I was incredulous when I read this observation from Reginald Braithwaite: Like me, the author is having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever. The author he’s| Coding Horror
The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans.| Coding Horror
A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask| Coding Horror
We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I'm concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream.| Coding Horror
With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven’t any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now? (Arrival is a fantastic movie. Watch it, but don’t stop there – read the Story of Your Life novella it was based on| Coding Horror
If you haven’t been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don’t blame you. There’s a lot going on right now. It’s a busy time. But let’s pause and take a moment| Coding Horror
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| Coding Horror
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command| Coding Horror
Hard to believe that I’ve had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that’s yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster| Coding Horror
In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it’s not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much,| Coding Horror
I’ve never thought of myself as a “car person.” The last new car I bought (and in fact, now that I think about it, the first new car I ever bought) was the quirky 1998 Ford Contour SVT. Since then, we bought a| Coding Horror
When we started Discourse in 2013, our server requirements were high: 1GB RAM modern, fast dual core CPU speedy solid state drive with 20+ GB I’m not talking about a cheapo shared cpanel server, either, I mean a dedicated virtual private server with those specifications. We| Coding Horror
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer: We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack| Coding Horror
Remember “cybersecurity”? Mysterious hooded computer guys doing mysterious hooded computer guy... things! Who knows what kind of naughty digital mischief they might be up to? Unfortunately, we now live in a world where this kind of digital mischief is literally rewriting the world’s history. For proof| Coding Horror
I didn’t choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field with zero downsides.| Coding Horror
programming and human factors| Coding Horror
The dot-com bubble was a watershed event for software developers. You simply couldn’t work in the field without having something miraculous or catastrophic happen to you. Or both at once. The “dot-com bubble” was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995 — 2001 during which stock markets in Western nations saw| Coding Horror
Let’s say you’re about to deploy an application. Said app has been heavily tested by your development team, who have all been infected by unit testing fever. It’s also been vetted by your QA group, who spent months spelunking into every crevice of the app. You even| Coding Horror
We’re currently undertaking some painting projects at home. Which means I’ll be following the instructions on the paint can. But what would happen if I didn’t follow the instructions on the paint can? Here’s a list of common interior painting mistakes: The single most common mistake| Coding Horror
At Stack Exchange, we insist that people who ask questions put some effort into their question, and we’re kind of strict about it. That is, when you set out to ask a question, you should… * Describe what’s happening in sufficient detail that we can follow along. Provide the| Coding Horror
In my previous post on shuffling, I glossed over something very important. The very first thing that came to mind for a shuffle algorithm is this: for (int i = 0; i < cards.Length; i++) { int n = rand.Next(cards.Length); Swap(ref cards[i], ref cards[n]); } It’s a| Coding Horror
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| Coding Horror
You know the feeling. It’s happened to all of us at some point: you’ve pored over the code a dozen times and still can’t find a problem with it. But there’s some bug or error you can’t seem to get rid of. There just has| Coding Horror
Remember that Stack Overflow thing we've been working on? Some commenters on a recent Hacker News article questioned the pricing of Stack Exchange -- essentially, a hosted Stack Overflow: Seems really pricey for a relatively simple software like this. Someone write an open source alternative? it looks like something that| Coding Horror
Steve McConnell on diseconomies of scale in software development: Project size is easily the most significant determinant of effort, cost and schedule [for a software project].* People naturally assume that a system that is 10 times as large as another system will require something like 10 times as much effort| Coding Horror
Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law [https://blog.codinghorror.com/moores-law-in-practical-terms/], when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always. Consider the average programmer salary [http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Sr._Software_Engineer_%2F_Developer_%2F_| Coding Horror
We've always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we're performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There's plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people will use it.| Coding Horror
James Bach responded to my recent post, Are You Following the Instructions on the Paint Can?, with Studying Jeff Atwood's Paint Can. I didn't realize how many assumptions I made in that post until I read Mr. Bach's pointed response. The most amusing assumption I made – and I had no| Coding Horror
Every programmer ever born thinks whatever idea just popped out of their head into their editor is the most generalized, most flexible, most one-size-fits all solution that has ever been conceived. We think we've built software that is a general purpose solution to some set of problems, but we are| Coding Horror
Eric Lippert notes the perils of programming in C++: I often think of C++ as my own personal Pit of Despair Programming Language. Unmanaged C++ makes it so easy to fall into traps. Think buffer overruns, memory leaks, double frees, mismatch between allocator and deallocator, using freed memory, umpteen dozen| Coding Horror
When I wrote about App-pocalypse Now in 2014, I implied the future still belonged to the web. And it does. But it’s also true that the web has changed a lot in the last 10 years, much less the last 20 or 30. Websites have gotten a lot… fatter.| Coding Horror
