We recently encountered this strange SQL Server error: Target string size is too small to represent the XML instance. Since I didn’t find any clear explanations with a few quick web searches, I thought I’d document the cause. It turned out that in a...

“Innovation” The word is probably a front-runner for Most Abused Marketing Term. Is there any phrase more inane than “business innovation”? The term is so badly overused (and misused) that it’s taken on that wrong kind of buzz. Rather than talking...

In Coders at Work, Joe Armstrong cites Joe’s Law of Debugging: all errors will be plus/minus three statements of the place you last changed the program. (Read the entire page here.) If I had remembered this last night, instead of this morning, I could...

I’ve been a fan of Ryan Tomayko ever since I stumbled across his How I Explained REST to My Wife in 2005. (That piece was so good that I actually performed it live during a company lunch in early 2006, with the inimitable Kamni Khan.) He’s had a...

Through our five-year existence as a company, we’ve done a great job at making noise, particularly by way of the tools we’ve released through our Lab. Readability, TBUZZ, Arc90’s PHP Twitter API Client, and JSON Lint are fairly well-known. Most people...