iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 28/09/2026

You're granting too much good will towards the criminals who develop and run these tools. They built a tool to illegally defeat security systems and successfully ran it. That the tool has a scripting system that generates its own scripts at random is a gimmick for marketing purposes.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 23/09/2026

I was on a BA flight last year that was five hours delayed with the passengers already on the plane, and the head flight attendant came on the PA and said please could everyone complain about this on social media because they sure don't listen to the flight attendants or pilots.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 09/09/2026

I'm comfortable with assigning malice rather than incompetence from these thieves and fraudsters. "Misconfigured" is generous.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 04/09/2026

It is bonkers. I'll bring you a print copy at Christmas!

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 04/09/2026

After many delays, my book is finally done! Print copies ship on September 29th, and the e-book is HALF OFF at www.manning.com/books/fabulo... from now through Labor Day, WHAT A FABULOUS DEAL! Thanks to everyone who supported this project; I appreciate you all so much.

manning.com

Fabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms - Eric Lippert

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 02/09/2026

Unfortunately I had to remove the suspense in favor of pedagogy. :)

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 02/09/2026

I'm super excited! Print copies are coming off the presses now. :)

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 28/08/2026

I totally forgot it was tonight and did not have time to set up the telescope when a neighbor reminded me, so this is the best I got.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 18/08/2026

Writing the code is the fun part. Micromanaging interns who can't learn or grow is horrible. I genuinely can't understand why anyone would make that trade.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 08/08/2026

That is very interesting! We went with a very different architecture for roslyn because "incrementally patch an existing binary" was an explicit non-goal. The problem we actually faced was "get correct intellisense on every keystroke" which is also a semantic analysis problem but not quite the same.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 07/08/2026

Thank you for all your support of this project! I'm reviewing the last galleys tomorrow and then it goes to the printer. :)

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 28/07/2026

In my youth I had a book called Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise? that made that exact point :)

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 24/07/2026

I haven't seen this specific structure before. I think it's probably quite niche for applications but it's a nice idea!

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 11/06/2026

Is it a marmot? Whistler, the resort town / mountain in British Colombia is named after the whistling marmots.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 09/06/2026

Possible culprit: in Microsoft Excel a zero in a cell marked as being a date is treated as midnight 30 December 1899. Why midnight on Dec 30th rather than Dec 31st or Jan 1st? To work around a bug in Lotus. See ericlippert.com/2003/09/16/e... for details.

ericlippert.com

Eric’s Complete Guide to VT_DATE

I find software horology fascinating. The other day, Raymond said “The OLE automation date format is a floating point value, counting days since midnight 30 December 1899. Hours and minutes a…

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 31/05/2026

Its because of the co-op program. At Facebook the intern manager training cautions new intern managers that UW interns might have more work experience than them.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 31/05/2026

I don't recall, but on the jscript team in the 1990s my myself, my lead, manager, product manager, group manager and VP were all from UW. There's a lot of us!

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 22/05/2026

I am in Canada and have poor internet at the lake but I'll take a look when I'm back. Sounds interesting!

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 28/02/2026

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.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 13/02/2026

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

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 22/01/2026

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...

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 08/12/2025

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

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 03/12/2025

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.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 20/11/2025

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?

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 17/11/2025

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!

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 06/11/2025

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

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 31/10/2025

Doug mocked that up but the title was mine!

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 30/10/2025

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. :)

hubs.la

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...

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 18/10/2025

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.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 18/10/2025

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.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 18/10/2025

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.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 14/10/2025

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.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 28/09/2025

Wait til they find out about XBOX!

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 22/09/2025

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.

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

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 22/09/2025

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.

A golden colored dirona albolineata in the Puget Sound

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 15/09/2025

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.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 14/09/2025

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.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 14/09/2025

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!

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 14/09/2025

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.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 14/09/2025

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.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 14/09/2025

We threw two away when building Roslyn and shipped years late as a result. Though it was ultimately a success that I'm proud of, I still feel that we would have shipped on time had we not thrown away the second one, but rather iterated upon it until it met perf goals.

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Eric Lippert @ericlippert.com · 14/09/2025

The first edition of Mythical Man Month suggests "plan to throw one away", but the natural critique is that if you plan to throw one away, you'll probably throw two away. In the second edition Brooks admitted that the original advice was too simplistic.

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