Stack Overflow and personal emails
This post is partly meant to be a general announcement, and partly meant to be something I can point people at in the future (rather than writing a short version of this on each email). These days, I...
View ArticleStack Overflow question checklist
Note: this post is now available with a tinyurl of http://tinyurl.com/stack-checklist My earlier post on how to write a good question is pretty long, and I suspect that even when I refer people to it,...
View ArticleDiagnosing issues with reversible data transformations
I see a lot of problems which look somewhat different at first glance, but all have the same cause: Text is losing “special characters” when I transfer it from one computer to another Decryption ends...
View ArticleAnti-pattern: parallel collections
(Note that I’m not talking about "processing collections in parallel, which is definitely not an anti-pattern…) I figured it was worth starting to blog about anti-patterns I see frequently on Stack...
View ArticleThe BobbyTables culture
I started writing a post like this a long time ago, but somehow never finished it. Countless posts on Stack Overflow are vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. Along with several other users, I always...
View ArticleCommon mistakes in date/time formatting and parsing
There are many, many questions on Stack Overflow about both parsing and formatting date/time values. (I use the term “date/time” to mean pretty much “any type of chronlogical information” – dates,...
View ArticleAll about java.util.Date
This post is an attempt to reduce the number of times I need to explain things in Stack Overflow comments. You may well be reading it via a link from Stack Overflow – I intend to refer to this post...
View ArticleSurprise! Creating an instance of an open generic type
This is a brief post documenting a very weird thing I partly came up with on Stack Overflow today. The context is this question. But to skip to the shock, we end up with code like this: object x =...
View ArticleStack Overflow Culture
This blog post was most directly provoked by this tweet from my friend Rob Conery, explaining why he’s giving up contributing on Stack Overflow. However, it’s been a long time coming. A while ago I...
View ArticleFarewell, Daisy Shipton
This is more of a quick, explanatory “heads-up” post than anything else. On March 31st 2018, I started an experiment: I created a new Stack Overflow user called “Daisy Shipton” with no picture and a...
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