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Over the years I have developed several style based techniques which I use to keep my from make Error if(const == lvalue) rather then if(lvalue == const) since the first can't fall victim to the classic accidental assignment goof. I recently worked on a project with very unusual style standards and I found that I had ...
This is happening in every team. For some reasons, conflicts arise in the team and they affect the overall motivation and productivity. What is your recommended approach to solve that common problem? Examples: one part of the team wants to implement dependency injection, the other part think it's a waste of time. some...
The Joel Test includes the question: Can you make a build in one step? Which is important, but I'm wondering, how streamlined have some of the deployment processes been? All software from shrink-wrap to web applies: what's the best deployment environment you've worked with, and what steps were involved?
This started as a "Note to Self," so please excuse me if the frustration is all too evident and the writing is less than stellar... Three major subjects I've had at the forefront of my mind lately: Motivation Learning (Curiosity) Doing (Making) I've been studying motivation and incentives for months now. It seems the...
Our team is divided on this and I wanted to get some third-party opinions. We are building an application and cannot decide if we want to use .Net WPF Desktop Application with a WCF server, or ASP.Net web app using jQuery. I thought I'd ask the question here, with some specs, and see what the pros/cons of using either ...
For the last couple of years, all of the serious projects I have worked on have been either web based, or had a non graphical user interface (services, command line scripts etc...). I can throw together a WinForms app or do some simple WPF when needed, but I've never really delved into some of the lower level API's li...
How are companies working on large projects evaluating an impact of a single modification on an existing code base? Since my question is probably not very clear, here's an example: Let's take a sample business application which deals with tasks. In the database, each task has a state, 0 being "Pending", ... 5 - "Finis...
This is a chart I whipped together showing the length of active (meaning ongoing bug fixes and service packs) support offered for each version of Delphi. It is based on the published support data obtained from Embarcadero's website. Delphi 2010 and XE are excluded because their active support is still ongoing so they ...
From this question, I have another question about... How long and what type of complexity would have been involved in Chris Sawyer writing most of rollercoaster tycoon in assembler? In order to specify and break this question down, I am interested in; Approximately how many man hours (have a guess) do you estimate i...
I have been tasked with evaluating a new PC for our dev team that is spec'd only slightly better than our current models. Could anyone recommend appropriate benchmarking software that would be useful to emulate typical development tasks?
Many IDEs have the ability to spit out automatically written pieces of code. For example, it might generate a getter/setter pair for you. I wonder whether it isn't an attempt to work around some flaws in the language. If your IDE can figure out what the code should be without your help, why can't the compiler? Are ther...
Possible Duplicate: Is it better to specialize in a single field I like, or expand into other fields to broaden my horizons? Recently, I don’t know from where I got a thought in my mind that, “is knowing .NET development environment enough for a successful career in IT industry”. Should I be learning more languages ...
I work in a company that does web applications for various banks and some smaller e-shops We employ about 20 developers and have 4-5 projects in development at any one time. Our development teams don't interact much and a lot of the same problems are done in varied ways(good to bad). I was wondering if it would be a g...
When I started using Java in the nineties, it was all "Write once, run anywhere!" from day one. That was probably all true then and I was a part of the choir as well. I am not sure what to think about that anymore, considering all the other languages using multi platform runtimes (python, flash, perl, html, php...). B...
I've been hearing a lot of enthusiasm about functional programming languages lately, with regards to Scala, Clojure, and F#. I've recently started studying Haskell, to learn the FP paradigm. I love it, it's really fun, and fits my math background. But will it ever really matter? Obviously, it's hardly a new idea. Her...
For blackberry GUI developement. I am using the name convention like backButtonField and some of my colleagues are using btnBack. But sometimes I stuck with the names like loginVerticalFieldManager its a very long name. At that time vfmLogin looks better So for GUI components names what convention should I follow?
Over on stackoverflow, I see this issue crop up all the time: E_NOTICE ?== E_DEBUG, avoiding isset() and @ with more sophisticated error_handler How to set PHP not to check undefind index for $_GET when E_NOTICE is on? How to stop PHP from logging PHP Notice errors How do I turn off such PHP 5.3 Notices ? Even ...
I know Git is great for open source projects. But I was wondering: for a company with 20 programmers working on a 1 year project, which source control system is desirable? From what I heard Git uses pulling; wouldn't it be less than desirable to need to go through someone else to get your changes in the main trunk? Esp...
I'm trying to convince the company I work for to contribute towards open-source software, specifically building a library/component for ASP.NET web apps. We have an 'Innovation Day' coming up where we can work on our own personal pet projects at work, similar to Google's one day a week policy, except ours is once a mon...
Introduction If an error occurs on a website or system, it is of course useful to log it, and show the user a polite message with a reference code for the error. And if you have lots of systems, you don't want this information dotted around - it is good to have a single centralised place for it. At the simplest level, ...
I'm considering using Grails for a new website, but am open to other/new programming languages and frameworks. I have done development using J2EE/JSF2, ASP.NET, and PHP. Is Grails or Ruby on Rails pretty much the best way to get functionality up and running quickly? Some initial thoughts: DJango looks similar to RoR...
Which world most important algorithms have contributed most to humankind in past decades? I thought this is a good general knowledge for a developer to know about. Update: If possible, please keep the answer to a specific programming algorithm. I would like to get a list of the most important ones, only one algorithm ...
I need a way to filter out resumes of folks who just copy-and-paste code then hope it works, and check it in if it does. All this happens without having an understanding (or care) to understand the rest of the code in the system. Sure I know that copying and pasting code is part of learning a new object, control, etc....
I came across this article Work for Free that got me thinking. The goal of every employer is to gain more value from workers than the firm pays out in wages; otherwise, there is no growth, no advance, and no advantage for the employer. Conversely, the goal of every employee should be to contribute more to ...
So I was currently in the middle of coding, unfortunately for me, I was in "The Zone" then I thought to myself, are my method/variable names to long? POP out of the Zone I go! So I came here to ask, are my method/variable names too long? You be the Judge! Bonus points to anyone who can figure out what I'm writing, a...
This question is to experienced testers or test leads. This is a scenario from a software project: Say the dev team have completed the first iteration of 10 features and released it to system testing. The test team has created test cases for these 10 features and estimated 5 days for testing. The dev team of course can...
My question is: How can you verify the users' requirements early in the software creation process? I show the user specifications, prototypes, demos... but still users forget to share some "insignificant details" about the process or business rules and data. Which pops up after the final test as some "really small and...
I guess most people have been in this situation. The initial project planning begins. The requirements are outlined. After architectural review and sorting through APIs/Frameworks the fitting technology is picked. The development starts. And then it starts. As soon as you need to do some supposedly simple supporting th...
I want to build a PHP web application, but always faces the problem that I need to connect to database and deal with related objects. So I tried codeigniter and it uses a special way to connect to database named Active Record and I've known that its an ORM technique and there are lot of ORM libraries out there. What is...
A very extensive application began as an Access-based system (for database storage). Forms were written in VB5 and/or VB6. As .Net became a fixture in the development community, certain modules have been rewritten. This seems very awkward and potentially costly just to maintain because of the cross-technologies and ext...
You are just starting a new project and you have these two technologies to choose from, Java and .NET. The project you are working doesn't involve having features that would make it easy to choose between the two technologies (e.g. .NET has this that I need and Java does not) and both of them should work just fine for ...
In What would you choose for your project between .NET and Java at this point in time? I say that I would consider the "Will you always deploy to Windows?" the single most important technical decision to make up front in a new web project, and if the answer is "no", I would recommend Java instead of .NET. A very common...
Is there any compelling reason a programmer would host on a shared platform versus just having a VPS account somewhere?
Although questions similar to this one has already been asked and I can perhaps assemble the answer for myself by reading already posted materials. Still I am going ahead with the question, cause I feel it has elements of new flavor and I would like to see the views of others on how to tackle this. I have developed se...
Customers need some education because they think different. Customers think: changes are not a problem in any time of the project details are not important (exceptions even less) time does not cost money (they have a fix price agreed) one sentence in the specification can be extended/read freely to fit the actual nee...
Please put a direct link to it. Required: Still available online (please put a direct link to it) Must be a speech from a current or former developer Speaker's popularity doesn't matter Target audience should be other developers It is not required that the topic is programming (the task). I'm more looking for subject...
I'm planning on moving to NY in 6-12 months tops, so I'm forced to find a new job. When I'm planing to start my life in another city it's also probably a good time to think about career changes. I've found a lot of different opinions about PHP vs .Net vs Java and this is not the topic here. I don't want to start a new ...
What is your experience when developing web applications using one of these two languages/frameworks? Which have you found to be more convenient and faster to develop with?
I am currently working as an intern at a consulting firm. I am soon to move to a full time employee once I graduate next semester, and I love working there. However, as a student, I lack money and I have met a business owner outside of work who has offered to hire me for some freelance web development. Because I met t...
I've just started making some simple but non trivial(i think) programs in Ubuntu -- as of now have made a small xkcd scraper, which i plan to develop into a multi webcomic downloader+viewer At this point, would it be a good idea to start publishing the code on a site like Github or launchpad? (currently I'm not really ...
In a post, Joel Spolsky mentioned that 5 digit Stack Overflow reputation can help you to earn a job paying $100k+. How much of that is real? Would anyone like to share their success in getting a high paid job by virtue of their reputations on Stack Exchange sites? I read somewhere that, a person got an interview offer ...
I have a question that can be best answered here, given the vast experience some of you guys have! I am going to finish my bachelor's degree in CS and let's face it, I am just comfortable with C++ and Python. C++ - I have no experience to show for and I can't quote the C++ standard like some of the guys on SO do but ye...
Should I break SQL queries in different lines? For example in the project I am working on, we have a query that is taking 1600 columns! 1600 + tab chars. I wrote queries like this: "SELECT bla , bla2 , bla FROM bla " . "WHERE bla=333 AND bla=2" . "ORDER BY nfdfsd ..."; But they demanded me to put them ...
I'm considering using Google App Engine for an online matchmaking (and possibly ranking, not sure) of users in a (currently hypothetical) RTS game. However, I just read this bad review, which has made me nervous. Which problems have they solved (or are planning to solve), which might be an issue for me, and are there a...
I was just reading https://stackoverflow.com/questions/155609/what-is-the-difference-between-a-method-and-a-function and all of a sudden, the thing came to my mind was the static methods. As static methods are no way associated with an object how can it be called as static methods (almost all developers do)? Is my und...
Getting into zone is a pleasurable and fruitful process. We produce good source code and we get lots of satisfaction from our work done while being in the zone. But, how does one get into the 'zone'? Do you follow a specific process? Apart from switching of email system, mobiles and other mundane non-productive applica...
I've been wondering about getting contributions to a new open source product my team will be developing. There's encouragement for us to get as much support from the wider community as we're able, but I can also see this absorbing a lot of time making sure that 3rd parties located outside our office are on track regar...
There has been a lot of discussion around the excellent question "Will high reputation in Stack Overflow help to get a good job?". I immediately agreed with JoshK that basically said "No" (I'll will explain why), but Joel chimed in with lot of convincing facts which made me upvote him as well. My question is what other...
Any time a Perl, Python, C++ or Tcl program halts with an unhandled exception, those language runtimes take care to register a non-zero exit code for the process. Even Eclipse-based programs return 1 if they fail during startup. Programs run by the standard java.exe, however, happily return zero no matter how abruptly ...
I've been programming for years now, working my way through various iterations of Blub (BASIC, Assembler, C, C++, Visual Basic, Java, Ruby in no particular order of "Blub-ness") and I'd like to learn Lisp. However, I have a lot of intertia what with limited time (family, full time job etc) and a comfortable happiness w...
I am currently facing a situation where I will need to obfuscate data for legal reasons (these are countrywide rules and not specific to me) I will still need to work with teams outside this area who will still need to access applications/databases for testing/deployment and so on, however the data must be fully obfusc...
I was wondering if there are obvious advantages and disadvantages to using Ruby on Rails to develop a desktop application. RoR has great infrastructure for rapid development, proper implementation of specs and automated acceptance tests, an immense number of popular libraries and the promise of being actively developed...
I'm planning to develop a web based ERP, which should be full-ajax and with desktop-like UI. It will be a data-entry & data-report application. For developing it I'm considering all technologies. GWT: I saw that with GWT Designer you could create cool UIs, but databinding seems to be too complex JSF: Netbeans no longer...
The canonical books on software development is fairly well established. However, after reading through a dreadful book full of bad advice on managing programming teams this weekend I am looking for recommendations for really good books that focus on the management side of programming (recruiting, performance measuremen...
I basically need some confirmation and clarification concerning Windows Azure with respect to a Silverlight application using RIA Services. In a normal Silverlight app that uses RIA services you have 2 projects: App App.Web ... where App is the default client-side Silverlight and app.web is the server-side code where...
This is a dilemma about which I have been thinking for quite a while. I'm a graduate student and my topics of interest are programming language design, code analysis, compilation, etc. So far, this field has been very interesting and rewarding for me, so I was thinking about finding a job in that field and continuing t...
I'm working on a decentralized transaction processing system that needs both authentication and general encryption, and I have a design decision to make: should I use PGP or X.509 certificates? While the world tends to use X.509 for authentication (especially in browsers), they are based on the principle of having a ce...
I don't know if "In-Memory debugger" is really what I mean, or if it's even possible to produce, but it's the best name I could come up with... Here's the tool I'm looking for: Given a variable name, resolve that name to a reference Given that reference, be able to watch the object referenced Given the watch, be able...
Recently an architect described our company as offering a Rolls-Royce solution (MVC) when all he needed was a Toyota (Web Forms). I'm curious to find out what you think about web forms vs MVC as an architectural choice.
I work at a small Web Dev firm, and have been handling all the PHP/MySQL/etc. for a while. I'm looking at improving our practices to allow for easier collaboration as we grow. Some things I have in mind are: Implementing a versioning system (source control) Coding standards for the team (unless mandated by a certain f...
I want to know what aspects in VPS hosting packages are related to performance for the website which will make it faster in loading for the end useres. And does RAM really matter?
In the last 3-5 months I was thinking about which web programming language I should use. PHP? Ruby? C#? Python? Perl? And you know what? Every time I keep changing my mind like crazy! I learn some things about each one of them and then move to another. Now I'm totally lost, totally lost guys. :) What I want form you i...
A previous question about why people hate Microsoft was closed. This is an attempt at a somewhat more constructive question along the same general line. This one is both broader and narrower though. It's more general by being about software vendors in general, not just Microsoft. It's narrower by dealing only with mana...
I just want to hear some pro and con's - it's obvious that there is no right answer So would Java be a better choice for a long term career? Or should I opt for .Net since it could be the platform having all the latest advances? I just want to hear others point of view, so please don't close this question just because...
what kind of insights or questions would lead you to determine a person's OOAD skills.
In every interview I have been in, I have been quizzed on mathematical analysis of complexity, including big-O notation. How relevant is big-O analysis to development in industry? How often do you really use it, and how necessary is it to have a honed mindset for the problem?
Been calling them "implementers", but it seems weird to me. /// <summary> /// Implementers should implement this. Derp /// </summary> protected abstract void InternalExecute(); A point of clarification, I'm interested in what to call the people who create child classes, not the child classes themselves. "Hey, you the...
Simple question, but I often hear these three terms defined with such ferocity, but which have been known to me to mean different things over the years. What are the "correct" definitions of "Procedures", "Methods", "Function", "Subroutines", etc?
I'm a beginner learning Java and after reading the docs I'm trying to solve some of the problems at codingbat.com. Some I managed to solve pretty quickly in a matter of seconds but some not quite. The problems themselves are easy (example http://codingbat.com/prob/p126212) but I sometimes have a hard time finding the s...
Just as the title says, what is your favorite whiteboard interview problem, and why has it proven effective for you? Junior, senior, Java, C, Javascript, PHP, SQL, pseudo-code, etc.
What percentage of time is saved and costed doing TDD. I assume this percentage of cost and reward changes during a projects life-cycle. I'd imagine the initial phase has a lot more cost but little rewards attached. Further on (during re-factoring) you get the benefit of your tests. I've heard anywhere from 30-50% of y...
Rails, to me, seems like a perfect level of abstraction for most types of web development. However, having watched some seasoned Rails consultants build an application, I'm finding that they use Gems to an extent that it's often pretty difficult to figure out what's going on in the code. As an intermediate-level Rails ...
Possible Duplicate: Will high reputation in Stack Overflow help to get a good job? In reference to this question, do you think that having a high reputation on this site will help to get a good job? Aside silly and humorous questions, on Programmers we can see a lot of high quality theory questions. I think that, if...
I find myself using my text editor of choice (vim, nano, gedit, pick your poison) much more often than any IDE as of late. After noticing my ide shortcuts getting dusty I started to think about this and wonder: what justifies use of an IDE for you opposed to a text editor? For that matter what rationale would you hav...
Hello Over the years have I made a programming journey from C in 1990 to Pascal, C++ with I programmed commercially, java VHDL, C# and now I'm taking a look on F#. In the spring I will go back to study embedded programming in C in a university course so before I do that I will refresh my knowledge in C. I don't remem...
In Python's tutorial one can read that Python's original implementation is in C; On the other hand, the Python implementation, written in C, (...) I'm very curious why was Python written in C and not C++? I'd like to know the reasoning behind this decision and the answer should be supported by historical references ...
Not specific code writing practices. Please also include reasoning. My start: use GCC or Clang gcc because it is unchallenged in the amount of static checking it can do (both against standards and general errors) clang cause it has such pretty and meaningful error messages when compiling C code using GCC use -Wall ...
I just read about cyclesort via a sortvis.org blog post. This is probably the most obscure one I have heard of so far, since it uses maths that I am not familiar with (detecting cycles in permutations of integer sets). What is the most obscure one you know?
I'm an Object Oriented Programming fanatic. I have always believed in modelling solutions in terms of objects. It is something that comes to me naturally. I work with a services start up that essentially works on application development using OOP languages. So I tend to test understanding of OOP in the candidate being ...
A link and a quick explanation why would be very helpful. General tech news, I mean not like InfoQ which is too technical. Probably much more like P.SE than SO. EDIT: site should help developers gain general knowledge about the industry, technologies, inventions, etc. Much like when we listen to the news every morning ...
First off, I apologize cause I don't know how to make a community thread; so someone help me out please. As a developer, across many platforms, technologies and even on an infrastructure level; I always find myself asking, when am I doing TOO much?!? It's been a never ending learning process, since I started. One (1) t...
Triggered by this thread, I (again) am thinking about finally using unit tests in my projects. A few posters there say something like "Tests are cool, if they are good tests". My question now: What are "good" tests? In my applications, the main part often is some kind of numerical analysis, depending on large amounts o...
In several projects we have been using the following layers: Action (has 1 or more managers) Manager(has 1 or more Daos) Dao But most of the time the manager only calls the dao. We do use the manager class to prepare the date to be sent to the db or to prepare the data to be sent to the action(is this a good practice...
I have always heard that SDE interviews are much harder to crack than SDET. Is it really true? I have also heard that if candidate doesnt do well in SDE interview he is also sometimes offered SDET position. How much truth is there into these talks? I would highly appreciate if someone would put good resources and gui...
The main language that I use at the moment is C# and I am the most comfortable with it. However, I have started dabbling in F# and Haskell and really enjoy those langauges. I would love to improve my skills in either of those languages over time since it truly is fun for me to use them (as opposed to Ruby, which is hyp...
The Joel Test question #11 is: "Do new candidates write code during their interview?". What are arguments for and against to ask new candidates to write code during the interview and to make a decision upon it?
Java is often found in academia. What is the reason behind that?
I've found some videos that explain C# but it back to C#.NET when it is first appeared, if I learn from these videos will I learn something that has been removed from the language? will I miss alot?
As I understand it, Test-Driven Development is about writing tests to define the program specifications (you can correct me if I'm wrong). If there is someone responsible for writing the specifications (including a public API) for the software (let's call him the Software Architect), does that mean that the Software Ar...
To my knowledge, all modern imperative programming languages support recursion in the sense that a procedure can call itself. This was not always the case, but I cannot find any hard facts with a quick Google search. So my question is: Which languages did not support recursion right from the start and when was that sup...
A while ago the company I work for had outsourced a development project to a third party. They employed agile practices in developing the solution. However when asked for documentation they would just say it was required as it was incorporated in a wiki or as part of their sprints. They did leave at the completion of t...
Possible Duplicate: How do you organize your projects folders? I'm interested to learn how everyone keeps their local development projects organized in a logical manner. What do you do to keep your dev projects organized in a manner that allows you to easily find things?
I have been using the http:BL to block bad IP's from accessing my site. If a malicious IP (comment spammer) trys to hit the site I just exit the web script which implicitly returns a 200 OK response. Other responses I could return: 404 - Not found? If I return a 404 maybe the robots will think "this is a waste of time...
Previously I was searching for a good TimeLine control for a WPF project. I found an answer in Here which direct me to this CodePlex project. Now I want to change code to feed my culture needs. But there are some mismatches! My question is: How you interact with such thousands lines of code? EDIT: Any shortcut will be ...
When working with WPF or Silverlight, how should one use control naming conventions? Do you name the controls in XAML markup? I have seen samples of projects at codeplex with control names such as "selectButton" or "btnSelect". What would you recommend?
I always see abstraction is a very useful feature the OO provides for managing the code-base. But how are large non-OO code bases are managed? Or do those just become a "Big Ball of Mud" eventually? Update: It seemed everyone is thinking 'abstraction' is just modularization or data-hiding. But IMHO, it also means the u...
I always read about large scale transformation or integration project that are total or almost total disaster. Even if they somehow manage to succeed the cost and schedule blow out is enormous. What is the real reason behind large projects being more prone to failure. Can agile be used in these sort of projects or tra...
I'm working in development for 4 years, and 3.5 in PHP - why I don't seem to be able to be selected in an interview. I want to know what special things the interviewer wants to see in candidates - for senior PHP developer roles. Interviewer asks me 10 questions and I'm able to answer only 5. Does selection depend on th...
The question of managing bugs in production has been a large feature in my mind of late. Sprint's are not meant to have any items added into them, but for critical bugs, this is simply unavoidable. How does one go about managing this break in the sprint? Do you simply give a sprint a percentage "allowance" of time, thu...
In an attempt to reach at least beginner status with such a legendary editor, I have been coding in Emacs for the last two months. I try to keep an open heart, but I find myself continally disagreeing with one core design choice: that Emacs allow its users to never have to leave. In a 2010 world, I just think that ev...

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