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I have seen underscores and earmuffs (like _good_ or *good*) frequently used in conversations among programmers. All I know is that underscores are used to denote private variables or methods in languages like C, Python etc. and earmuffs are the preferred way of indicating that something is a global variable. Do these...
After a round of interviews earlier this year, which included some practical questions with access to a computer, I noticed that, at least for the applicants we were seeing, there was a high inverse correlation between quality of applicant and the explicit choice of Bing/IE as the stack for search/browsing the web. Tha...
How to explain DependencyProperty using real world analogy? Why is it needed?
As practicing (as much as I can at least) "egoless programming", I'm focused on solving problems whoever wrote the code related (if that person don't make dangerous code) and I like to understand the problem fully to be sure to solve the source of this problem. However, when someone point my code to show an error, I of...
What's your opinion on summarizing the ToS? Example: [ToS here] Basically, it means you won't sue me. [I accept][I don't accept] Is this good practice or will this just get you sued more?
I want to go on vacation and not think about work at all but they want me to provide them a contact number in the event of an emergency (server goes down, web service malfunctions, etc). I am afraid that it will be abused (they will contact me before trying everything for example) but I also think that if I am on vacat...
With so many ORM tools for most modern languages, is there still a use case for writing and executing SQL in a program, in a language/environment that supports them? If so why? For clarity: I'm not asking about if programmers need to know SQL, or if I should have a SQL tool on my desktop. I'm asking specifically why ...
I have developed a web application for a client which is live to their customers. Recently, the application has been sold in such as way that it is replicated to other domain names so there are 4+ instances of the application which I am to develop and maintain. At the moment, each copy of the app has it own SVN reposit...
I am looking for a way to give an algorithm (service) a sentence, and it will tell me if its positive context or negative or even neutral. Does such a service exist?
Preference for dynamic and static typing is largely a matter of taste, and different people find them more or less suitable in different situations. My question is, would it be technically possible to have a statically-typed alternative to JavaScript for client-side web page augmentation etc.?
In Database 101 you learned never to distribute the sensitive database password along with your program, since all a person has to do is reverse engineer the program, find where you actually need the original password for authentication, then echo/print that line. However when you have multiple remote programs that nee...
Some possibilities are JSON, XML, HTML and/or Javascript fragments. The democratic answer to this question is "it depends on the situation," but I am looking for why one may be better than the others.
Perhaps I'm just naive, but when I try to decipher the wall of tasks I'm targeted to do over the course of a week, I just can't help but think whoever builds the project schedule needs to get some remedial training on basic project management. For example, I am assigned 13 tasks today, the shortest lasting .13 days (de...
I've always been a big fan of asynchronous messaging and pub/sub implementations, but coming from a Java background, I'm most familiar with using JMS based messaging systems, such as JBoss MQ, HornetQ, ActiveMQ, OpenMQ, etc. I've also loosely followed the discussion of AMQP. But I recently became aware of the Data Di...
IT professionals are experts who are trusted with the IT assets of a business or organisation. As trusted professionals we have responsibilities that extend beyond things that a non-IT customer can be expected to understand or be aware of. So I think the proper relationship between an IT professional and his internal/e...
Background I'm currently automating some tests for a plugin for MS Office. We are creating Coded UI tests in VS 2010. I suppose I could use the "Coded UI test builder" tool, but it does not really suit my particular case. Because of this I created my own UI Map class and extension methods for each UI Control/Map where...
I thinking about how increase developer's commitment to release and create release cycle as a game for more fun in office. Current suggestions Building tower from bricks Climbing on some hypothetical everest, where each camp is release stage Some badges system, like StackExchange system
I watched an interesting Google Talk video (warning about an hour of your time) about Gamification of whatever you are doing. It's clear that the StackExchange set of sites employ quite a few of these principles. There's something compelling about making work fun, but I wonder how many problem domains can incorporat...
Today we got our own website design. The theme is the "whiteboard". I'm a big fan of them. I would like you to share with me how you use it. I'm sure I don't exploit its potential enough. I will really enjoy answers that will come with pictures of your own whiteboard as an illustration ;) I use it as an information rad...
Since they exist for several fields with varying degrees of usefulness, I'm curious as to the reputation of headhunters/recruiters that focus solely on IT professionals (e.g. programmers, software engineers, CIOs, etc) when it comes to finding a new job. Are they actually useful or is it fairly hit or miss? Does the o...
I've been working as a developer for about 3 years now (straight from uni), I'm wondering, if I take a year or two out would it be impossible to get back into the industry? I didn't get the gap year thing out of my system after uni, and I'm thinking that I should probably do it before I hit 30 (24 now), my main concern...
Note: I'm not sure if this question is more suitable for Stack Overflow or Programmers. The thought process behind putting it here was that it doesn't actually relate to coding itself. I noticed a small freeware utility I have on my computer uses a couple of DLLs. From their names ("RenderAllChunks" and "RenderSlice"...
When I hear low-level programming, such as for drivers, embedded systems, operating systems, etc., I immediately think about C and perhaps C++. But mainly C. But what other languages are also used for these kind of tasks? Today, I mean, not what has been used.
I first heard this term about fifteen years ago. My understanding is similar to that described in the Wikipedia article and a TechRepublic article: you work with your colleagues in a "friendly, collegiate way in which personal feelings are put aside". It includes things like doing peer reviews with mutual respect and a...
As the Internet is pretty much ubiquitous, can we as developers assume that all users have Internet access? Now I don't mean that the code is written in such a way that if there is no connection then the whole program crashes due to lack of error code. What I mean is, can programs today be developed under the assumptio...
I have started playing around with Perl 5 lately, and it seems very interesting. I would like to spend some time learning it more in depth when I can. My question, since Perl 6 is slowly taking place (I believe...) and is said to break backward compatibility, is this: am I better learning Perl 5 and then Perl 6, or is ...
Do you think it's worth it to use version control if you are an independent developer, and if so, why? Do you keep the repository on your own computer, or elsewhere, where it can serve as a backup?
I know its not strictly related to what people ask here but I have to ask this anyway. Isn't having long conversations/discussions over emails reduce one's productivity. I have joined this new company where people prefer emails alot. It's not a big company so every one is accessible to everyone and also senior techies ...
If you were hired into a new company as a team lead (say a team of 10) one of the important things to do is to earn the respect of the members of the team. In the early days the new team lead may know nothing of the team culture, code base and business domain: in other words, is a complete neophyte. How does one go ab...
Python first appeared in 1991, but it was somewhat unknown until 2004, if the TIOBE rankings quantify anything meaningful. What happened? What caused the interest in this 13 year old language to go through the roof? Is there a reason that Python wasn't considered a real competitor to Perl in its first decade of existe...
I have this question since my friend told me that if we have frequent appraisal such as 4 months or 6 months once, people will be turned to a money minded. But I am thinking this in another aspect like, people will be getting feedback and boost quickly than one year appraisal. We do not need to increase the salary much...
Ok, so I have a program that basically logs errors into a nosql database. Right now there is just a single model for an error and its stored as a document in the nosql database. Basically I want to summarize across different errors and produce a summary of the "types" of errors that occured. Traditionally in a SQL data...
Let’s say you estimated time for a case to be 3 days. In day two you notice that the case is growing and new scenarios are popping up which were not counted when the time estimation where done. The new finding leads to 2 days extra (total 5 days). This is a typical problem that you will face sooner or later as develop...
I'm reading Code Complete 2, and I'm at the chapter where it says to (paraphrasing) "avoid programming through the interface." Why is it bad to program "through" the interface? A more concrete example: if I have a method of a class that submits a funny picture, what's wrong with it logging me in also? Should I simp...
I've been using underscore_case for about 2 years and I recently switched to camelCase because of the new job (been using the later one for about 2 months and I still think underscore_case is better suited for large projects where there are alot of programmers involved, mainly because the code is easier to read). Now e...
I'm working on a series of inter-related but separate web applications, all situated on the same host: Super Admin | ---Site Network Admin | | | ---Site | | | ---Site | | | ---Site | ---Site Network Admin | ---Site | ---Site | ---Site All three will have access to the same core libr...
Is unit testing a 100% or not at all kind of deal? I was browsing through my old projects and started adding features, this time with unit testing. However, is this ultimately worthless if I'm going to be re-using past components that do not have unit tests? Do I need to write unit tests for all the previous classes a...
I can't guess the perfect title of this question, so please read my case and please help me. We have 4 different products. Each is having their own site and database, means they are totally independent. Now I want a common system that can manage "contact us" page inquiries. Moreover I can pull out the contact inquires ...
I've never been really convinced of the advantages that you get by switching over to RSpec from Test::Unit in Ruby on Rails (despite reading from time to time about RSpec). What is it about RSpec that most Rails project seems to be using it? (some code examples clearly indicating advantages of one over the other would ...
I've been reading and thinking a lot lately, and I've come to the conclusion that I maybe I should rethink my web development strategy. I'm doing a lot of on-the-fly programming, and in the 2 years I've been working on a PHP web application, what might have begun as a little tool became quite the big project. But there...
I can read the website blurb and be impressed by the alleged benefits, but I haven't worked anywhere or with anyone who followed the TOGAF (or any alternative) architecture framework. Our organisation has declared itself dedicated to moving from what is currently a fairly shambolic design & development model towards so...
Doctrine and Propel both make use of single and concrete table inheritance to map object relationships. The former sees all possible fields in the class tree mapped to a single table - whereas the latter maps each class to a specific table, duplicating common fields in the inheritance hierarchy. While this facilitates ...
When designing relational database schema for web applications, I often find a case where I end up creating a table just to contain one row, and only one row. It feels like that is the wrong way to design it, but I can't come up with anything significantly better, or that is obviously "the right way to do it." A recent...
I feel it's important to continue practicing my problem-solving skills. Writing my own mini-projects is one way, but another is to try and solve problems posted online. It's easy to find interesting programming quizzes online that require applying clever algorithms to solve - Project Euler is one well-known example. Ho...
We are two developers on the edge of starting new web product development. We are both fans of lean start-up approach and would like to practice continuous deployment. Here comes the dilemma - we are both coming from a C# / Windows background and we need to decide between: Stick to .NET and Windows, we will not waste t...
It is clear that the knowledge of low level stuff is very important in our work. But in a situation where you're already developing commercial software on a high level, and when you already have a chosen direction but don't have any assembly skill, isn't it more reasonable to focus on studying stuff related to your dir...
I'm an experienced developer with .NET, and understand core computing concepts well (OOP, design patterns, etc) but would like to also learn rails. Is there a book out there that's the de-facto standard for describing best practices, design methodologies, and other helpful information on Ruby on Rails? What about tha...
How are libraries typically distributed? Because they have to be compiled with the same compiler under the same settings as the project using it, distributing the .dll, .lib, etc. seems impractical. Is the source code just made available for download?
Yesterday, I read couple of chapters on ASP.NET Ajax and jQuery from my ASP.NET 4 book and I found those frameworks pretty interesting and decide to learn more about them. Today, I borrowed some books from library on Ajax and JavaScript. It seems ASP.NET Ajax is different from Ajax and jQuery seems like the "new" JavaS...
I have been a professional developer for just over half a year and have been amazed at how big the world really is out of college. I have continued to learn in my free time but I am wondering where should I focus? FOCUS 1) The development stack used by my company. Quickest payoff in my day to day development. #Deepest ...
(I'll get my justification for why this is on topic in early: programming books tend to have fairly specific formatting needs - code samples, tables, images and graphs - which are not common to all book types and are not necessarily well handled by eBook readers. Similarly they're used in different ways - you often di...
On a very small team, where the black box and white box testing is done by the same person, which should the tester do first?
I have written a Perl module by starting with an existing Perl module of related functionality and modifying heavily. In fact, acccording to git blame I have changed (or created) every line of non-biolerplate code in the module. Of course, I have also changed the name of the module, so if I uploaded it to CPAN, it woul...
Today's testing is not much like yesterday's testing. More services, more distributed systems, more automation. I want the kind of testers that are self-starters and will constantly work themselves out of the job by writing test code. What are good interview questions for the modern software tester?
Since it's the holiday season now and everybody's making wishes, I wonder - which language features you would wish PHP would have added? I am interested in some practical suggestions/wishes for the language. By practical I mean: Something that can be practically done (not: "I wish PHP would guess what my code means an...
I love writing unit tests and agree they are an excellent way to test code, prevent regressions, etc. However, I find myself unable to write them much as the vast majority of the code I work on day-in and day-out is application code that displays a UI to the user. Is there a good way of unit testing application code? W...
I'm looking at beginning some work on a cloud based application and I'd be interested to hear of anybody's experiences of pitfalls they have run into particularly from a design/architectural standpoint when working with cloud platforms. Are there any expectations that might change significantly from regular web develop...
I've been looking around lately, specifically at some of the MS tools that are available, and I'm noticing a big focus on designer tools and wizards. Not just for UI development but for everything. Entity Framework has the modeller RIA Services has the DomainService wizard(s) Workflow has the whole workflow designer t...
I've been wondering for a while. I guess I have been adapting to the circumstances but I am in desperate need of some clearly defined workflows. Ok, so say I am working with one other person and I have 2 projects come up both of equally large size with LOOSE deadlines. What should I do: a) turn down one, work on other...
Perl and Python are often compared to each other (let's not forget Ruby), and almost always those discussions will come to the conclusion pretty much anything you can do in one or the other. Without going into that, I've noticed that Python however, is often used as an implementation language (uhmm, maybe the term her...
Tools like pc-lint or QAC can be used to perform static code analysis on a code base. In my experience the static analysis often yields a huge amount of noise, i.e. warnings on things that are not real bugs but somehow violate one of the rules in a given rule set. Turning off certain rules (either for good in the rule ...
What are useful metrics to capture for source code? How can metrics, like for example (Executable?) Lines of Code or Cyclomatic Complexity help with quality assurance or how are they beneficial in general for the software development process?
I'm currently working on a webscraper that is going to be processing about 2 million pages in total. But I'm not entirely sure how to benchmark it. Currently it processes about 100,000 pages in an hour at about 2mb/s. It isn't saturating the the bandwidth of the server but I've tried a lot of ways to make it quicker bu...
Are there specific things that you look out for before getting the team into pair programming? Obviously pairing someone who's great with C++ with another who knows ASP.NET best won't get me far, but how about someone who's great with C++ with another who knows Java best but can pick up C++ quick enough? What else? Ex...
We have recently replaced binary based communication protocol with XML one (between browser based client and server). The implementation is almost complete, however I am looking for ways to improve its performance both for faster transmission and parsing. Any ideas ? Please post link along with the answer.
Does function length affect the productivity of a programmer? If so, what is a good maximum number of lines to avoid productivity loss? Since this is a highly opinionated topic please back up the claim with some data.
Coming from eclipse I've developed my own coding standards which I got used to. In Visual C# 2010 however, it appears that some coding standards that MS recommends are enforced in the default configuration. E.g.: I'm used to write conditional statements like this: if (somecondition) { return true; } else { re...
What features is Windows missing that can improve the productivity of a programmer. I know a lot of people would want some features from Linux and OSX ported or being created for Windows as well. What is missing for you ? An example would be the option to have multiple workspaces. When not having the possibility to use...
I have a project I've been working on which I would like to push into a new, public Github repository as open source. After searching on StackExchange for the right license to use I've settled on the BSD license. My question is: now what? Do I just need to copy the BSD license text into a file called LICENSE in the roo...
At any given time, I usually have a bunch of ideas for weekend/side projects that I can work on. The ideas can be generally be categorized into these: Self Learning: Learning a new language/ technology/ framework Work related: Learning/Doing something that would help you at work Money: Projects that (you think) c...
I am usually a PHP and Delphi developer and have been getting into Python lately. I am developing an app and would love to get some feedback on the code, there are few things which I would love to tidy up myself but I am sure there are other things. Where / how is a good way to get in touch with an experienced Python ...
So i just finished my first semester of college. In my intro to programming class we made a bunch of super interesting (sarcasm) console applications. Any suggestions on ways other than just messing around with console applications for a beginner C++ student to improve?
I'm interested in taking on more contract projects for programming and, although it'd be nice to find clients just in my area, I want to expand my search a bit to other areas where a company may allow me to telecommute. I'm wondering if anyone who has experience with this has noticed that whether a company would be mor...
I graduated from university with a computer science degree (BSc), having done some C, C++, Java, Python, and Oracle along the way. I did some freelancing while I was at university and carried this into a full time job when I graduated, and I've been working full time for a year now. PHP isn't really what I want to do, ...
Just curious, because many developers use Flash to do many things that HTML 4 (correct me if I'm wrong) or below cannot or had a hard time doing, like for example the rounded corners (Canvass) and that Video Thing and many more. I have not actually explored all of HTML5, so might as well learn it from you. thanks.
I went to an interview last week for a junior programmer and mentioned that I have been working on a project with a buddy of mine. Tomorrow they would like to see this project in order to decide if they should hire me or not. So I was wondering: What parts of a project are of interest to someone who has not seen the p...
I've recently been assigned to work on a project written in PHP. I can't change that, and have no intention of really trying. However, this can't be an uncommon scenario. How do you motivate yourself to work on the project when the code you're looking at and producing constantly makes you want to cry? EDIT: It should b...
Following on from a previous thread, it has got me interested in learning a little about Assembly programming. Not so much for wanting to program useful apps in, just to get a feel for low level programming to better understand what is happening. Can anybody recommend any books or online resources for beginners? Tha...
What is your process? How do you get feedback? What software do you use? (like Morae from TechSmith) Who does them? Have you measured how it positively affected the quality of your software? I'm looking for your experience on the subject. This is something I want to improve.
I enjoy programming, but programming at work is just that, work. I would like to further develop my own personal interests in programming. Throughout the week I imagine myself completing a small project on the weekend or finishing up a programming related book. However, in reality I often fall short of my expectations....
Consider a web application with a custom search function that must display the results in a paged manner (twenty per page with up to hundreds of thousands of total results) and the ability to drill down to individual results that maintain next/previous links to navigate through the results. Re-executing the search on ...
I've been searching around for info on contract / freelance programming as far as steps to take in the initial communication with a client (someone who has contacted me regarding a project). I am wondering if anyone has links to good resources as far as what I should send them (should I send them a document outlining "...
I'm interested in developing for the web and I'm curious what languages should I know besides html, css, javascript, php/python/ruby. I don't know much about c# or java to make a decision whether to learn them or not, are they used much in the field I'm interested in? What other technologies should I look into ?
Recently I have read some articles/blogs/comments about the development and history of WPF and Silverlight. In some forums many developers and users criticize the performance of WPF applications (for example Visual Studio 2010). Actually the market share of Silverlight in comparison to Flash is not very high. At PDC 20...
Example here: What languages should I know if I'm interested in building web applications? Yes, I understand that HTML and CSS are not Turing-complete. Yes, I understand that they are declarative, not imperative languages. But why are people always clubbed over the head with this pedantic (and arguably obvious) fact ...
I am aware of a company that owns the intellectual property of a decent software product and makes an excellent income from licensing per annum. However, the director (non technical) complains about the cost of maintaining the development team, as it eats significantly into the profit margins, and is considering outsou...
I've just started working on a project and we're using domain-driven design (as defined by Eric Evans in Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. I believe that our project is certainly a candidate for this design pattern as Evans describes it in his book. I'm struggling with the idea of con...
I need to a piece of php code that goes beyond my abilities so I need to hire somebody to do it. It's not really something too long or complex so I wanted to know if there was a straightforward way to post my request and find somebody to do it for a certain amount. Does such a website exists or what's the best alternat...
This question is along the same lines as this one, but instead of talking about quality of code, I'm talking about the final product from the users' perspective. If you had limited time / budget, and could only guarantee one attribute of the software (other than the basic requirements) that take it from decent software...
I'm diving into web development after ten years of desktop development and I have an idea for a Rails website that will rely on users posting short videos (5 -15 mins) they've recorded. The website will be ad-supported and probably won't generate enough revenue to support hosting video based on how expensive I underst...
I'm working with php and sql. I think that my method of implementing functions is better than what my boss proposes. Just now he explained me how to do a check on a list of email addresses, and I do not like his idea. I proposed mine which is better and quicker to implement, but he disagreed. Now I think I will go ahe...
Objects Never? Well, Hardly Ever In the VIEWPOINT section of Communications of The ACM, I found an interesting article entitled "Objects Never? Well, Hardly Ever". It’s a radically different perspective than objects-first or objects-late. He suggests "objects-never" or maybe "objects-graduate school". The author talked...
The problem: When we were sending newsletters to customers, there was no way to confirm if the customer already received the mail. We have come up with two different approaches: (Boss's Idea) Each time mail was being sent, do an INSERT in a db with the title of the newsletter being sent and the email address which is ...
I've often come across bugs that have been caused by using the ELSE construct. A prime example is something along the lines of: If (passwordCheck() == false){ displayMessage(); }else{ letThemIn(); } To me this screams security problem. I know that passwordCheck is likely to be a boolean, but I wouldn't place...
I'm searching for a web site to start a new open source project. I want to start the developing of a "SPORT training log". I have some developing skill but not all I need (I dont know web coding). Anyone know a good starting point to meet some people, propose the software and then (in another place also) start the deve...
I saw the recent post about the person questioning his boss's solution (I believe my solution is better than my boss, so should I ignore him?) and decided to ask something similar but not as "clashing" as it sounded in the above link. To put it simply and more conceptually: We have a web app that does phone billing for...
If I want to unit-test some of my javascript functions, would it be more efficient (and doable) to use the already installed PHP unit-testing framework, or should I use a javascript unit-testing framework? EDIT: It seems I have to clarify things a bit. I'm using javascript for form validation. It seems that some logic ...
Are the default objects supported by My keyword in VB.net is a kind of singleton? If not, what is the difference? Again is this "default object" feature is something useful? If yes, then why it is not implemented in other languages like C#?
For example, would you prefer this one-liner int median(int a, int b, int c) { return (a<b) ? (b<c) ? b : (a<c) ? c : a : (a<c) ? a : (b<c) ? c : b; } or an if/else solution involving multiple return statements? When is ?: appropriate, and when is it not? Should it be taught to or hidden from beginners?
I'm a fairly young programmer, and I work at a medium sized company's IT department. I have a coworker, and he is a really good Visual Basic 6 programmer. And I mean really good. Honestly. He can deliver working applications, containing very few bugs, in the time I need to get my first cup of coffee, and boot my machin...