So You Don’t Want to be a Programmer After All

I get a surprising number of emails from career programmers who have spent some time in the profession and eventually decided it just isn't for them. Most recently this: I finished a computer science...
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Learn How To Design Beautiful Touch Interfaces for Windows 8

With the advent of new touch based interfaces, everyone wants to develop touch based applications. The problem is touch applications are very different than traditional mouse and keyboard based applications....
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Building Windows 8 Apps with Blend for Visual Studio

Building Windows 8 applications with Blend for Visual Studio is incredibly easy. Blend provides you with visual design tools that allow you to focus on the front-end design, without having to worry heavily...
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Getting Started with Blend for Visual Studio

I wanted to give you a tour of Blend for Visual Studio so you could understand how you can go from nothing, to an app that is running in Windows 8 Modern UI within 5 minutes using Blend for Visual Studio. The...
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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...
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P90X Review

I recently finished a P90X review for some of my friends and family that saw me at the Calgary Tony Horton workout. The reason I am sharing on here is because I see so many IT and Software people that...
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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...
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The End of Ragequitting

When Joel Spolsky, my business partner on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, asked me what I wanted to do after I left Stack Exchange, I distinctly remember mentioning Aaron Swartz. That's what Aaron...
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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...
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Software Development Top 30 Mistakes

I have been developing software and web applications for nearly 11 years now.  Software development has come a long way since the days of Binary, Cobol, etc.  What still fascinates me about software...
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