Microsoft's New Running Shoes
When Ballmer famously said, “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches,” it was fair to characterize Microsoft’s approach to open source as hostile. But over time, forces within Microsoft pushed to change this attitude. Many groups inside of Microsoft continue to see the customer and business value in fostering, rather than fighting, OSS.
Read MoreGitHub Data In Your Website
Software collaboration goes beyond just working on the code. In addition to writing a lot of code, software involves writing a lot of words. Prose shows up in documentation, tutorials, blog posts, and so on.
Read MoreA Lesson in Compassion
The screaming was unexpected.
Read MoreUsing Octokit.net to authenticate your app with GitHub
Some endpoints in the GitHub API require authorization to access private details. For example, if you want to get all of a user’s repositories, you’ll need to authenticate to see private repositories.
Read MoreMerge conflicts in csproj files
In a recent version of GitHub for Windows, we made a quiet change that had a subtle effect you might have noticed. We changed the default merge strategy for *.csproj
and similar files. If you make changes to a .csproj
file in a branch and then merge it to another branch, you’ll probably run into more merge conflicts now than before.
A less terrible .NET project build with NuGet
According to Maarten Balliauw, Building .NET projects is a world of pain. He should know, he is a co-founder of MyGet.org which provides private NuGet feeds along with build services for those packages.
Read MoreGitHub Secrets Talk
If you happen to be in Oahu next week (lucky you!), Wednesday April 9 2014 at 5:30 PM, come see my talk on GitHub Secrets at the University of Hawaii (lucky me!). Did I mention good food will be served?!
Read MoreBlogging while Broken
I’m going through a bit of a funk with work and writing. They seem somewhat intertwined. Writing this blog has been such an important outlet for me that it’s rough when I can’t seem to muster the energy to just keep writing.
Read MoreEmpathy In Your Best Interest

If I had to pick only one trait I hope to instill in my children, it’s empathy. It’s on my mind because of this beautiful post by Reg Braythwayt.
Read MoreMaster time with Reactive Extensions
What would you do if you could stop time for everyone but yourself?
Read More10 Years of being Haacked
How to review a merge commit

Git does a pretty amazing job when it merges one branch into another. Most of the time, it merges without conflict. In a fairy tale world with rainbow skittles and peanut butter butterflies, every merge would be without conflict. But we live in the real world where it rains a lot and where merge conflicts are an inevitable fact of life.
Read MoreThe Stories We Tell Ourselves
Everyone is the protagonist of their own narrative. And in this narrative, it’s only natural to see ourselves as the proverbial “good guy” of the story. We tend to rationalize our own actions as necessary or positive, much like Walter White until (spoiler alert) the end of Breaking Bad.
Read MoreFun with infinite sums
I’m kind of a fan of numbers. You might even say I’m a bit of a numberPHILe. You groan, but it’s true. Numbers exhibit such interesting properties when you put them together.
Read MoreBut does it quack like a duck?
From the topic of this and my last post, you would be excused if you think I have some weird fascination with ducks. In fact, I’m starting to question it myself.
Read MoreDuck Typing Is More Than Quackery
Eric Lippert writes one of my all time favorite tech blogs. Sadly, the purple font he was famous for is no longer, but the technical depth is still there.
Read MoreGet your Fitbit totals
In my last 2013 recap blog post I wrote about the number of steps I recorded with Fitbit last year and the year prior. In case you missed it, they were:
Read MoreBetrayal
Today, I read a comment about a group of people who feel betrayed by the increase in code that Microsoft is releasing under an open source license.
Read MoreA Very Haacked 2013
Another year comes to an end and tradition demands that I write a recap for the year. But it doesn’t require that I write a very good one.
Read MoreFixing Broken Jekyll URLs
Well this is a bit embarrassing.
Read More