I haven't had the opportunity to talk at all about Google's new Chrome browser yet. Which is a shame, because it's easily the best web browser I've ever used. If it wasn't for the complete and utter lack of an add-in ecosystem, I'd switch away from Firefox in a heartbeat. If you're curious about Chr...

As a software developer, how do you sharpen your saw? Sharpening the saw is shorthand for anything you do that isn't programming, necessarily, but (theoretically) makes you a better programmer. It's derived from the Covey book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There's a guy who stumbled into ...

The performance of any computer is akin to a shell game. The computer performance shell game, also known as "find the bottleneck", is always played between these four resources: CPU Disk Network Memory At any given moment, your computer is waiting for some operation to complete on one of these resou...

The book Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project is a fantastic reference for anyone involved in a software project -- whether you're running the show or not. In addition to the dead-tree edition, the book is available in an appropriately open source free format...

We sit at the intersection of two trends: Most home networking gear, including routers, has safely transitioned to gigabit ethernet. The generation, storage, and transmission of large high definition video files is becoming commonplace. If that sounds like you, or someone you know, there's one tweak...

I've been playing around a bit with file compression again, as we generate some very large backup files daily on Stack Overflow. We're using the latest 64-bit version of 7zip (4.64) on our database server. I'm not a big fan of more than dual core on the desktop, but it's a no brainer for servers. Th...

Every software project I've ever worked on has accrued technical debt over time: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a fin...

Lately, I've been seeing these odd little signs pop up in storefronts around town. All the signs have various forms of this printed on them: Only 3 students at a time in the store please We took that picture at a 7-11 convenience store which happens to be near a high school, so maybe the problem is ...

A recent episode of This American Life interviewed Wil Felps, a professor who conducted a sociological experiment demonstrating the surprisingly powerful effect of bad apples. Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions in 45...

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 discove...