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.

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.

The screaming was unexpected.

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.

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.

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.

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?!

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.

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.

What would you do if you could stop time for everyone but yourself?

Today Jeff Atwood commemorates 10 years of CodingHorror.com. Congratulations Jeff!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

Well this is a bit embarrassing.