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I've had an idea for a semantic model of computing that's theoretically sound but is also quite unusual. I'd like to quickly prototype a system to prove that it can work in practice. Most of my work is in programming languages, so I'm comfortable putting together a small language for the purposes of testing, but I wond...
I've recently been promoted into managing one of our most important projects. Most of the code in this project has been written by a partner of ours, not by ourselves. The code in question is of very questionable quality. Code duplication, global variables, 6-page long functions, hungarian notation, you name it. And it...
I recently observed some contract offers which included a "code review by third party" clause - the contract would not pay out fully until the code review was completed and it received a pass. I was surprised, especially considering that these were fairly simple, and small-scale contracts (churning out vanity apps for ...
I seem to remember that linked lists, recursion, pointers, and memory management are all good examples of stumbling blocks - places where the aspiring programmer typically ends up spending significant time trying to understand a concept before moving on and improving, and many end up giving up and not improving. I'm lo...
I've recently started learning C++, and I enjoy it a lot. I've often read it's easier to write bad code in C++ than in most languages, and that it is a lot deeper than what it seems. As I'd like to avoid writing bad code, I was wondering what exactly I shouldn't do, and what I should do, to write good code in C++.
I am close to completion of a useful suite of tools for 2D game development (with mobile platforms in mind), for working with sprites and animations. Can anyone advise the best way to sell and promote my product (without investing capital). I am aware that there are lots of websites that can market and sell software to...
It seems most jobs that I've been exposed to come with a 3 month trial period, during which the employer decides whether the employee is doing good enough work, and is a good fit. 3 months seem like overkill to me, for most cases we've known much sooner whether someone wasn't a good fit. How long does it take you, on ...
So far I've been trying to use Vim in as vanilla a configuration as possible, so as to save myself hassle when moving between machines. However, there are a few things I'd really like to bind keys, such as to shorten "_diwP which I use often to delete the word under the cursor and replace it with one from the clipboard...
In Git it's possible to set and enforce a good commit template. Can you recommend (preferably with argumentation) a good commit template / guidelines to enforce in the company?
To be a language focused on mathematics and scientific computing, I am always baffled by the total lack of useful mathematical routines in the Fortran standard library. One would expect it to be shipped at least with a routine to compute standard deviation and mean, but this is not the case. In particular with the intr...
I remember reading some "funny" examples once of weird results JavaScript can give when you, for example, add strings to numbers etc. Does anyone have any good examples or a link to the blog that I might have read them on? Which ones are likely to catch a programmer out in the real world?
I believe every programmer must learn about a core programming language and a scripting language. Seriously I've no hand in any languages like Python, JavaScript, JScript, CScript etc. I'm native Windows Developer and which scripting language would be the best one to do some automation/web related stuffs.
We run an internal web server with in-house software to run a manufacturing line. When new product features are to be added, either or both of the following occur: changes to the in-house server software may be required to support these - these are for significant changes in functionality, being code drive. changes to...
While a lot is written about developer-developer, developer-client, developer-team manager communications, I couldn't find any text which gives guidelines about tester-developer communication and relation. Whether testers and developers are separate teams or in the same one (in my case, I am a lone tester in an agile d...
I am beginning the process of moving code over to PHP 5.3 and one of the most highly touted features of PHP 5.3 is the ability to use closures. My understanding of closures is that they allow anonymous functions, can be assigned to variable names, and have interesting scoping abilities. From my point of view the only ...
Possible Duplicate: Version control for independent developers? I've heard statements to the effect of: "Well it's just me working on this project so I don't need to put it under source control" as well as, "There is no need to work version controlled on this project, it's so small". It is my opinion that no matter ...
We are developing a product at work which interfaces with basic I/O and sends data to a webserver over a GPRS connection. What i need to know before we commit to a product, is which language is more suited for this task: Java or Python? (or any language to be honest) As i said, it will run on a wireless module and open...
To handle task-level estimates and time reporting, I have been using (roughly) the technique that Steve McConnell describes in Chapter 10 of Software Estimation. Specifically, when the time comes for me to create task-level estimates (right before coding begins on a project), I determine the tasks at a fairly granular...
I have set myself the goal of becoming a decent developer by this time next year. By this I mean full experience of the development 'lifecycle,' a few good apps/sites/webapps under my belt, and most importantly being able to work at a steady pace without getting sidelined for hours by some should-know-this-already tech...
OK, I feel stupid asking this - but in Jeff's article: Getting the Interview Phone Screen Right and originally stated in the 5 essential phone screen questions: They shouldn't stare blankly at you when you ask with 2^16 is. It's a special number. They should know it. I've been a developer\software engineer\code m...
After much searching, I have failed to answer a basic question pertaining to an assumed known in the software development world: WHAT IS KNOWN: Enforcing a strict policy on adequate code documentation (be it Doxygen tags, Javadoc, or simply an abundance of comments) adds over-head to the time required to develop code. ...
Is there an easy way to sync the color scheme/theme between visual studio 2008/2010 and notepad++? I would like to have it so that I could point visual studio and notepad++ to the same document and maintain the styles just through that.
Today I've seen the following pattern: you have an object A and an object B. Object B accepts a pointer to A at its constructor. Once B is created, there's a method B.doCalc() that performs a calculation (internally using A's information). The result is obtained with method B.getResult(). In order to perform another c...
This question is extremely subjective and open-ended. It might even sound like something I should just research for myself and make my own decision. But I'd like to put it out there and get some thoughts from others. Long story short - I burned out with the rat race and am on a self-funded sabbatical this year. Much of...
What is the recommended workflow to learn HTML5? What tools should I install? What SDK? Where to start? How to test? How to debug? What do I read? I understand that what is often labelled as "HTML5 development" is in fact a mixture of HTML, CSS, JS and more, however I don't believe that bigger projects are developed in...
The components that I'm using are restricting me from selling the application. Any ideas how to still make a profit from it? I've seen some freeware apps which set your homepage to some site, I guess they get paid for that.
I'm looking into ways of improving requirements management. Currently, we have a Word document published on a Web site. Unfortunately, we cannot (to my knowledge) look at changes from one revision to the next. I would greatly prefer to be able to do so, much like with a wiki or VCS (or both, like the wiki's on bitbu...
I have been using html select boxes or textboxes for date input. On submit, the date is validated and if invalid an error is returned. I have avoided javascript calendars thus far, but jQuery datepicker seems to be a popular choice amongst people on SO. I was updating my app and wondered whether to use a Javascript Cal...
Where i work, people (consultants) feel pressed to release features as fast as possible. So instead of spending too much time on thinking about how to do things the right way or because they don't want to break anything, code gets copied from different modules and modified. It's not easy to prevent this, since the code...
I am not a native English speaker. Is there some trick in this name? What does it mean or imply? PS. I don't know whether this is the right SE site to post this question but if it is not could you indicate me?
What are some OOP strategies for working with a database but keeping things unit testable? Say I have a User class and my production environment works against MySQL. I see a couple possible approaches, shown here using PHP: Pass in a $data_source with interfaces for load() and save(), to abstract the backend source of...
In Canada, everyone is familiar with the date format YYYY-MM-DD. In Europe or South Africa, they prefer DD-MM-YYYY. There are users from South Africa who get confused with the YYYY-MM-DD date format. Is there a way to handle this situation? I was thinking of using the following method format for all: Feb 02, 2011
Are there any disadvantages in tying my application to Spring framework? I'm not talking about bugs or issues like that, if any. I'm talking about strategic, architectural things that will influence my application lifecycle. Should I prefer Spring over Java EE core features supported by EE container? What are the advan...
I have worked in a few places where the use of Open Source Software in products they produce is strictly forbidden for various reasons, such as: no formal support lack of trust in something perceived as "just downloaded from the internet" How can it be professional if it's not supported, we don't pay for it etc etc I...
I am integrating with a set of REST services exposed by our partner. The unit of integration is at the project level meaning that for each project created on our partners side of the fence they will expose a unique set of REST services. To be more clear, assume there are two projects - project1 and project2. The REST...
The upcoming version of .NET Reflector, coming in March, will no longer have a free version. .NET Reflector started out as a free utility written by programmer Lutz Roeder and quickly became fairly indispensable to a lot of programmers. After about four years he sold it to RedGate software, who has maintained a free v...
In C#, am I encouraged to use the all-purpose var keyword for every variable declaration? If yes, do I have to mention those special characters for literal values within the variable declaration like the M for decimal in the following statement: var myDecimal = 14.5M; If it makes a difference, I'm trying to do some we...
It seems that off-by-one errors are one of the most (if not the most) common programming errors (see https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/109/what-are-common-mistakes-in-coding, and conventional wisdom). What is the reason these are so common, is it something to do with how the human brain works? Wha...
I work for a company that has a hosted .net internet application with many clients. Those clients often want to write customizations for our application. We have APIs to hook into the app, but the customizations themselves are written in .net. This is a shared, secure hosting environment and we have to code review thes...
One thing that occurred to me the other day, are specific types still necessary or a legacy that is holding us back. What I mean is: do we really need short, int, long, bigint etc etc. I understand the reasoning, variables/objects are kept in memory, memory needs to be allocated and therefore we need to know how big a ...
My company has been looking to hire a PHP developer. Some of the requirements for the job include: an understanding of design patterns, particularly MVC. some knowledge of PHP 5.3's new features. experience working with a PHP framework (it doesn't matter which one). I interviewed a man today who's primary work exper...
You ever try to implement something simple but for some strange reason it doesn't work. So you try a possible solution but then something else doesn't work. You keep trying different workarounds but every time something different isn't working. Every time you get one step closer you also get one (or more) step farthe...
I love that writing Python, Ruby or Javascript requires so little boilerplate. I love simple functional constructs. I love the clean and simple syntax. However, there are three things I'm really bad at when developing a large software in a dynamic language: Navigating the code Identifying the interfaces of the objects...
Reading the brouhaha surrounding Reflector going paid got me thinking about the product and its uses. Many people seem to consider it an essential tool. I have to admit, I haven't used Reflector in years. I mean, there's documentation for both the .Net APIs and the third party components I use. In the past, whenever a ...
Using generators and lambda, we can do functional programming with Python. You can also achieve the same thing with Ruby. So the question is: why do we need specific functional programming languages such as Erlang, Haskell, and Scheme? Is there anything different that these specific functional programming languages pro...
Today I develop on a fairly complex computer, it has multiple cores, SSD drives and what not. Still, most of the time I'm programming the computer is leasurely doing nothing. When I need to compile and run/deploy a somewhat complex project at best it still takes a couple of seconds. Why? Now that we're living more an...
I work for a "mature web startup" as a web developer (mainly using PHP). Our main site has about 8 million registered members at the moment. However, the site is basically impossible to use on anything that's not a real computer. One of our most-requested features, if not the most requested, is a mobile app or mobil...
Together with my teammates, I'm trying to self-learn XP and apply its principles. We're successfully working in TDD and happily refactoring our code and design. However we're having problems with the overall view of the design of the project. Lately we were wondering what would be the "good" practices for an effective ...
Disclaimer: I know perfectly well the semantics of prefix and postfix increment. So please don't explain to me how they work. Reading questions on stack overflow, I cannot help but notice that programmers get confused by the postfix increment operator over and over and over again. From this the following question arise...
I know basic stuff like, what are beans, jsp, servlet, jsf and how this stuff should work together. I know how to make basic jsp page with database query for example. Now I need to know what is the best path to learn all this stuff. My plan is to learn in this order: jsp (including persistance and JSTL) servlets + b...
Up to now, as a developer i preferred python for web programming and scripting. Now, i will manage some projects. I know that finding developers that know php is easier than finding developers that know python. I have a background of python, so if developers use python; i will be able to control and lead easier. This i...
A colleague is unwilling to use unit tests and instead opting for a quick test, pass it to the users, and if all is well it is published live. Needless to say some bugs do get through. I mentioned we should think about using unit tests - but she was all against it once it was realised more code would have to be writte...
Did any of you use behavior driven development in your projects? The concept and tools for it sound great. But was it easy to introduce and then stick to it? Did it lead to significant and visible positive results?
Over the past 2 years myself and a colleague have built an online statistical analysis application using a mixture of silverlight, wcf and R. I (a c# programmer) wrote all the silverlight and wcf stuff whilst my colleague (a statistician) came up with the stats algorithms and wrote the R code. Now we think that this a...
I'm currently taking a class for database design, and we're using the ER diagram style designed by Peter Chen. I have a couple of problems with this style: Keys in relationships don't seem realistic. In practice, synthetic keys like "orderid" seem to be used in almost all tables, including association tables, but th...
Can JSTestDriver be used to test DOM behaviors and interactions? I see I can write tests to exercise pure JS but how do I go about testing against HTML or DOM? Can I deliver with each test HTML for browsers to render and the tests to run against?
Should you sacrifice code readability with how efficient code is? e.g. 3 lines of code into 1 line. I read in Code Craft by Pete Goodliffe that readability is key. Your thoughts?
Where I work, we use an in-house ETL solution that's homegrown and has been around for 5-10 years. I'm still new to my data analysis job, but I was wondering about the ETL tools that are out there. This is a new area for me. My situation, and job, is basically digging in a set of databases (DB2, SQL2005, Citrix, Ancie...
I want to preface this by saying "I love my job and I want to stay here" But I've got a serious problem, Circularly linked DLL's (DLL's linked back to the EXE) Special builds with conditional defines to get rid of the links when the EXE doesn't exist for using the DLL's in special utilities. Inability to reference o...
The day I have been dreading has arrived. I never felt OOP or good software design was important(I knew they were important, but I thought I could manage without them.). However having read otherwise almost everywhere on the interwebs, I started dreading the day when my client would ask me for new features in an existi...
See my more recent question: Is programming as a profession in a race to the bottom? My last shop did not have a process. Agile essentially meant they did not have a plan at all about how to develop or manage their projects. It meant "hey, here's a ton of work. Go do it in two weeks. We're fast paced and agile." Th...
Few friends (3) and I started a small company. But we weren't shure how to organize ourselves since everyone will work from their homes and in different hours of the day. How should we organize in terms of work to do, bugs, etc? Should we use an agile methodology like "adapted" for our small team?
I have a C# library that's used by several executables. There's only a couple namespaces in the library, and I just noticed that one of the namespaces has quite a few classes in it. I've always avoided having too many classes in a single namespace because of categorization, and because subconsciously, I think it look...
I am a PHP programmer with 1 year of experience. As I am just starting my career, I am learning a lot of things now. I can say I am a little bit of a perfectionist. When I am assigned a problem I start off by Googling. Then, even when I find a solution, I keep trying for a better one until I find 2-3 options. Then I st...
The open-closed principle (OCP) states that an object should be open for extension but closed for modification. I believe I understand it and use it in conjunction with SRP to create classes that do only one thing. And, I try to create many small methods that make it possible to extract out all the behavior controls i...
When unit testing using expectations, you define a set of method calls and corresponding results for those calls. These define the path through the method that you want to test. I have read that unit tests should not duplicate the code. But when you define these expectations, isn't that duplicating the code, or at leas...
Personally I'd prefer to work on one project at a time, maintaining absolute focus on that. I find I'm at my most productive in this situation, however it's not always the way things happen in the real world. Do you prefer working on one large project, and being totally focused on that, or be working on say 3-4 small p...
What are the most desired features currently lacking in any Python IDE tools? I'm also interested in what's missing in Komodo 6 but available in other tools (I currently use Komodo 6 for Python 3 under Windows). [I am asking for this to be made community wiki if appropriate.]
I seem to remember reading somewhere some list of 4 "levels" of understanding multithreading. This may have been in a formal publication, or it may have been in an extremely informal context (even like in a Stack Overflow question, for example). Unfortunately I don't remember who referred to them or precisely what they...
I'm hoping for some tips on creating a project (ASP.NET MVC, but I guess it doesn't really matter) against multiples versions of a service (in this case, actually multiple sets of WCF services). Right now, the web app uses only some of the services, but the eventual goal would be to use the features of all of the serv...
So it's obvious that a string of things is a sequence of things, and so a sequence of characters/bytes/etc. might as well be called a string. But who first called them strings? And when? And in what context such that it stuck around? I've always wondered about this.
Earlier, I asked to find out which tools are commonly used to monitor methods and code bases, to find out whether the methods have been getting too long. Most of the responses there suggested that, beyond maintenance on the method currently being edited, programmers don't, in general, keep an eye on the rest of the cod...
I have a class that will read from Excel (C# and .Net 4) and in that class I have a background worker that will load the data from Excel while the UI can remain responsive. My question is as follows: Is it bad design to have a background worker in a class? Should I create my class without it and use a background worker...
DeMarco and Lister (Peopleware) suggest you create a "cult of quality" within your programming team. Frustratingly, they don't suggest how you go about doing that! Anyone got any thoughts on how to accomplish this?
I've just came across an interesting collaborative coding issue at work. I've written some unit/functional/integration tests and implemented new functionality into application that's got ~20 developers working on it. All tests passed and I checked in the code. Next day I updated my project and noticed (by chance) that ...
My friend is a project manager for a software company. The most frustrating thing for him is that his engineers frequently leave their jobs. The company works hard to recruit new engineers, transfer projects, and keep a stable quality product. When people leave, it drives my friend crazy. These engineers are quite youn...
Do todays web pages use Web Semantics? what is the potential in web semantics (i mean potential to enhance web)? web semantics is all about SEO?
I work in France as a Java programmer, mainly in French, but am a native English speaker. My level of French is pretty good (French wife!), but one thing I have problems with is working out whether to use English terminology or a French equivalent. Examples: lock (as in a synchronisation lock) - do I use the verb "loc...
I consider myself a programming language enthusiast. When I find bad code, especially my own, it is hard to understand, hard to change, and hard to test. My coworkers don't know better, or don't care. I am frustrated that I can't raise the code quality by myself. Is it normal to feel frustrated when the code quality, a...
Managing other programmers while you are yourself a part of the programming work force. It's a very common scheme, at least in the companies I worked for. Can you be a good programmer or a good manager if you do both at the same time? I'm questioning the effectiveness of an individual that has to be in two very differe...
When you go to the Appendix D in Oracle Text Reference they provide lists of stopwords used by Oracle Text when indexing table contents. When I see the English list, nothing puzzles me. But the reason why the French list includes moyennant (French for in view of which) for example is unclear. Oracle has probably though...
I'm graduating with a Computer Science degree but I see websites like Stack Overflow and search engines like Google and don't know where I'd even begin to write something like that. During one summer I did have the opportunity to work as a iPhone developer, but I felt like I was mostly gluing together libraries that ot...
I am in charge of a group of about 30 software development experts and architects. While these people are co-located in the companies organization chart, they do not really feel as a team. This is due to their work enviroment: 1) The people are spread over eight locations, with a max. distance of about 1000km (this is ...
When learning new languages, is it better to commit yourself to one language 100% and wait until you've "mastered" it to move on to another, or to work on learning different languages at the same time? If it matters, I'm currently learning C++ and I'd like to know Java and Python as well.
Delphi has a few problems implementing some design patterns because some features it lacks, like multiple inheritance and no pure abstract classes. Are there any good resources or "Adaptation-Patterns" to convert some or all of the Design Patterns in the GoF book, to Delphi applications?
I recently developed a desktop client that automates much of the work involved during online research. I developed this tool in 2-3 hours, and it has reduced an hour's worth of work to about 5 minutes. The softwas has had some visibility, and some higher-ups in the organization are excited about the time and effort it'...
I've been reading over the Enumerable module in Ruby, and it contains a few methods that follow the pattern of enum.foo(n) {\|obj\| block } → nil enum.foo(n) → an_enumerator Which is to say, they seem to return an iterator when chained and nothing otherwise. What's the reasoning behind taking this approach instead of ju...
I'm looking to learn Java, but I don't want to get a book that is going to tell me what an object is, how OOP works, etc. I know this from my existing ActionScript 3 work. One idea is to look at all the areas Java covers, pick one that is of interest to me and delve into that. Is this a good idea? Any other suggestions...
I want to release an audio fingerprinting software project under a free license, but the repository contains copyrighted audio files. The test cases also currently use these files. How do I release the code to the public with maximum version history but without violating copyright? Details: The code is versioned under...
If you have some non-technical people managing your software development team, is there a book you'd want them to read to understand the process better? For example, in most work, you can pretty well estimate how long a task will take. But in development, the whole point is that you have to figure out the problem, whic...
What are the worst anti-patterns you have came across in your career as a programmer? I'm mostly involved in java, although it is probably language-independent. I think the worst of it is what I call the main anti-pattern. It means program consisting of single, extremely big class (sometimes accompanied with a pair of ...
What are some key ways of getting your team involved in using version control during development, web development or otherwise? I refuse to work without it, which means anyone involved in the project must also use it. It's just good practice. GUIs like Tower have helped, but the concept of it is either met with anger (...
A colleague of mine wrote a post a while ago asking Do you own your tools. It raises an important question. Do you? I answered way down in the comments. As an independent, I do own my tools. Even when I wasn't independent, I had my own (fully licensed) tools that I used for personal development. I don't think buying yo...
I have a web application that allows the user to choose the timezone from the list. The list is very long (pretty much all CLDR-supported timezones). So the question is - how should I represent it? How should it be sorted - alphabetically or by timezone offset? What information should each item contain - offset, locati...
We have two different legacy systems (window services in this case) that do exactly the same thing. Both of these systems have small differences for the different applications they serve. Both of these system's core functionality lies within a shared library. Most of the time, the updates occur in the shared library...
From time to time, I experience different bugs with proprietary software that I need to interact with. In order to get through these bugs, I need to develop various workarounds. Is there a good book for debugging/disassembling proprietary software to write better workarounds?
I'm in the process of proposing a new standard directory layout that will be used across all the projects in our organization. Projects can have compiled source code, setup scripts, build scripts, third-party libraries, database scripts, resources, web services, web sites, etc. This is partly inspired by discovering M...
I am brand new on this site and look forward to interacting with each of you. I am graduating in June with my Bachelors Degree in Computer Information Systems with hopes of become a DBA in the future. I am currently taking a Database class now and studying SQL Server/T-SQL on the side. My experience in IT is limited to...
In reading up on good practice for database applications I've frequently come across advocates of so-called "business logic layers" and I'm trying to decide if it's best for my project to use one (it's a small personal project). My issue lies in the fact that I can't think of anything for the BLL to do that the DAL can...
I have an idea in mind, but it still confuses me the database area. Imagine that I want to show real time data, and using one of the latest browser technologies (web sockets - even using older browsers) it is very easy to show to all observables (user browser) what everyone is doing. Remy Sharp has an example about the...

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