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One of the principles of agile is that you should measure working software: Working software is the primary measure of progress - 12 principles of Agile The thing is, while I can measure my software in terms of stories done, bugs squashed or the volume of defect reports decreasing, I'm stuck on how to measure the val...
My contract has just ended and I'm wondering what possible jobs I might want to look at next. I've worked in banking and insurance industry for all my career (including one Fortune 500 company) and in my experience banking is the slowest (and most boring) industry to work for due to their strict business practices (whi...
Does anyone know of any good books on this topic? I did search on amazon but ones that I found are pretty old publications.
Whether as an attendee, a speaker, or a vendor I wanted to know what the unspoken rules of etiquette are at software conferences. Other than the blindingly obvious ones (like don't assault the winner of the iPad raffle because you didn't win). What are some of the rules that should be followed, even if you feel they...
One thing I'd like to do in C++ is to call non-member functions with the same syntax you call member functions: class A { }; void f( A & this ) { /* ... */ } // ... A a; a.f(); // this is the same as f(a); Of course this could only work as long as f is not virtual (since it cannot appear in A's virtual table. f doesn...
This is a design question. I have a multi part application with several user types. There is a user client for the patient that interacts with a web service. There is an API evolving behind the web service that will be exposed to institutional "users" and an interface for clinicians, researchers and admin types. The pa...
I have developed a simple application which I want to put release for free but I'm not planning releasing the source code. I want the application to be freely available but I do not want anyone to sell it or reverse engineer it. MIT License looks simple and nice but it also allows anyone to sell it. Is there any licens...
I've never been very good at maintaining a coherent bunch of variable names for interfacing with XML files because I never name the variables in my interfaces the same way across my source. There are Elements, Attributes, Documents, NodeLists, Nodes, DocumentFragments and other stuff. What's a good scheme for keeping ...
At a previous employment, a project manager (PM) wasn't satisfied with the delivery time of the code on a project I was on. I was told by my project lead that that the PM was considering having me sign a contract to lock-in my time estimates I gave for tasks and delivery dates. The situation on the project was that we...
So we're looking at the possibility of porting our software to support multiple languages and one of the areas we're going to have to deal with is error messages and other notifications. These obviously have to be reported to the users in their own language. Our team (largely) only speak English and even if we were al...
I've recently begun working on a PHP application, replacing another developer. I believed the application was using an API to communicate with a remote service but when I looked through the code I found that it was using a set of functions to actually log in, fill out forms and submit them as a user might do in a brows...
I just looked at the statistics for the PowerCollections C# library and noticed a sharp decrease in quantity of downloads. What may be the cause? Is there something better I should be using?
In an ideal world it is preferrable to meet the deadline with less bugs. But from your experience which is more preferrable/acceptable: Meet the deadline but has a number of bugs because developer rush into things Less bugs but not quite meet the deadline because the developer is very rigorous in writing the code
Are your projects completed on time? If not, what problems cause you to miss deadlines? How can they be overcome? Do your clients understand them?
In my short experience here at programmers.stachexchange, when someone needs help to get started at programming quite a lot of users suggest learning this or that language, but few suggest learning the basis of programming (data structures, flow structures, algorithms, paradigms, etc.) So I'm coming to the conclusion t...
Whenever I login to stackoverflow or some sites I see lots of requests for sites like http://cdn.sstatic.net/. Why is this done rather than serving directly from the actual site? How does it help to speed up a website?
In a project following agile programming model what is the main job of a team leader? What are the job differences between team leader and project manager?
When is Java a good choice for web development? Please do not say "When you have a development team that knows only Java."
I'm a java programmer and I've decided to learn a bit about theoretical computer science. I don't have a degree in that and a little background would help me a lot since I don't know anything other than coding when it comes to software development. I've searched this website for answers and I've found a lot of people r...
Following on from this thread I started The Singleton Pattern It got me thinking about how coupled my classes are and how best to achieve loose coupling. Please bear in mind I am a new programmer (4 months into my first job) and this is really the first consideration I have given to this, and am very keen to understa...
I'm working in the Development dept (around 40 developers) for a large E-Commerce company. We've grown quickly but have not evolved very well in the field of documenting our work. We work with an Agile / Scrum-like methodology with our development and testing but documentation seems to be neglected. We need to be able ...
I am looking for a way to compare a set of files against a given file with each comparison giving me a "closeness" metric. I should then be able to order based upon the metric to find the closest file. I considered using diff, but afaik this only provides a yes or no on whether a particular line matches, which is too ...
I'm preparing a presentation for my team that lists the various technologies we could use today for our business applications. We have been historically building HTML applications (ASP and ASP.net) for the last decade and as part of the introduction I wanted to explain why we moved from Windows applications to HTML. Ou...
I will be doing a part time University project soon and the time frame for it is around 8 months with approximately 10-15 hours a week spent working on it, with a review by a tutor each quarter. My question is what software development process would you recommend using when the course requires you to work on your own i...
My team creates a lot of one-off web forms. Most of these forms just send an e-mail, and a few do a simple database write. Right now, each form lives in its own separate solution in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. That means we have close to 100 different form projects, which makes it difficult to maintain consi...
I have been in the Java programming for the last 4 years, basically doing Java web development and JEE. I have spent the last 7 months investing in learning Objective-C and iOS development for fun. Now I'm considering to scout a professional iOS development career. My question is does iOS development career considered ...
How do you save important(privacy-wise) user data like SSN, Credit Card Numbers and Addresses in databases? Scenario: Only data which needs to be available is saved. For eg, SSN is saved because the app uses the SSN to identify a particular record. or credit card details are saved to make 1-click transactions possible...
I'm transitioning from being a desktop developer to a web developer, and I'm having trouble understanding why HTTP is stateless. What are the reasons for it? What are some ways a desktop developer like myself can make the transition to a stateless development environment?
I'm wanting to model a (proposed) manufacturing line, with specific emphasis on interaction with a traceability database. That is, various process engineers have already mapped the manufacturing process - I'm only interested in the various stations along the line that have to talk to the DB. The intended audience is a ...
I am now faced with integrating an inversion of control (IoC) container into an existing application, and I'm looking for some recommendations on how that can most easily be accomplished with the ultimate goal of reducing coupling, thereby increasing testability. Although I generally wouldn't classify most of the class...
I am developer working mainly in C# who has now been assigned to a Data Migration project. (Sad story, I know. But that's for another day). We are currently creating column-to-column mapping between tables in an Excel worksheet in a particular format. Now as many developers, I too hate this kind of mechanical work. I ...
I am using a piece of free source code in one of my projects. The source code was written in the 1990s and is available from a website that says the code may be modified and distributed freely. The source files contain no License indication but they have a "Copyright All Rights Reserved" comment. This morning I started...
I'm trying to lead a software team that is falling behind. One of the main problems is that whenever something is mildly difficult, I end up having to assign it to myself. I had one other developer with moderate skills and half an intern. Unfortunately, the other developer's skills do not include design. So I begged...
My team and I develop software that our customers will use to interact with their customers. Additionally, we also eat our own dogfood and use the software ourselves to interact with our customers. Therefore, it can sometimes be difficult to explain use cases and scenarios, as our employees can be operators, our custo...
I have in the past, and continue currently, used the handle "thanatos" on a lot of Internet sites, and if that isn't available (which happens ~50% of the time), "deathanatos". "Thanatos" is the name of the Greek god or personification of death (not to be confused with Hades, the Greek god of the underworld). "Dea" is a...
I am currently working on an LOB application which I am basing on the MVVM architecture. Going by the answers to the questions I'm asking, it seems like there are not that many people building large and/or complex applications in MVVM. Hopefully, there is a number of you who have built such animals. If so, have you fou...
So, I've been hired on as an entry level game developer with little/no experience working with any API other than Win32. This will be an overall learning experience for me as a person and I have gone over this multiple times with the boss and he has no problem with my inexperience. He says that if I'm not worth it now,...
Is bringing printed code or code on a USB to an interview a good idea? If so, what kind of code should I bring. Should I avoid big projects and just show small snippets which show off my skills?
This came up in a discussion with a friend, and I found myself hard-pressed to think up an any good arguments. What benefits do weak typing confer?
I've played with the thought of how I would construct my dream company and how one could make it highly attractive to great programmers. If one could employ a few "superstar" programmers instead of many "good" ones. One thing I personally would enjoy is the freedom to work from whenever I wanted. So I could travel arou...
Throughout the function handleException, the exception encountered is implicit. How does the compiler handle such implicit passing of exceptions? [For e.g. in C++ methods, this pointer is passed to account for the current object. My question is how does a compiler handle exceptions internally - handleException has no a...
If I write a client-side Javascript app (with a little bit of server interaction), how can I prevent people from copying the Javascript files to their own site? Should I, at all?
I'm a freelance solo web developer/designer/iPhone app maker by night (IT technician by day) and I'm interested in developing a social network site to go public (like Facebook, fingers crossed for half a billion users). But I'm concerned that I'm not going to manage this on my own, being only able to dedicate weekends/...
In my company, it's an email discussion of what feature is implemented and what kind of bug is fixed sent by the one who write the code. And the reviewer, who receives the mail, will review the code and discuss the quality and how to edit the code in his opinion. What does a standard code review contain?
I am currently 4 months into an internship, and when reviewing my code, my boss didn't like that I had kept a specific object local to a number of methods across a few separate classes within one assembly. He didn't like that I was created a new object each time, and instead told me to create a single object that can ...
In other words, a language where every possible string is valid syntax? EDIT: This is a theoretical question. I have no interest in using such a language; I'm just asking whether it's possible. Further edit I went ahead a designed such a language. See ErrorFree
In short, my question for you hardcore Emacs users is this: have you achieved this "self-reinforcing performance" Steve Yegge talks about? Emacs is self-hosting: writing things in it makes the environment itself more powerful. It's a feedback loop: a recursive, self-reinforcing, multiplicative effect that happ...
I want to improve the way that I develop software. I want to develop faster and a great code! Today I use the waterfall method as freelancer, writing web stuffs (sites, systems, etc). Is there a way to use agile development (XP, SCRUM, etc) working in this way? I don't know nothing about agile development, where should...
I was poking around the AdventureWorks database today and I noticed that a number of tables (HumanResources.JobCandidate and Sales.Individual for example) have a column which is storing xml data. What I would to know is, what is the advantage of storing basically a database table row's worth of data in another table'...
We recently discovered a locale specific issue in our application and while it was easy to fix (once we figured out what was going on), it got the team I'm on thinking about unit testing practices in this regard. We would like to catch these issues sooner, ideally before they're discovered by a customer, and we want t...
I work for a very large fortune 500 company who is subcontracted to another fortune 500 company on a DoD contract. As you can guess the red tape is tremendous to do anything. We have simply shared a VM that is loaded up with Microsoft dev tools from someone elses MSDN subscription. When I have questioned our MSDN lice...
Some history:For the last six months I have been employed at a small firm with just three programmers, my employer among them. The firm maintains two programs written in VB6. I am asssigned as the lead programmer to one of these. In the last six months I did some maintenance and bug hunting, but created some new functi...
Has memory and processing power increased over time around basically in the same rate, or can we say that one or the other has increased more? Has cost decreased in the same rate? And how about the near future? I am aware this question is not directly related to programming, but I thought it would be better to ask it h...
When tasks take longer than expected, why is it better to defer items during a sprint than to just defer everything you didn't finish on the last day of the sprint?
I started programming at the age of 6 on a Commodore 64. Now I'm 28, and I have to complete 4 courses from a first degree in Computer Science. I'm starting to get bored with writing code after all these years. I've taken a course in Computer Science in theoretical computer languages and 10 years of C system coding in ...
Why should a company invest in a Commercial Off the shelf (COTS) product? Is it the cost of in-house development, support or are there other reasons to not buy an COTS product? By Commercial Off the shelf (COTS) products I mean products such as SharePoint, SAP, MS Dynamics. Not Word/Excel/Outlook. By company I refer...
I keep seeing job postings as "Java Software Developer III" or "Software Developer II". Is there any official documentation that classifies these distinctions?
Agile software development is becoming a pretty fun buzzword these days. As a developer, I understand the pragmatic value of iterative development, but (most often) it isn't a developers choice to embrace an Agile approach to software development. It's a top-down management choice! Whether it is crystal, agile methods...
I'm a young developer hoping to sell my apps I made for Android soon. My applications are basically 99% finished so I'm investigating what would be the best marketing strategy to use to sell my apps. I'm sure the brilliant minds here can give me some great advice. I'm particularly interested in your thoughts on the fol...
I'm a developer at a small company. Sometimes I'm offered extra cash for freelance work from previous employers or on odd jobs that I could do after hours without encroaching on my full time job in any way. Unfortunately my manager has explicitly forbidden me from working on any side projects. The reason he says is th...
Supposed you were asked in an interview "How would you implement Google Search?" How would you answer such a question? There might be resources out there that explain how some pieces in Google are implemented (BigTable, MapReduce, PageRank, ...), but that doesn't exactly fit in an interview. What overall architecture w...
My company's database makes available data to a lot of external applications. So I need to transform the same data to a lot of dynamic views. I can see that a former database developer had implemented many long chains of view-function-procedure call sequences to do transformation more common to all external application...
the goal is to have an online documentation system, with these major requirements: will be mainly used as an intermediate stage for the final technical docs of all our application (which will probably never get completed though :]). It would be typically used as so: someone has a problem, I fix it, and write down the ...
I hope this doesnt get perceived as ambiguous or too vague, but i'm attempting to make a service that monitors twitter and archives tweets. Apart from PHP cron jobs i cant think of any way to detect if there has been a new tweet posted? I'm not too fussed about what programming language i have to write it in, or what f...
My question here is relative to jobs. I currently hold a System Analyst position. What is the difference between System Analyst and Programmer/Analyst? Is this position higher than a programmer? Or how should I upgrade myself ?
If I work as a Developer in one language (e.g. Java) and work my way up to Senior Developer, would that qualify me to be a Senior Developer for a position using another language (e.g. Ruby)?
I'm not talking about fixed price jobs, they're fairly straightforward. But I'm on about an hourly rate project, my question specifically relates to what to charge for. If I have an IE/CSS issue that takes me an hour of scouring CSS to fix, is that chargeable? If I decide to use a really cool jQuery animation on their ...
Possible Duplicate: When are Getters and Setters Justified Is it a good programming practice to not use getters and setters in trivial parts of code?
I am more practiced in PHP than in Java, and when I use Java I find myself looking at it from a PHP perspective. This can cause trouble, so I'd like to know, what are the most common programming mistakes PHP programmers make in Java?
I'm considering use of GWT on a major in-house web app development project, namely it's major advantage in my eyes is the cross-compilation to Javascript which would (at least theoretically) help my team reduce the size of tech stack by one. However, having been burnt before (like most devs), I would like to hear fro...
On the one hand, the agile approach stresses a tight-knit team that holds each other accountable and accepts collective ownership of the project. On the other hand, companies use contract programmers so that they can manage the peaks and valleys of funding without laying off actual employees. If there is a shortfall i...
(Apologies in advance for the vague and miasmic question) Is there a book, or other resource, there that can explain using Drupal, The System, to a web app oriented programmer? I've read through the Apress Pro Drupal Development book and it was a fantastic overview of the system's architecture. That's not what I'm loo...
I need to find an installer tool that can do the following on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, or Windows Vista (32-bit and 64-bit editions): Install IIS 7 if not installed Install .NET 4.0 if not installed Register ASP.NET 4.0 if necessary Install SQL Server 2008 Express Edition if not installed Install my webapp to ...
Today, another developer was talking to me about how he addressed an issue he was working on. The solution he found was to stick a string of escaped XML into the attribute of another XML element. In my head I was screaming "Is that even safe and wise to do???". According to him, that has been done on tons of other p...
Aside from using a specific tool such as JIRA or Bugzilla, what techniques or development methodologies do you use to keep your OSS development efforts organized? and more importantly, how do you prioritize which features to deliver when there really isn't any paying clients that decide which features are the most impo...
I'm a new graduate, but I have been doing web development for about six months. When I was finishing university the server side languages (PHP, Java) were more important then client side languages. JavaScript was only used to validate data or use AJAX to beautify the page. The server side validation was of course done ...
Our programming environment is dependent upon certain environment variables being set. For example, to use distcc, one needs to define the DISTCC_HOSTS environment variable. The way we handle this is forcing each developer to source a global tcshrc file upon invoking a new shell. The global tcshrc file contains stateme...
I am 15 year old student looking to buy his first car and thought I could earn some extra money by learning to program since I like messing around with the computer all the time. I have been reading a lot of the posts here and have come up with a list of books I think would be beneficial to me, however, I do not know w...
In April, I'm going to be giving a talk called **English 2.0 - Understanding the Language of Developers" to a group of English teachers. The purpose is in two hours to give them a quick background in key concepts so that they can better understand developer blogs and podcasts and are able to ask better questions when t...
I think I have good enough reputation on SO now. Well, this may not be that much as compared to so many other users out there but I am happy with mine. So, I was thinking of adding my profile link on my résumé - just the profile link and not that "I have this much reputation on SO". Those who haven't seen, can see thi...
I've just been reading through the SOLID principles, and this is one I have real difficulty with when designing software. I am relatively new (4 months professionally) at coding. The idea is simply to encapsulate classes into ones that perform a single task. For example, what if you have a class that creates and popul...
Just browsing through Code Complete last night and I came across the explanation of abstract data types. I must have read it 5 times, and the Wikipedia article doesn't help much either. So what I'm looking for is a simple explanation of exactly what is an Abstract Data Type? Any solid examples? In C# or VB? I unders...
On a current job I have two projects to work on. First is very huge system and the second one is smaller but it also big (first project is being developed for 12 years, second for 4 years). At first I was working only on first project and was trying to get used to it. Then I was moved to second project and tried there,...
I have done or was part of some mobile projects that are uploaded in their respective markets and currently live, and I am already mentioning status as LIVE for respective projects. One of my friend -who is actually a web developer- has recently suggested me to put the urls of the application if the project is live. An...
I have heard Google uses Python, Java and C++. But what I don't know is how is each of those programming language is used. I mean what is Python, Java and C++ is used for at Google. Why would they used upto 3 programming languages when 1 language is enough. Does anybody know?
I have heard a lot about Web Services and Web APIs, is there any difference between them or are they the same?
I have two algorithms that share a lot of commonalities. One performs an iterative procedure, the other does just the first iteration. The results are, of course, different (one class provides results that the other can't), as well as the setup (the iterative process requires tolerances and max number of iterations, wh...
When building a non-trivial application, is it best to focus on getting things working quickly, and taking shortcuts in the code like mixing model logic with your views, breaking encapsulation - typical code smells? Or, are you better off taking the time upfront to build more architecture, build it right, but running t...
Reading this topic about the most over hyped technologies I noticed that SharePoint is almost universally reviled. My experience with SharePoint (especially the most recent versions) is that it accomplishes it's core competencies smartly. Namely: Centralized document repository - get all those office documents out of ...
For a programmer, two of the most common terms that seem to be overloaded are contractor and consultant? Is there a difference between the two?
Is there such a thing as too much uniformity? Where I work we of course have standards including naming conventions, architectures, frameworks to leverage etc. However lately there has been a lot of critiquing of things I would consider more style. For example writing if statements in multiple lines vs one line, us...
I use Eclipse, and the two most noticeable slowdowns caused by my computer are waiting for compiling and waiting for intellisense. I already have a fast SSD drive and 3GB of ram. I'm guessing that upgrading my processor would be the next best thing to do. Would that make a significant impact? Any recommendations for ...
My current work relies on using tags in CVS for an automated build process (ANT currently) to build for respective environments (development, QA, production). From our research, neither Git or Subversion support tagging in the same manner. If we use Subversion or Git, they don't support tags (in the same manner - pl...
I learned C++ in college (now we are moving to Java.) On the side I learned basic scheme, php and javascript. However my knowledge is basic enough that I wouldn't even know how to start building a website such as this. The reason I ask is I want to further develop my web-development skills/knowledge by doing a proj...
I have heard a few people say that one of the best ways to improve your coding ability is to read others code and understand it. My question, as a relatively new programmer, where do I go to find good source code examples that are not too far over my head?
I'm mostly a C/C++ programmer, which means that the majority of my experience is with procedural and object-oriented paradigms. However, as many C++ programmers are aware, C++ has shifted in emphasis over the years to a functional-esque style, culminating finally in the addition of lambdas and closures in C++0x. Regar...
I'm starting my first Ruby on Rails project as I've been excited about the language for quite a while now and I'm sick of writing PHP. I've gathered that rails is pretty much an automation framework which should really speed up programming on the backend for me. Though this does not impact the frontend, I still need to...
Does anybody have any advice on this? I currently work as a kind of lead developer/team leader and we have some remote team members and sometimes a contractor or two. At times, the entire team might be working on a large project and server details are usually managed by the entire team. What is the best practice way to...
I just do not get what problem they solve.
For a reason that is largely irrelevant, I installed Delphi 7 once again in such a long time. I have to say, I was completely blown away - in a way I haven't been for rather a while. This is not how I remember things at all. The installation took around 30 seconds. Launching it took 2 seconds, and it was immediately us...

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