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.

In my last post, I wrote about preserving URLs when migrating to Jekyll. In this post, show how to preserve your Disqus comments.

In my last post I wrote about migrating my blog to Jekyll and GitHub Pages. Travis Illig, a long time Subtext user asked me the following question:

The older I get, the less I want to worry about hosting my own website. Perhaps this is the real reason for the rise of cloud hosting. All of us old fogeys became too lazy to manage our own infrastructure.

Judging by the reaction to my Death to the If statement where I talked about the benefits of declarative code and reducing control statements, not everyone is on board with this concept. That’s fine, I don’t lose sleep over people being wrong.

Not long ago I wrote a blog post about how platform restrictions harm .NET. This led to a lot of discussion online and on Twitter. At some point David Kean suggested a more productive approach would be to create a UserVoice issue. So I did and it quickly gathered a lot of votes.

Over the past few years I’ve become more and more interested in functional programming concepts and the power, expressiveness, and elegance they hold.

Octokit.net targets multiple platforms. This involves a large risk to my sanity. You can see the general approach here in the Octokit directory of our project:

Most developers are aware of the potential pitfalls of premature optimization and premature generalization. At least I hope they are. But what about premature standardization, a close cousin to premature generalization?

Today on the GitHub blog, we announced the first release of Octokit.net.

If I had to pick just one feature that embodies GitHub (besides emoji support of course , I’d easily choose the Pull Request (aka PR). According to GitHub’s help docs (emphasis mine),

I love a good argument. No really! Even ones online.

Just shipped a new release of RestSharp to NuGet. For those who don’t know, RestSharp is a simple REST and HTTP API Client for .NET.

The first GitHub Data Challenge launched in 2012 and asked the following compelling question: what would you do with all this data about our coding habits?

I avoid mailing lists the same way I avoid fun activities like meetings and pouring lemon juice into bloody scrapes. Even so, I still somehow end up subscribed to one or two. Even worse, once in a while, despite my better judgment, I send an email to such a list and am quickly punished for my transgression with an onslaught of out of office auto replies. You know the type: