Coding Horror is Jeff Atwood's blog. He lives in Berkeley, CA with his wife, two cats, and a whole lot of computers. He was weaned as a software developer on various implementations of Microsoft's BASIC in the 80's, starting with his first microcomputer, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. He continued on the PC with Visual Basic 3.0 and Windows 3.1 in the early 90's, although he also spent significant time writing Pascal code in the first versions of Delphi. He is now quite comfortable in VB.NET or C#, despite the evils of case sensitivity. He considers himself a reasonably experienced Windows software developer with a particular interest in the human side of software development, as represented in his recommended developer reading list.
Remember that Scene in Star Trek IV where Scotty tried to use a Mac Plus?
Using a mouse or keyboard to control a computer? Don't be silly. In the future, clearly there's only one way computers will be controlled: by speaking to them.
There's only one teeny-tiny problem with this magical future world of computers we control with our voices.
It doesn't work.
After we created Stack Overflow, some people were convinced we had built a marginally better mousetrap for asking and answering questions. The inevitable speculation began: can we use your engine to build a Q&A site about {topic}? Our answer was Stack Exchange. Pay us $129 a month (and up), and you too can create a hosted Q&A community on our engine -- for whatever topic you like!
Well, I have a confession to make: my heart was never in Stack Exchange. It was a parallel effort in a parallel universe only tangentially related to my own. There's a whole host of reasons why, but if I had to summarize it in a sentence, I'd say that money is poisonous to communities. That $129/month doesn't sound like much -- and it isn't -- but the commercial nature of the enterprise permeated and distorted everything from the get-go.
When I first chose my own adventure, I didn't know what working remotely from home was going to be like. I had never done it before. As programmers go, I'm fairly social. Which still means I'm a borderline sociopath by normal standards. All the same, I was worried that I'd go stir-crazy with no division between my work life and my home life.
Well, I haven't gone stir-crazy yet. I think. But in building Stack Overflow, I have learned a few things about what it means to work remotely -- at least when it comes to programming. Our current team encompasses 5 people, distributed all over the USA, along with the team in NYC.
My first mistake was attempting to program alone. I had weekly calls with my business partner, Joel Spolsky, which were quite productive in terms of figuring out what it was we were trying to do together -- but he wasn't writing code. I was coding alone. Really alone. One guy working all by yourself alone. This didn't work at all for me. I was unmoored, directionless,
We're currently in the midst of a CSS Zen Garden type excerise on our family of Q&A websites, which I affectionately refer to as "the Trilogy":
These sites all run the same core engine, but the logo, domain, and CSS "skin" that lies over the HTML skeleton is different in each case.
I have what I would charitably describe as a hate-hate relationship with email. I desperately try to avoid sending email, not just for myself, but also in the code I write.
Despite my misgivings, email is the cockroach of communication mediums: you just can't kill it. Email is the one method of online contact that almost everyone -- at least for that subset of "everyone" which includes people who can bear to touch a computer at all -- is guaranteed to have, and use. Yes, you can make a fairly compelling case that email is for old stupid people, but let's table that discussion for now.
As far as I'm concerned, you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much screen space. By "screen", I mean not just large monitors, but multiple large monitors. I've been evangelizing multiple monitors since the dark days of Windows Millennium Edition.
Original postWriting code? That's the easy part. Getting your application in the hands of users, and creating applications that people actually want to use -- now that's the hard stuff.
Original postIf you've ever wrangled a user interface, you've probably heard of Fitts' Law. It's pretty simple -- the larger an item is, and the closer it is to your cursor, the easier it is to click on. Kevin Hale put together a great visual summary of Fitts' Law, so rather than over-explain it, I'll refer you there.
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While I may have mixed emotions toward LINQ to SQL, we've had great success with it on Stack Overflow. That's why I was surprised to read the following:
If you are building an ASP.NET web application that's going to get thousands of hits per hour, the execution overhead of Linq queries is going to consume too much CPU and make your site slow.
I find it difficult to believe, but the reports keep pouring in via Twitter and email: many candidates who show up for programming job interviews can't program. At all. Consider this recent email from Mike Lin:
The article "Why Can't Programmers... Program?" changed the way I did interviews. I used to lead off by building rapport. That proved to be too time-consuming when, as you mentioned, the vast majority of candidates were simply non-technical.
I apologize for the scarcity of updates lately. There have been two things in the way:
1- Continuing fallout from International Backup Awareness Day, which meant all updates to Coding Horror from that point onward were hand-edited text files. Which, believe me, isn't nearly as sexy as it … uh … doesn't sound.
2- I am presenting and conducting a workshop at Webstock 2010 in New Zealand. This is a two week trip I'm taking with the whole family, including our little buddy Rock Hard Awesome, so the preparations have been more intense than usual.
On top of all that, according to the program, I just found that my presentation involves interpretive dance, too. Man. I wish someone had told me! My moves are so rusty, they've barely improved from Electric Boogaloo. But hey, at least I don't have to sing Andrews Sister songs like poor Brian Fling.
How much is a good idea worth? According to Derek Sivers, not much
I was reminded of Mr. Sivers article when this email made the rounds earlier this month...
Have you ever opened a simple little ASCII text file to see it inexplicably displayed as onegiantunbrokenline?
Opening the file in a different, smarter text editor results in the file displayed properly in multiple paragraphs.
As a long time reader of Joey DeVilla's excellent blog, Global Nerdy, I take exception to his post Fast Food, Apple Pies, and Why Netbooks Suck...
Original postI'm a big fan of John Gruber's Markdown. When it comes to humane markup languages for the web, I don't think anyone's quite nailed it like Mr. Gruber. His philosophy was clear from the outset...
Original postI can't believe it's been almost two and a half years since I built my last PC.
Original postYou may notice that commenting is currently disabled, and many old Coding Horror posts are missing images. That's because, sometime early on Friday, the server this blog is hosted on suffered catastrophic data loss.
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I recently added microformat support to the free public CVs at careers.stackoverflow.com by popular demand.
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.
I've been unhappy with every single piece of software I've ever released. Partly because, like many software developers, I'm a perfectionist. And then, there are inevitably … problems:
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Let's face it: we all write bad code.
But not every programmer does something about the bad code they're polluting the world with, day in and day out. There's a whole universe of possibilities:
Among programmers of any experience, it is generally regarded as A Bad Ideatm to attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions. How bad of an idea? It apparently drove one Stack Overflow user to the brink of madness:
Ever have one of those days where everything you check into source control is wrong?
Also, how exactly is that day is different from any other? But seriously.
Code that is visible is code that can be wrong. No surprise there. But did you know that even the code you can't see may be wrong, too?
I've spent a significant part of my life online. Not just on the internet, I mean, but on modems and early, primitive online communities. Today's internet is everything we couldn't have possibly dared to imagine twenty-five years ago, but there is a real risk of these early, tentative digital artifacts -- and for some, the beginnings of our Hacker Odyssey -- being lost forever in the relentless deluge of online progress. Sure, every single thing that happened in 2004 is documented exhaustively online. But 1994? 1984? Not so much.
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That Stack Overflow thing we launched a year ago? It's been going pretty well so far.
Of course, everyone knows you could code Stack Overflow in a long weekend. It's trivial. Assembling a worldwide community of smart, engaged software developers? That's a whole different ball of wax. Stack Overflow is a site by programmers, for programmers; it's only as good as the programmers who choose to participate.
After I posted my blog entry on Treating User Myopia I got a lot of advice. Some useful, some not so useful. But the one bit of advice I hadn't anticipated was that we were not making good use of the area "above the fold". This surprised me. Does the fold still matter?
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