Buy Bad Code Offsets Today!
Let's face it: we all write bad code. But not every programmer does something about the bad code they're polluting the world with, day in and day out. There's a whole universe of possibilities: Follow the instructions on the paint can Become a software apprentice Get a coding buddy Practice the fundamentals

Parsing Html The Cthulhu Way
Among programmers of any experience, it is generally regarded as A Bad Ideatm to attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions. How bad of an idea? It apparently drove one Stack Overflow user to the brink of madness: You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool that is insufficiently

Whitespace: The Silent Killer
Ever have one of those days where everything you check into source control is wrong? Also, how exactly is that day is different from any other? But seriously. Code that is visible is code that can be wrong. No surprise there. But did you know that even the code you can't see may be wrong, too? These are the questions that drive young programmers to madness. Take this perfectly innocent code, for example. Looks fine, doesn't it? But hold on. Wai

Preserving Our Digital Pre-History
I've spent a significant part of my life online. Not just on the internet, I mean, but on modems and early, primitive online communities. Today's internet is everything we couldn't have possibly dared to imagine twenty-five years ago, but there is a real risk of these early, tentative digital artifacts -- and for some, the beginnings of our Hacker Odyssey -- being lost forever in the relentless deluge of online progress. Sure, every single thing that happened in 2004 is documented exhaustively online. But 1994? 1984? Not so much. That's where Jason Scott comes in.

Stack Overflow Careers: Amplifying Your Awesome
That Stack Overflow thing we launched a year ago? It's been going pretty well so far. Of course, everyone knows you could code Stack Overflow in a long weekend. It's trivial. Assembling a worldwide community of smart, engaged software developers? That's a whole different ball of wax. Stack Overflow is a site by programmers, for programmers; it's only as good as the programmers who choose to participate