Simon Willison’s Weblog

Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway. I think I should probably get this tattooed on to my skull.

# 5th December 2009, 5:36 pm / jeff-atwood

The State of Solid State Hard Drives. From Jeff Atwood’s report it sounds like the price/performance ratio for SSD hard drives has got to a point where switching is the most cost effective way of improving a personal machine’s performance. Anyone know what’s involved in putting one of these things in a MacBook Pro?

# 14th October 2009, 1:03 pm / harddrives, jeff-atwood, macbookpro, performance, ssd

Meta Is Murder. I hadn’t realised how important MetaTalk was in ensuring high quality discussions on MetaFilter, by ensuring that meta-discussions happened somewhere else. Speaking of which, happy birthday MetaFilter.

# 14th July 2009, 7:34 pm / blogging, jeff-atwood, metadiscussions, metafilter, metatalk

Coding Horror: A Scripter at Heart. Sigh. I cannot believe that the false distinction between “scripting” and “programming” is still being discussed.

# 26th January 2009, 6:06 pm / ffs, flamewars, jeff-atwood, programming, scripting

Coding Horror: Protecting Your Cookies: HttpOnly. Jeff Atwood discovers the hard way that writing an HTML sanitizer is significantly harder than you would think. HttpOnly cookies aren’t the solution though: they’re potentially useful as part of a defense in depth strategy, but fundamentally if you have an XSS hole you’re going to get 0wned, HttpOnly cookies or not. Auto-escape everything on output and be extremely cautious with things like HTML sanitizers.

# 29th August 2008, 2:01 am / html, httponly, javascript, jeff-atwood, sanitization, security, xss

Is It OK to Require JavaScript? Not if you can avoid doing so. Unobtrusive JavaScript really isn’t hard if you design it in from the start, and since stackoverflow is a community forum / questions and answers site I have trouble imagining a feature that can’t be made to work without JavaScript.

# 10th June 2008, 6:41 am / javascript, jeff-atwood, stackoverflow, unobtrusive-javascript

Size Is The Enemy. Jeff Atwood: “I’ve started a cottage industry mining Steve [Yegge]’s insanely great but I-hope-you-have-
an-hour-to-kill writing and condensing it into its shorter form points.” Lots of verbose static typing apologists in the comments.

# 24th December 2007, 10:50 am / dynamiclanguages, java, jeff-atwood, python, statictyping, steve-yegge

A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins. It turns out Venn diagrams are an excellent way of illustrating joins.

# 12th October 2007, 9:42 am / jeff-atwood, sql, venndiagrams