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24 Jul 2016 The Raspberry Pi Has Revolutionized Emulation Every geek goes through a phase where they discover emulation. It's practically a rite of passage. I think I spent most of my childhood – and a large part of my life as a young adult – desperately wishing I was in a video game arcade. When I finally obtained my driver's license, my first thought wasn't about the girls I would take on dates,

03 Apr 2015 Given Enough Money, All Bugs Are Shallow Eric Raymond, in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, famously wrote Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The idea is that open source software, by virtue of allowing anyone and everyone to view the source code, is inherently less buggy than closed source software. He dubbed this "Linus's Law". Insofar as it goes, I believe this is true. When o

23 Apr 2015 Your Password is Too Damn Short I'm a little tired of writing about passwords. But like taxes, email, and pinkeye, they're not going away any time soon. Here's what I know to be true, and backed up by plenty of empirical data: No matter what you tell them, users will always choose simple passwords. No matter what you tell them, users will re-use the same password over and over on multi

09 Jan 2015 The God Login I graduated with a Computer Science minor from the University of Virginia in 1992. The reason it's a minor and not a major is because to major in CS at UVa you had to go through the Engineering School, and I was absolutely not cut out for that kind of hardcore math and physics, to put it mildly. The beauty of a minor was that I could cherry pick all the cool CS classes an

18 Dec 2006 Code Tells You How, Comments Tell You Why In an earlier post on the philosophy of code comments, I noted that the best kind of comments are the ones you don't need. Allow me to clarify that point. You should first strive to make your code as simple as possible to understand without relying on comments as a crutch. Only at the point where the code cannot be made easier to understand sho

04 Sep 2014 Standard Markdown is now Common Markdown Let me open with an apology to John Gruber for my previous blog post. We've been working on the Standard Markdown project for about two years now. We invited John Gruber, the original creator of Markdown, to join the project via email in November 2012, but never heard back. As we got closer to being ready for public feedback, we emailed John on

03 Sep 2014 Standard Flavored Markdown In 2009 I lamented the state of Markdown: Right now we have the worst of both worlds. Lack of leadership from the top, and a bunch of fragmented, poorly coordinated community efforts to advance Markdown, none of which are officially canon. This isn't merely incovenient for anyone trying to find accurate information about Markdown; it's actually harming the pr

19 Mar 2007 Primary Keys: IDs versus GUIDs Long-time readers of this blog know that I have an inordinate fondness for GUIDs. Each globally unique ID is like a beautiful snowflake: every one a unique item waiting to be born. Perhaps that's why I read with great interest recent accounts of people switching their database tables from traditional integer primary keys ... ID Value -- ----- 1 Apple 2 Or

26 Jun 2006 Object-Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science I had an opportunity to meet Ted Neward at TechEd this year. Ted, among other things, famously coined the phrase "Object-Relational mapping is the Vietnam of our industry" in late 2004. It's a scary analogy, but an apt one. I've seen developers struggle for years with the huge mismatch between relational database models and t

27 Aug 2013 The CODE Keyboard What would you do, if you could do anything? I don't mean in a fantasy superhero way, but in terms of resources. If someone told you that you now had the resources to attempt to make one thing happen in the world, one real thing, what would that be? If you're Elon Musk, the patron saint of Hacker News, then you create an electric car and rocket ships. And then propose

17 Jul 2007 The Principle of Least Power Tim Berners-Lee on the Principle of Least Power: Computer Science spent the last forty years making languages which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data stored in that language. If you write

22 Mar 2013 Why Ruby? I've been a Microsoft developer for decades now. I weaned myself on various flavors of home computer Microsoft Basic, and I got my first paid programming gigs in Microsoft FoxPro, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft Visual Basic. I have seen the future of programming, my friends, and it is terrible CRUD apps running on Wintel boxes! Of course, we went on to build Stack Overflow i

05 Feb 2013 Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Occasionally, startups will ask me for advice. That's a shame, because I am a terrible person to ask for advice. The conversation usually goes something like this: We'd love to get your expert advice on our thing. I probably don't use your thing. Even if I tried your thing out and I gave you my so-called Expert advice, how would it matter? Anyway, w

13 Dec 2012 Web Discussions: Flat by Design It's been six years since I wrote Discussions: Flat or Threaded? and, despite a bunch of evolution on the web since then, my opinion on this has not fundamentally changed. If anything, my opinion has strengthened based on the observed data: precious few threaded discussion models survive on the web. Putting aside Usenet as a relic and artifact of the pas

25 Oct 2012 The Future of Markdown Markdown is a simple little humane markup language based on time-tested plain text conventions from the last 40 years of computing. Lightweight Markup Languages ============================ According to **Wikipedia**: > A [lightweight markup language](http://is.gd/gns) is a markup language with a simple syntax, designed to be easy for a human to enter with a simp

04 Oct 2012 Todon't What do you need to do today? Other than read this blog entry, I mean. Have you ever noticed that a huge percentage of Lifehacker-like productivity porn site content is a breathless description of the details of Yet Another To-Do Application? There are dozens upon dozens of the things to choose from, on any platform you can name. Lifehacker's Law: A new To-Do list app will be r

20 Jul 2012 New Programming Jargon Stack Overflow – like most online communities I've studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It's primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs with the occasional meningitis outbreak. It isn't alwa

29 Jun 2012 The PHP Singularity Look at this incredible thing Ian Baker created. Look at it! What you're seeing is not Photoshopped. This is an actual photo of a real world, honest to God double-clawed hammer. Such a thing exists. Isn't that amazing? And also, perhaps, a little disturbing? That wondrous hammer is a delightful real-world acknowledgement of the epic blog entry PHP: A Fractal of Bad

04 Jul 2008 Investing in a Quality Programming Chair In A Developer's Second Most Important Asset, I described how buying a quality chair may be one of the smartest investments you can make as a software developer. In fact, after browsing chairs for the last few years of my career, I've come to one conclusion: you can't expect to get a decent chair for less than $500. If you are spending less than

15 May 2012 Please Don't Learn to Code The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012. A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript code to do his job, something is deeply, horribly, terribly wrong with pol

07 May 2012 This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details Fair warning: this is a blog post about automated cat feeders. Sort of. But bear with me, because I'm also trying to make a point about software. If you have a sudden urge to click the back button on your browser now, I don't blame you. I don't often talk about cats, but when I do, I make it count. We've used automated cat feeders s

16 Apr 2012 Learn to Read the Source, Luke In the calculus of communication, writing coherent paragraphs that your fellow human beings can comprehend and understand is far more difficult than tapping out a few lines of software code that the interpreter or compiler won't barf on. That's why, when it comes to code, all the documentation probably sucks. And because writing for people is way harder t