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I've been freelancing for a local game development shop. Most of the projects we worked on were brought in by an external contractor. This guy now wants to do business directly with me for some new projects which have nothing to do with games, and thus wouldn't require the skills of my previous clients. They heard abou...
My goal is to define contracts between classes. I like duck typing and all but I'd like also to define an interface between different layers of my application to clearly define which are the method to call from the external, and which are accessory methods that shouldn't be used by the other layer. For example in Java ...
We are using some open source libraries in our projects. Sometimes there are some issues found in some of them (most likely library bugs, but it may also be a wrong usage from our side, especially when sometimes documentation is not exactly 100 % complete). As the libraries are often quite complex, debugging them to pi...
I have an application that has a back-end database (tables, procedures, database specific dlls) and front-end (application logic and UI) that separate people are working on. I was wondering what's the best way to organize it in my repository (I'm using GIT). The options I see are: all-in-one repository submodules of ...
I always come across people who like to bang on for ages over the smallest "technical things". Don't get me wrong, I'm a geek programmer who loves what I do, but you know the type of conversation. Mac is so much better than Windows Don't use a For Each loop, use a While loop Don't buy an Intel based PC, get an AMD bas...
Advice on being a lead developer is welcome. Advice on being a lead developer of an Objective-C team more so. Unfortunately, I don't have experience in Objective-C (I suppose the first thing to do is to learn it). Also, I've never been a lead developer before. I do have about 6 years experience in developing applic...
I simply cannot imagine writing software without a spec. No matter how sketchy or high level it is, spec is important to explain to the clueless programmers on what are the functionalities of the program. But the problem with spec is that it is somewhat a second class citizen in the whole software development cycle; w...
My boss recently went back to our international office in his home country to interview some potential new employees, and we have decided to hire a few as programmers. They are fresh out of college and have very limited experience (similar to me when I first started working here). I am told they are able to read Englis...
Can I develop a BSD-licensed software that extends an Apache-licensed software (and vice-versa)?
I'm trying to edit a JSP for a project and I'm getting a NullPointerException somewhere in the JSP when it's requested from my server. My web server (JBoss) is reporting the exception, but it's giving me a bogus line number. It's reporting that the exception happened on line 702, but my JSP is only 146 lines long, so I...
Lots of programmers that I've met always says that "He is not a UI guy." The fact is that development nowadays, whether web, Windows, Linux, OSX, or any other type of development now comprises software with a good-looking UI. Why do so many developers seem to not like UI work?
I'm curious whether Mathematica could help me in software development or not. Do you use it for that, and for what? For instance, do you use it to analyze algorithms, or to do something else? I will probably buy myself a (student) license, but I'm not completely sure (if it isn't good for software development, I might ...
edit: I should point out; My personal view was that I should be proactive. I know sometimes I have to bite my tongue, and I wanted to get the communities input(was this one of those times). I couldn't find a more appropriate place to ask it in the SO family of sites. Here is the scenario -- small org < 70 employees n...
It seems that even that developer tools has become more solid and robust, writing good code has become a challenge. Even that tools are more powerful, quality of code haven’t got better. I come up with two important factors, there is less time and the projects are more complex. Because tools we use today are more power...
In development, what is the best way to manage delays? For example, you're doing a task, new requirements come in/something which further steepens the learning curve of something that must be learnt right there and then, and you need to communicate this to the PM/manager. What is the most effective way of doing this?
I'm working on a project where our dev team gets the specifications from the business part of the company. Both the business management and the IT management require estimates and deadline projections, as they should. The good thing is that estimates are mostly made by the actual developers who get to do the required f...
While browsing my code in a weakly-typed language I was seeing that I've trained myself to use identity (===) where logical. Then I came across a greater (or less) than or equal to (>=), and it made me wonder... why is there no "greater than or identical to"? I suppose it would be >==. For example... 5 == 5 // true ...
What is a good growth strategy for hash tables? If the number of elements exceeds the number of buckets, I increase the number of buckets with the following formula: n = int(n * 1.618033988749895) | 1; Does that sound sensible? (The | 1 part makes sure I get an odd number.)
I have a structure for storing item properties on SQL Server: ItemId PropertyId Value 1 1 a 1 2 b 2 1 a 2 2 5 Currently there are over 130000 items and 10000 properties and the numbers are growing. Current row count is a little over 15M. If I created a pivot tabl...
I love programming in languages that seem geared towards hardcore programmers. (My favorites are Python and D.) MATLAB is geared towards engineers and R is geared towards statisticians, and it seems like these languages were designed for people who aren't hardcore programmers and don't think like hardcore programmers...
I am a teenage hobbyist in high school, and I mostly release my software as open source; therefore I have little experience actually selling software, let alone in a specific area -- Android phones. Now, I have received requests from several users of one of my applications (basically, an advanced calculator) to create ...
I know something about Pascal, Mathematica and Matlab, but I dont have any idea about C,C++,C# languages. I want to learn one of the languages that they they are fast and exact to compute some arithmetic functions for large numbers(for example larger than $10^3000$). I asked somebody and he said he used C++ and he said...
What is the platform independence really mean? What are the criterion to call a language platform independent ? Are cross-platform and 'platform independence' same? (This may be a question for self study, but i would like to hear from experts from Stack overflow. There are lots of definitions and views regarding it o...
At work now I had an argument with co-worker, because I made a page that he feels is too generic. The page has 3 modes (simple, adv and special) - it has to work like this, because we don't choose how the specification is written. in each mode the page looks different(the changes are not big - it shows/hides 5 text fie...
I have a situation where we on a regular basis need a freshly installed "virgin" Windows installation to do various work in isolation on, and building one from scratch every time in a vmware instance is getting tedious. Perhaps there are cloud offerings providing a service allowing to request one or more Windows insta...
In my opinion, when I looked at JavaScript, it looked like not my cup of tea. When I came across jQuery, I loved it. I sat and watched Nettuts+ 15 days of jQuery screencasts, 1 year later and now I'm fairly confident I wouldn't develop a website without including jQuery's library. I have never felt this has held me bac...
I have a WinXP based laptop with pretty basic hardware configuration by today's standards. I am planning to upgrade to a WinXP based laptop with a lot better hardware. The problem: My current laptop has truck loads of software like cygwin, perl, ruby etc. Installing each software manually is going to be pretty cumberso...
My company (small, about 40 people across 3 offices) occasionally does "developer workshops" online where one of the devs hosts a presentation about some tech topic. It's not necessarily about our work, but just to help everyone improve their skills and understanding. I've been asked to host the next one, and the topic...
This problem is a re-occuring one in my experiences. That of the ability to learn from other people's experiences, and being able to share what I have learned. Part of the problem of this learning process, is the dependence on experience. If for example, you've never had many jobs cleaning up other people's code for ea...
What is the standard way of describing how software products are released and the proportionate order of magnitude to which the changes relative to the software product are conveyed? Is Release Update Patch Bug Fix redundant? or Is Update Patch too terse? As an end user I'd think that all bug fixes are patches...
I was listening to a dot net rocks the other day where they mentioned, almost in passing, a really intriguing tool for learning new languages -- I think they were specifically talking about F#. It's a solution you open up and there are a bunch of broken unit tests. Fixing them walks you through the steps of learning th...
I just joined a (relatively) small development team that's been working on a project for several months, if not a year. As with most developer joining a project, I spent my first couple of days reviewing the project's codebase. The project (a medium- to large-sized ASP.NET WebForms internal line of business application...
There are no shortage of vague "Scheme vs Common Lisp" questions on both StackOverflow and on this site, so I want to make this one more focused. The question is for people who have coded in both languages: While coding in Scheme, what specific elements of your Common Lisp coding experience did you miss most? Or, inver...
I had a user ask me this question. We know that cars break down, but that's because of something physical (unless software is involved!). I tried to answer that software is a much younger industry, but the user countered with "didn't the automobile industry become much more stable than and reliable with less people?". ...
An airplane, as opposed to, for example, a website, is a system where any failure in certain systems is completely unacceptable, since errors in e.g. flight monitoring can cause the autopilot to malfunction and do a dive. Obviously, this doesn't happen since the brilliant engineers at Boeing and Airbus have checks in t...
Note: This question is not about the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause". The New BSD license does not contain that clause, and is compatible with the GPL. I'm trying to pick between the New BSD license and the MIT license for my own projects. They are essentially identical, except the BSD license contains the followi...
I know there are some questions already here that are closely related to this subject but none of them take Ubiquitous Language as the starting point so I think that justifies this question. For those who don't know: Ubiquitous Language is the concept of defining a (both spoken and written) language that is equally use...
I was thinking that if all the users of a website are required to have JavaScript enabled, Is it ok to use obtrusive JavaScript? I'm all for progressive enhancement, but what's the point when an advanced web application bounces users at the door if they have an old browser or JavaScript disabled? We have a very slim ta...
My boss has offered me a 25% share, in exchange on more input from my side, of a website ( a crawling engine in php and a front end using ajax ) I developed for him. What are the things I should consider in writing the contract so that my share is future proof?
I work in a large company, but on a just two man team developing desktop LOB applications. I have been researching TDD for quite a while now, and although it is easy to realize its benefits for larger applications, I am having a hard time trying to justify the time to begin using TDD on the scale of our applications. ...
I've always wondered how do you find undocumented / private API ? Example the Apple undocumented / private API, Play Station, Windows Phone 7, Win32 Kernel, Windows API, hidden callback, etc... What tools do hackers use to find out about private and undocumented functions? Where can I read about peoples' experiences...
I want to sell software online and I need an easy to implement payment processing system. What I'm actually going to be selling is an activation code (one per purchase) that would activate the trial version of a product. I was about to use this one but I just found out that people without a paid email account (not hotm...
I'd like to advocate the use of issue-tracking software within an organisation that currently does not use it. But there's one aspect of their situation for which I'm unsure of what to suggest: their projects frequently receive informal verbal feedback or casual comments in meetings or in passing from a wide group of i...
My boss has always told me that a good programmer should be able to ensure that the code he or she changes is reliable, correct, and thoroughly self-verified; that you should completely understand all the results and impacts your changes will cause. I have tried my best to be this kind of programmer—by testing again an...
I'm working on making my classes unit-testable, using dependency injection. But some of these classes have a lot of clients, and I'm not ready to refactor all of them to start passing in the dependencies yet. So I'm trying to do it gradually; keeping the default dependencies for now, but allowing them to be overridden ...
There are several almost standard tags used in comments: FIXME, TODO, BUGBUG. Which other tags do you use and for what? Are there any standards on using them, i.e. format (supplementing with date and initials), revising procedures, etc?
Unicode has maybe 50 spaces \u0009\u000A-\u000D\u0020\u0085\u00A0\u1680\u180E\u2000-\u200A\u2028\u2029\u202F\u205F\u3000][\u0009\u000A-\u000D\u0020\u0085\u00A0\u1680\u180E\u2000-\u200A\u2028\u2029\u202F\u205F\u3000 and 6 line breaks not only CRLF, LF, CR, but also NEL (U+0085), PS (U+2029) and LS (U+2028). Maybe I ...
I have decided to take the time out after work to learn Python. Python appeals to me because at work (Web and eLearning Company), I have to follow out very repetitive tasks like delete all these tags, rename all these tasks and even more advanced repetive tasks. Additionally it would be good for me to get an understand...
I am looking to learn how to properly use, and implement, HTTP headers. What is the best resource or set of guidelines that I can use? ( especially ranges to detect download managers, etc) ?
I've been developing applications in C# / VB.NET for about 3-4 years (.NET Framework v2.0, 3.5, 4). I have also developed some command-line applications or scripts in C, and Python under Linux. Sometimes I need to develop my applications in another languages, like Python, but the problem thing is that lots of those app...
I have been interested in design patterns for a while and started reading "Head First Design Patterns". I started with the first pattern called the 'Strategy' pattern. I went through the problem outlined in the images below and first tried to propose a solution myself so I could really grasp the importance of the patt...
My question is whether I should test code that I know will be changed in a short time. I'm doing TDD in ruby, and I often meet with this question. I'm interested about best practices about this, pro and contra. Thanks. Update Clarification: My question is basically how do you compare the 'cost of writing a test' VS 't...
Test-driven development (TDD) is big these days. I often see it recommended as a solution for a wide range of problems here in Programmers SE and other venues. I wonder why it works. From an engineering point of view, it puzzles me for two reasons: The "write test + refactor till pass" approach looks incredibly anti-e...
What is the trend like for the usage of cross-platform GUI frameworks right now? Are more people starting to use cross-platform frameworks (such as GTK+, Qt and wxWidgets) or are there more who use more platform-tied frameworks (e.g. Cocoa or WPF)? Is it more or less stagnant? Is it like a rollercoaster? What do you th...
Im really aware of some benefits of using Hudson as CI server. But, im facing the problem to convince my coworkers to install and use it. To put some context, we are developing two different products (one is an enterprise search engine based on Apache Solr) and several enterprise search projects. We are facing a lot o...
I heard Google has a giant private (internal) repository of all of their code and their employees have access to it so that when they are developing things they don't have to reinvent the wheel. I'd like to know more about it! Is there anyone here from Google that can describe it in a bit more detail, or do you know a ...
Can this position (Developer Advocate) be considered as a Software Engineering position in terms of interview questions they will likely ask me? Anyone else been interviewed for this position? I am just trying to gauge what they'll ask me for Developer Advocate position. Thanks. EDIT: This is just the first phone inter...
Like most people, I think of myself as being a bit above average in my field. I get paid well, I've gotten promotions, and I've never had a real problem getting good references or getting a job. But I've been around enough to notice that many of the worst programmers I've worked with thought they were some of the best...
In every industry there are two verticals Product Vertical and Service Vertical, so my question is: How does design approach changes while designing Software for Product Vertical as compared to developing Software for Service Vertical ? What are the pros and cons for each case ? Also, in case of Product Vertical, H...
I work as part of a team on an existing application that has no inline documentation, nor does it have technical documentation. As I've been working on various bug reports on the application, I've written a sort of breadcrumb trail for myself - bug numbers in various places so that the next developer can refer to that...
Background: I work at a start-up company, where one team uses Virtual Machines to connect to a remote server to do their development, and another team (the team I'm on) uses local IIS/SQL Server 2005/Visual Studio installations to conduct work. Team VM is located about 1000 miles from Team Non-VM, and the servers the ...
As we all know by now, XSS attacks are dangerous and really easy to pull off. Various frameworks make it easy to encode HTML, like ASP.NET MVC does: <%= Html.Encode("string"); %> But what happens when your client requires that they be able to upload their content directly from a Microsoft Word document? Here's the s...
If you were going to set up a Email Alerts for the customers of your website to subscribe to, what rules of etiquette ought to be followed? I can think of a few off the top of my head: Users can Opt-Out Text Only (Or tasteful Remote Images) Not sent out more than once a week Clients have fine-grained control over what...
I am a software engineer that's had positions programming in VBA (though I dare not consider that 'real' experience, as it was trial and error!), Perl w/ CGI, C#, and ASP.NET. The latter two are post-undergraduate, with my entrance into the 'real world'. I'm 2 years out of college, and have had 5 years of experience ...
What is the current "standard" for setting up a development environment that supports remote collaboration as well as secure version control? Considering a virtual dedicated solution with vm for a web layer and a data layer, using VPN for each programmer. We're a small start-up that do both Microsoft and open-source de...
I'm developing a JavaScript application that uses several open source JavaScript projects. All their licenses have a phrase like "You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License". Does this mean I need to make a massive HTML comment at the top of my webpage with all the licence...
I have a lot of MATLAB code that needs to get ported to C (execution speed is critical for this work) as part of a back-end process for a web application. When I attempt to outsource this code to a C developer, I assume (correct me if I'm wrong) few C developers also understand MATLAB code (things like indexing and mem...
I've been working as a freelancer for about two years in vWorker. Any person can visit a coder's profile, and see in how many projects the coder has worked on, (if the coders allows) see how much the coder obtained in each project, ratings, feedbacks, etc. Would be good to include a freelancer account in your Resume / ...
Which is the most difficult CS subject/theory that you studied but important to the field? And the reason please?
I mean, there are really useful libs that can solve problems when you are stuck and do not know how to solve this or that with your knowledge of programming language you use... For example, Boost for C++ or JQuery for JavaScript or Spring for Java... They solve problems in seconds and you do not really care how they di...
I'm developing a Driver Safety Monitoring System which is kind of small software which would be implemented inside a car with connections to few cameras. What I want to know is to implement this software inside the vehicle what kind of computer can I use?
What are the most helpful articles on the subject of managing programmers? I came across this one recently, and thought it was excellent - The unspoken truth about managing geeks What else is out there?
There are times when working on my programming projects, and I get to a point where I'm ready to move on to the next part of my program. However, when I sit down to implement this new feature I get stuck, in a sense. It's not that I don't know how to implement the feature, it's that I get stuck on figuring out the best...
My company has corporate offices around the country and I have been hired under contract to work in one office while the rest of my team works in another. We are in the same time zone, but definitely remote. I have not met the team yet, but will be flying up there soon. What is your best advice for integrating and de...
I have started using ORM technology in the last few years. My first exposure was NHibernate. I then moved onto Linq 2 Sql, and Entity Framework. The issue I have however is, there are some organisations where I have found strong opposition to introducing ORM tools. They usually have a number of reasons: they have a lo...
"Abstract class" and "interface" are similar concepts, with interface being the more abstract of the two. One differentiating factor is that abstract classes provide method implementations for derived classes when needed. In C#, however, this differentiating factor has been reduced by the recent introduction of extensi...
How do language designers decide when a feature should go in a library as an extension or when it needs to have support from the core language?
A little introduction to my case: As part of a bigger product, my team is asked to realize a small IDE for a DSL. The user of this product will be able to make function calls in the code and we are also asked to provide some useful function libraries. The team, together with the PO, put on the wall a certain number of ...
As programmers, you have certain curtains to hide behind with your code. With PHP all of your code is server side preprocessed, so this never see's the light of day as far as the user is concerned. If you have maybe rushed through some code for a deadline, as long as it functions correctly then the user never needs to ...
I’m asking this question regarding problems I have experienced during TDD projects. I have noticed the following challenges when creating unit tests. Generating and maintaining mock data It’s hard and unrealistic to maintain large mock data. It’s is even harder when database structure undergoes changes. Testing GUI ...
I need to program an expert system that, according to a series of complex possibilities, returns a well defined result, together with some kind of diagnostic of what that results means. What is the general process to define the behavior of an expert system, from the initial assessment of the conditions to the actual co...
This question was prompted by this answer, where I quote,"agile + ORM on a large constantly changing database is brutal". So, how can an agile process deal with a constantly changing database? I am interested in both cases: Where the database design will stablelize, after using it a while to see how it works Where con...
I am currently looking for a .NET component that fulfills the following requirements. TIFF files Extracting single pages as images Writing the images to new TIFFs Support for colored TIFFs/Images Improving the TIFF files (deskew is a must, despeckle etc optional) Royalty-free deployment on servers Fully architecture...
I know to check for/use asserts and carefully examine any assembly components, but I didn't know if anyone out there has a fairly comprehensive or industry standard check-list of specific things at which to look? I am looking more at C and C++. note: There are some really helpful answers, I'm just leaving the questi...
Where I work I often have to develop (and bug fix) in an old system (.NET 1) whos code is complete spaghetti - with little thought given to variable names, program structure nor comments. Because of this it takes me ages to understand what bits need changed, and I often 'break' the existing software because I've made a...
I have been given task that has a case study developed by Extreme Programming (XP) and the Rational Unified Process (RUP). I was asked to apply regression models and take some dependent variables and some independent variables in order to compare both XP and RUP. Even though I have been searching, I have not been able ...
It seems like most of common web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari) are developed using C++. Whys is that so?
I developed a web project for my company and this project was designed to use Mozilla Firefox (including the javascript (jQuery)). However, now the company wants the project to be transferred to Internet Explorer. I know that in Google, there are several explanations about Mozilla Firefox, which I can demonstrate to th...
I want to make a class testable using dependency injection. But the class creates multiple objects at runtime, and passes different values to their constructor. Here's a simplified example: public abstract class Validator { private ErrorList errors; public abstract void validate(); public void addError(St...
I want to develop a project on my own (if it is sucessful more people might start working on it too). Also I want to apply some proper software engineering from the first until the last day. On one hand just to try it out and compare results with previous projects that were just about writing code quick and dirty, and ...
So you've heard it many times from those who do not truly understand the values of testing. Just to start things out, I'm a follower of Agile and Testing... I recently had a discussion about performing TDD on a product re-write where the current team does not practice unit testing on any level, and probably have never ...
So, I've got you bog standard c# object, overriding Equalsand implementing IEquatable public override int GetHashCode() { return _name.GetHashCode(); } public override bool Equals(object obj) { return Equals(obj as Tag) } #region IEquatable<Tag> Members public bool Equ...
I've started to learn a little ROR and everthing I read says that ROR espouses the DRY principle and they seem to imply that this is a big thing that makes ROR different from other languages/frameworks. What language does encourage duplicate code?
Back in college I remember a professor teaching the class one of the laws of computer science. He said something like "More code equals more bugs" and gave it a name (The Law Of Whatchamacallit) and attributed it to someone. Does anyone know where this "law" comes from, who said it or what it's original verbiage is?
I've learned a fair amount about the various different software licensing models and what those models mean for my own software project. However, I'd like to make sure I understand as many of them as possible for making decisions on how to license my own software and in what scenarios I can safely use software under a ...
Some projects I work on have a main line of features, but are customizable per customer. Up until now those customizations have been implemented as preferences, but now there are 2 problems with the system... The settings page is getting out of control with features. There are probably some improvements that could b...
I was just curious if SQL Devs write their code freehand or do they make use of the visual query designer to generate queries? In the majority of the cases, the query designer can create most of non-complex queries, no? (I'm a WinForms dev just now getting started with SQL Server)
I have setup an ideal, quiet, non-interrupting environment at home. I am extremely productive here. I dont want to leave my home, not my room, not even my couch. I am outside United States in a third world country so a lower pay is not an issue. The issue is the work environment. How/where do I find work online so th...
When I first started to learn how to program, real programmers could write assembly in their sleep. Any serious schooling in computer science would include a hefty bit of training and practice in programming using assembly. That has since changed, to the point where I see Computer Science degrees with assembly, if incl...
I am working on a C# .NET Application, where I have a Form with lots of controls. I need to perform computations depending on the values of the controls. Therefore, I need to pass the Form values to a function and inside that function, several helper functions will be called depending on the Control element. Now, I can...