Rob Janssen (RobIII)

Tragedy of the Common Library

Good intentions can go awry quickly in the world of software development. Imagine this common scenario: there are multiple teams building related projects at the same company.

5 Years of Stackoverflow.com · Not Rocket Science

On , Jeff Atwood asked for help naming his little project. On April 16, he announced StackOverflow.com. On September 16, it launched. (What’s the obsession with the number 6, Jeff?). In between, beta access was granted to people.

Hidden Code Mines

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: Well Actually, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking

Usernames a bit too clever for our own good? Spotify supports unicode usernames which we are a bit proud of (not many services allow you to have ?, the unicode snowman, as a username). However, it has also been a reliable source of pain over the years.

String concatenation behind the scenes, part one

The first algorithm I ever worked on in the C# compiler was the optimizer that handles string concatenations.1 It's all pretty straightforward, but there are a few clever bits that I thought I might discuss today.

Could we please end the SQLite ALTER TABLE pain?

I think there's nothing else in the world of programming that's given me more headaches than the lack of proper alter table support in SQLite. I'm not alone, because almost every developer I've worked with has had similar pains and complaints.

Cory Gross : Photorealistic 3D Moon Demo in WebGL and JavaScript

A while back I wanted to learn a bit about GLSL and how to write shaders. I already had some experience with Three.JS and using its WebGL renderer and I knew that it allowed custom shaders to be utilized through its ShaderMaterial object. I read up a bit on GLSL shaders and how, they worked.

You Cannot Win Engineering

For as long as I can remember, I've been a fan of Saturday Night Live and improvisational theater. Improv looks chaotic and uncontrolled, but the best practitioners operate under strict rules that govern interactions between players.

Red Hat ditches MySQL, switches to MariaDB

Red Hat will switch the default database in its enterprise distribution, RHEL, from MySQL to MariaDB, when version 7 is released. According to news from the Red Hat summit which concludes in Boston on Friday, RHEL 7 will also include MongoDB.

Content Security Policy

A relatively new feature in browsers, Content Security Policy is a tool that protects your web application against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities...