My alma mater, UC Berkeley, put out a progressive news release last week: for the first time ever, there are more women enrolled in the Intro to Computer Science class than men. It's an amazing accomplishment in light of the male-dominated software engineering industry; much digital ink has been spilt about how uncomfortable...
As Paul Graham has infamously noted, for programmers of my generation, there is a significant cohort of guys – and this set is unilaterally male – who were poking around on computers when we were young and impressionable. These were not quite the hulking mainframe behemothen[1] of the generation prior, but the WinTel PCs that were...
Like most software engineers, I wear an unofficial "IT troubleshooter" hat when I visit the folks over the holidays. They have the classic home computing setup: a handful of Windows PCs hooked up to printers, a wireless router they don't have the admin password to, smartphones that are used basically as...
Everybody loves a good Apple rumor. It seems like for the past few years, predicting what kind of hardware and software big companies will show off is a sport in and of itself, and the industry hypes itself to a frenzy dreaming of the next, next big splash. Which leads to posts like Gruber'...
Like three million other people, I went out and got an iPad on launch day. I had bought the original iPad for my fiancé short after its original debut, and I'm surrounded by iPads at work, but this is actually the first time I've had a tablet for myself, loaded with...
Painters have paintbrushes, writers have pens, and coders have…well, text editors. Real life software hackery is less glamorous than what Hollywood would believe, but an experienced developer work a set of familiar tools is still pretty awe-inspiring. The best editors are full of keyboard shortcuts, customizable, and highly extensible. At the various places I...
