/Entertaining

Code With Swearing Is Better Code

- Jamie Zawinski tl;dr: “We find that open source code containing swearwords exhibit significantly better code quality than those not containing swearwords under several statistical tests. We hypothesise that the use of swearwords constitutes an indicator of a profound emotional involvement of the programmer with the code and its inherent complexities, thus yielding better code based on a thorough, critical, and dialectic code analysis process.”

featured in #390

The Worst-Selling Microsoft Software Product Of All Time: OS/2 For The Mach 20

- Raymond Chen tl;dr: "Because I’m not here to ridicule the lackluster sales of the Mach 20 hardware. I’m here to ridicule the lackluster sales of the Mach 20 software.... That leaves three customers who purchased a copy and didn’t return it. And the support specialist had personally spoken with two of them."

featured in #378

Advent Of Code

- Eric Wastl tl;dr: An advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other.

featured in #371

Why Do We Call It "Boilerplate Code?"

- Hillel Wayne tl;dr: "Why do we have the term “boilerplate code”? It comes from the peculiar interplay of two industrial revolution technologies: steam engines and hot metal typesetting."

featured in #369

Rendering Doom With Emojis

- Bruno Croci tl;dr: "Back in 2020, I had an idea of a simple project to render doom using emojis because of some other doom renderer I saw on Twitter. I decided to take it as a weekend project, and although it took me around a week and a lot of bad code, it works and it’s actually pretty interesting. I don’t think anybody wants to play the game like that, but it certainly looks cool."

featured in #359

Reverse Engineering A Cat Feeder To Boost Productivity

- John Partee tl;dr: "I had two problems it could solve: low side project motivation, and loving dark chocolate sea salt almonds way too much. I'm a codemonkey - Why not feed my monkey brain when I push code? I couldn't find a USB candy dispenser, so I figured I'd try a cat feeder. This thing rocks, and I'll show you how to replicate what I did."

featured in #358

Someone Is Pretending To Be Me

- Connor Tumbleson tl;dr: "So I previewed the document and it was scary. It was a document intended for someone to have a cheat sheet for an interview on how to act as me." Connor plays investigator to understand how this spam works. 

featured in #356

My Blog is Hilariously Overengineered To The Point People Think It's A Static Site

tl;dr: "I'm going to share the gory details on how my blog works, and why people often mistake it for a static website. Buckle up and kick back, we're going to learn about the internet today."

featured in #352

Janet Jackson Had The Power To Crash Laptop Computers

- Raymond Chen tl;dr: "A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops."

featured in #344

A Story About `Magic'

- Erik Brunvand tl;dr: "You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words 'magic' and 'more magic'. The switch was in the 'more magic' position."

featured in #342