Advertisement · 728 × 90

Posts by Eric Lippert

I wrote a personal tool to do that when I was implementing them 15+ years ago, and yes it is very handy to have such a tool. Also a bunch of my debugging output tools are still in the code.

1 month ago 3 0 0 0

Surely senior developers already outperformed groups of juniors before being slowed down by being forced to use automatic bug generators.

1 month ago 6 0 0 0

Destroy him, my robots!

2 months ago 9 1 0 1

Absolutely!

2 months ago 0 0 0 0

Thanks @scott.hanselman.com for inviting me to be a guest on HanselMinutes to talk about my upcoming book, Fabulous Adventures In Data Structures And Algorithms. I had a great time!

ericlippert.com/2026/01/22/a...

2 months ago 26 2 2 0
Preview
Scotiabank CEO says Trump doctrine to dominate hemisphere will be good for business Financial data suggests Canadian banks are poised to profit if Donald Trump’s plan to takeover Venezuela’s oil industry comes to fruition.

Now I'm going to have to close my ScotiaBank account. VEXING.

www.nationalobserver.com/2026/01/08/n...

2 months ago 12 0 0 0
Preview
From the funny community on Reddit: Super Food Explore this post and more from the funny community

It was because of the wise old man of the mountain.

www.reddit.com/r/funny/comm...

3 months ago 1 0 0 0

Thank you so much for asking! I would love to, but let me coordinate real quick with manning marketing dept. :)

3 months ago 7 0 0 0
A great blue heron shaking itself dry at sunset.

A great blue heron shaking itself dry at sunset.

3 months ago 7 0 1 0
Advertisement

We used to stress out about whether a *warning* could possibly be interpreted in a way that would cause a new bug, and now intellisense is recommending I write a dozen new bugs every time I use VS. No wonder the old guard are vexed.

3 months ago 9 1 3 0

Ought the tech industry to take the legal system as its example of how to do jargon right then? Replace simple English words with Latin phrases?

4 months ago 1 0 1 0

Thank you everyone who has given me such warm support and thoughtful feedback on the early access release of my upcoming book:

hubs.la/Q03Q9PGP0

I really appreciate it.

The site-wide sale is over but if you want 50% off at checkout from now until Nov 27, use code MLLippert at checkout. Thanks!

4 months ago 17 3 0 1

I do not, sorry. And I don't have a good enough understanding of memory models to write my own!

4 months ago 4 0 0 0

Thanks!

4 months ago 3 0 1 0

Doug mocked that up but the title was mine!

5 months ago 1 0 0 0

Thank you!

5 months ago 1 0 0 0
Preview
Fabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms - Eric Lippert Author Eric Lippert introduces fabulous solutions using uncommon algorithms and data structures. There’s a lot more to algorithms than the useful-but-boring recipes you recite for every interview. Th...

I'm writing another book, and the first few chapters are available through Manning Early Access now! For 50% off!

hubs.la/Q03Q9PGP0

More details, and the story of how I came to write it, are on my blog at

ericlippert.com/2025/10/30/i...

It feels great to be writing again after a long break. :)

5 months ago 47 17 5 0
Advertisement

Thanks Cynthia!

5 months ago 2 0 1 0

There are no senior employees if there is no pipeline for training junior employees, and LLMs will never replace senior employees because LLMs *do not think and will never think*. It's incredibly foolish to destroy that pipeline.

5 months ago 10 0 0 0

Of course companies are not altruistic. Microsoft provided me vocational training not for the 12 months of terrible quality work they got out of me, but rather to incentivize me to become a highly loyal high quality entry level employee who could then make them 4x salary in revenue. It worked.

5 months ago 1 0 1 0

The point of giving tasks to interns isn't to get the task done, it's to train the intern! That's why we don't give critical tasks to interns.

5 months ago 4 0 1 0

Many times at MSFT decades ago I said that QA's job was not testing, it was advocating on behalf of the user. Testing was a tool, meeting user needs was the goal. Who advocates for users now? Seems like no one.

5 months ago 4 0 2 0

Wait til they find out about XBOX!

6 months ago 8 0 1 0
An enormous Giant Pacific Octopus asleep out of its den in shallow water at Sund Rock on the Hood Canal.

An enormous Giant Pacific Octopus asleep out of its den in shallow water at Sund Rock on the Hood Canal.

The most stunning thing we saw diving Sund Rock yesterday though was the biggest GPO I've ever seen in the wild. It was fast asleep, out in the open, in only 18 feet of water. I've never seen one asleep out of its den and so shallow before.

6 months ago 8 0 1 0
Advertisement
A golden colored dirona albolineata in the Puget Sound

A golden colored dirona albolineata in the Puget Sound

I spent the morning diving in the Hood Canal and got a pretty decent shot of this beautiful golden dirona. Biggest one I've ever seen, at least as big as my palm.

6 months ago 13 0 0 0

Since I've started using VS again, ignoring the bad suggestions being constantly made has unfortunately become second nature.

When I was in devdiv my team worked hard to make systems that did NOT suggest that I introduce subtle bugs a dozen times an hour.

Please do better.

6 months ago 15 2 0 0

It was! And having seen many of my friends and colleagues laid off in the last three years by billionaires seeking to put downward pressure on wages, it continues to be infuriating.

6 months ago 4 0 0 0

This was particularly galling for me as my aforementioned second rewrite was cancelled after Neal and I put a year's worth of work into, and it was passing almost all conformance tests. The third rewrite blew way, way past the initial timeline. Astonishing to me that Roslyn was not cancelled!

6 months ago 2 0 1 0

After I was promoted to principal engineer and then given an unacceptable performance review immediately after, one reason they gave was my poor ability to estimate how long a complex task would take. A skill that I was never taught, and was provided no expert mentors to learn from.

6 months ago 4 0 3 0

When we pitched to VS management that we entirely rewrite the entire compiler and IDE stack for VB and C# from scratch, understandably they wanted to know when it would be done and how much it would cost, so we negotiated schedule and quality goals.

6 months ago 3 0 2 0