If you haven't read my first article on getting started with coding I suggest you do so now before proceeding: I will assume that you can open a JavaScript console and run a basic program. In short, we explained that a program is a series of instructions ("statements") which are run together by giv…

February 17th, 2017 I left Stack Overflow. I remain a moderator on Skeptics where I was elected, but beyond that I am no longer working or managing any other community in the network. We parted ways very amicably, with lots of support, love and a few tears. I will miss them all terribly. I joined …

One of the most common questions about programming is what language should be used. I think that at this point in time the answer is clearly JavaScript. The reason is simple: it's everywhere a browser is, and it is powerful enough to be way more than a toy. How do I get started with JavaScript? Pr…

An Open Letter from United World College Graduates Regarding the Trump Administration’s Ban on Muslims We are the alumni of the United World Colleges movement. We are citizens of over 150 countries. We are people of different ethnicities, backgrounds, religions, sexual orientations, genders, poli…

Winter Bash is a festive celebration of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange communities. People compete to be awarded crazy hats for completing random, and often undisclosed actions. I've been involved in building a lot of this year's celebration, which will start soon and will be kept secret until th…

I regard it as the foremost task of education to insure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self denial, and above all, compassion. --Kurt Hahn The recent polemic regarding a speaker being expelled w…

If you haven't been living under a rock, you will have heard that the United Kingdom is going to leave the European Union. This will likely have consequences for the Silicon Roundabout, since it relies very much on skilled developers from the rest of Europe. On the other hand, both Berlin and Paris …

As part of Stack Overflow's pro-diversity initiatives, I have been helping Andela by mentoring one of their fellows, Bosun, in data structures and algorithms. In the Stack Overflow "default open" style, I am putting some of our notes on the internet, in the hope they will be useful to more people. M…

I generate random passwords of 24 characters chosen from a wide variety when registering to sites. I then use a password manager to remember the password, because of course it would be impossible to remember these. This allows me to browse with a little more security, and it also has the intended s…

In the first installment of "A computer from scratch", I've built a NAND gate. In the third part I've built NOT, AND and OR circuits and I've also introduced the 4011 CMOS NAND gates, which I'm using instead of a bunch hand built, transistor-based NANDs (because hey, that's a lot of wiring, but not …