There’s something about being outdoors in Alaska that inspires poetic thoughts. In my case it’s all bad poetry so I’ll spare you the nausea and just show a photo instead.

A while back I wrote a riveting 3-part developer’s guide to copyright law and open source licensing for developers.

A finely honed bullshit detector is a benefit to everyone. Let’s try a hypothetical conversation to test yours!

Google is shuttering Google Reader in a little over a day (on July 1st, 2013) as I write this. If you use Google Reader to read my blog, this means you might miss out on my posts and I KNOW YOU DON’T WANT THIS!

UPDATE: The .NET team removed the platform limitations.

One of the side projects I’ve been working on lately is helping to shepherd the Semantic Versioning specification (SemVer) along to its 2.0.0 release. I want to thank everyone who sent pull requests and engaged in thoughtful, critical, spirited feedback about the spec. Your involvement has made it better!

Code is unforgiving. As the reasonable human beings that we are, when we review code we both know what the author intends. But computers can’t wait to Well, Actually all over that code like a lonely Hacker News commenter:

This post is a departure from my typical software related topics, but I think you’ll find parallels with management and dealing with software developers.

In some recent talks I make a reference to Conway’s Law named after Melvin Conway (not to be confused with British Mathematician John Horton Conway famous for Conway’s Game of Life nor to be confused with Conway Twitty) which states:

In a recent post, Test Better, I suggested that developers can and ought do a better job of testing their own code. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you read that post first. I’m totally not biased in saying this at all. GO DO IT ALREADY!

Someone recently emailed me to ask if I’m speaking at any upcoming conferences this year. Good question!

Developers take pride in speaking their mind and not shying away from touchy subjects. Yet there is one subject makes many developers uncomfortable.

How can you trust anything you install from NuGet? It’s a simple question, but the answer is complicated. Trust is not some binary value. There are degrees of trust. I trust my friends to warn me before they contact the authorities and maybe suggest a lawyer, but I trust my wife to help me dispose of the body and uphold the conspiracy of silence (Honey, it was in the fine print of our wedding vows in case you’re wondering).

The other day I needed a simple JSON parser for a thing I worked on. Sure, I’m familiar with JSON.NET, but I wanted something I could just compile into my project. The reason why is not important for this discussion (but it has to do with world domination, butterflies, and minotaurs).

Today I learned something new and I love that!

Back in March of last year, Stephen Wolfram wrote a blog post, The Personal Analytics of My Life. It’s a fascinating look at the data he’s accumulated over years about his own personal activities and habits such as daily incoming and outgoing email.

I love automation. I’m pretty lazy by nature and the more I can offload to my little programmatic or robotic helpers the better. I’ll be sad the day they become self-aware and decide that it’s payback time and enslave us all.

Tony Hoare, the computer scientist who implemented null references in ALGOL calls it his “billion-dollar mistake.”

I wasn’t prepared to write an end-of-year blog post given the impending destruction of the world via a Mayan prophesied cataclysmic fury. But since that didn’t pan out I figured I’d better get typing.

Merry Christmas!