It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.I am betting against, and John is betting for. I have another long-term bet: I bet @codinghorror $10k that

It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.I am betting against, and John is betting for. I have another long-term bet: I bet @codinghorror $10k that

It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.I am betting against, and John is betting for. I have another long-term bet: I bet @codinghorror $10k that

25 Feb 2009 Who's Your Coding Buddy? I am continually amazed how much better my code becomes after I've had a peer look at it. I don't mean a formal review in a meeting room, or making my code open to anonymous public scrutiny on the internet, or some kind of onerous pair programming regime. Just one brief attempt at explaining and showing my code to a fellow programmer – that's usually all it tak

It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.I am betting against, and John is betting for. I have another long-term bet: I bet @codinghorror $10k that

18 Feb 2009 Are You An Expert? I think I have a problem with authority. Starting with my own. It troubles me greatly to hear that people see me as an expert or an authority, and not a fellow amateur. If I've learned anything in my career, it is that approaching software development as an expert, as someone who has already discovered everything there is to know about a given topic, is the one sures

25 Nov 2007 The Two Types of Programmers Contrary to myth, there aren't fourteen types of programmers. There are really only two, as Ben Collins-Sussman reminds us. There are two "classes" of programmers in the world of software development: I'm going to call them the 20% and the 80%. The 20% folks are what many would call "alpha" programmers -- the leaders, trailblazers, trendsetters, the kind of

11 Feb 2009 The Ferengi Programmer There was a little brouhaha recently about some comments Joel Spolsky made on our podcast: Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles. (That's a real easy-to-Google term!) It's object-oriented design, and they're calling it agile design, which it really, really isn't. It's principles for how to d

07 Feb 2009 Don't Reinvent The Wheel, Unless You Plan on Learning More About Wheels The introduction to Head First Design Patterns exhorts us not to reinvent the wheel: You're not alone. At any given moment, somewhere in the world someone struggles with the same software design problems you have. You know you don't want to reinvent the wheel (or worse, a flat tire), so you look to Design Patterns

29 Jan 2009 The Sad Tragedy of Micro-Optimization Theater I'll just come right out and say it: I love strings. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a problem that I can't solve with a string and perhaps a regular expression or two. But maybe that's just my lack of math skills talking. In all seriousness, though, the type of programming we do on Stack Overflow is intimately tied to strings. We're c

It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.I am betting against, and John is betting for. I have another long-term bet: I bet @codinghorror $10k that