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Jeff Atwood
Protecting Your Cookies: HttpOnly 
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Thu, 28 Aug. 2008
So I have this friend. I've told him time and time again how dangerous XSS vulnerabilities are, and how XSS is now the most common of all publicly reported security vulnerabilities -- dwarfing
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Deadlocked!
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Mon, 25 Aug. 2008
You may have noticed that my posting frequency has declined over the last three weeks. That's because I've been busy building that Stack Overflow thing we talked about.
It's going well so far. Joel Spolsky also seems to think it's going well, but he's one of
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Check In Early, Check In Often
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Thu, 21 Aug. 2008
I consider this the golden rule of source control:
Check in early, check in often.
Developers who work for long periods -- and by long I mean more than a day -- without checking anything into source control are setting themselves up for some serious integration headaches down the line. Damon Poole
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The Perils of FUI: Fake User Interface
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Mon, 18 Aug. 2008
As a software developer, tell me if you've ever done this:
Taken a screenshot of something on the desktop
Opened it in a graphics program
Gone off to work on something else
Upon returning to your computer, attempted to click on the screenshot as if it was an actual program.
And let's not forget the common
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Secrets of the JavaScript Ninjas
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Thu, 14 Aug. 2008
One of the early technology decisions we made on Stack Overflow was to go with a fairly JavaScript intensive site. Like many programmers, I've been historically ambivalent about JavaScript:
The Power of "View Source"
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Music to (Not) Code By
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Sun, 10 Aug. 2008
Occasionally people will ask me what kind of music I like to code by. I'm not sure I am the right person to ask this question of.
Allow me to explain by citing my 2001 Amazon review of a particular album.
It all started
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Bad News, Good News
Jeff Atwood via stackoverflow on Wed, 06 Aug. 2008
I’ve got some bad news and some good news.
I like to start with the bad news, and you don’t get a choice, so here goes:
There will be no podcasts for the next two weeks.
Joel is on an extended vacation. Our apologies, but the logistics of recording remotely are too daunting.
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On Our Project, We're Always 90% Done
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Tue, 05 Aug. 2008
Although I love reading programming books, I find software project management books to be some of the most mind-numbingly boring reading I've ever attempted. I suppose this means I probably shouldn't be a project manager. The bad news for the Stack Overflow team is that I effectivel
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Quantity Always Trumps Quality
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Sun, 03 Aug. 2008
Nathan Bowers pointed me to this five year old Cool Tools entry on the book Art & Fear.
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Stack Overflow Private Beta Begins
Jeff Atwood via stackoverflow on Fri, 01 Aug. 2008
And then a miracle occurred.
We’re beginning the Stack Overflow private beta.
I am sending out emails to the first 100 people for the private
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Is Money Useless to Open Source Projects?
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Tue, 29 Jul. 2008
In April I donated $5,000 of the ad revenue from this website to an open source .NET project. It was exciting to be able to inject some of the energy from this blog into the often-neglected .NET open source ecosystem.
As I mentioned at the time, I used a very
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Understanding The Hardware
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Sun, 27 Jul. 2008
I got a call from Rob Conery today asking for advice on building his own computer. Rob works for Microsoft, but lives in Hawaii. I'm not sure how he managed that, but being so far from the mothership apparently means he has the flexibility to spec his own PC. Being stuck in Hawaii is, I'm sure, a total bummer,
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Stack Overflow Beta Design
Jeff Atwood via stackoverflow on Sat, 26 Jul. 2008
Ever notice how most sites run by programmers have the worst designs ever?
Yeah.
We’re currently at the stage where we need to implement an actual design — for which I have recruited actual designers. Here’s a sneak peek at the beta
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Coding Without Comments
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Fri, 25 Jul. 2008
If peppering your code with lots of comments is good, then having zillions of comments in your code must be great, right? Not quite. Excess is one way good comments go bad:
'*************************************************
' Name: CopyString
'
' Purpose: This routine copies a string from the source
' s
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Podcast #15
Jeff Atwood via stackoverflow on Wed, 23 Jul. 2008
This is the fifteenth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following:
A brief discussion of our shoestring budget, and the project schedule. The beta for Stack Overflow is close; we will likely be trickling people in by the end of the month.
Strategies for handling recurring or background
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Building Tiny, Ultra Low Power PCs
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Wed, 23 Jul. 2008
In previous posts, I've talked about building your own desktop PC, and building your own home theater PC. I'm still very much in love with that little HTPC I built. Not only does it have a modern dual-core CPU, and fantastic high-definition capable integrated
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Dealing With Bad Apples
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Fri, 18 Jul. 2008
Robert Miesen sent in this story of a project pathology:
I was part of a team writing an web-based job application and screening system (a job kiosk the customer called it) and my team and our customer signed on to implementing this job kiosk using Windows, Apache, PHP5, and the ZendFramework -- everyone except one of our team members, who I will refer to as "Joe". Joe kept ad
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The Ultimate Software Gold Plating
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Wed, 16 Jul. 2008
Some developers love to gold plate their software. There are various shades of .. er, gold, I guess, but it's usually considered wasteful to fritter away time gold plating old code in the face of new features that need to be implemented, or old bugs that could be squashed.
Developers are fascinated by new tech
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Maybe Normalizing Isn't Normal
Jeff Atwood via Coding Horror on Tue, 15 Jul. 2008
One of the items we're struggling with now on Stack Overflow is how to maintain near-instantaneous performance levels in a relational database as the amount of data increases. More specifically, how to scale our tagging system. Traditional database design principles t
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Stack Overflow Badge Feedback
Jeff Atwood via stackoverflow on Sat, 12 Jul. 2008
Are you familiar with the “stinking badges” quote? It’s from the 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Here’s the actual clip from the movie:
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