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I am interested in taking the IEEE CSDA exam. What are some of the better, individual strategies for learning software engineering practices in preparation for the exam?
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I'm a student but I am hopefully moving into the software industry soon. There seems to be a lot of hype about the MVC software pattern. I noticed that PHP frameworks are often MVC, what about non-web languages.. is it the same with them? For my masters dissertation (C++), I chose the MVC pattern because it nicely s... |
I'm looking for hints and suggestions on a design for a multi-threaded URL fetcher in java. Specific requirements are:
To fetch each one of around 1,000 URLs periodically
The interval between each fetch will be URL specific
Intervals are likely to be 2 mins to 1 hour
I'm imagining I will need a bunch of fetchers each... |
The most common approach used for authorization which I know is role based authorization. Instead of directly storing the access rights against the user ids you create roles and store the access rights against them. Then assign the users the roles.
Though I find the role based method quite flexible and easy to maintain... |
I inherited an existing code base for a product that is reprehensibly sloppy. The fundamental design is woefully inadequate which unfortunately I can do little about without a complete refactor (HIGH coupling, LOW cohesion, rampant duplication of code, no technical design documentation, integration tests instead of un... |
I'm placing my first steps in the Business Intelligence sector and I'm looking for good ways to test BI systems. I'm going to try to explain what my system consists of so that people unfamiliar with BI systems could also pitch in some advice.
For those of you who are rather unfamiliar with BI systems, here's how a BI s... |
I know it seems odd to say, but a fellow programmer at work deliberately used a couple of bad programming practices on purpose! I'll explain. First let me say that he's an intelligent guy and for the most part he writes intelligible code.
He was asked to implement licensing on a web application project written in J... |
I have a commercial Android project that I have created a client-specific version for (mainly UI tweaks). Since the bulk of the tweaks are in the res/ folder in XML files, we have the changes currently in a branch but I really don't want to have to port changes back and forth between branches in perpetuity. I'm curious... |
Working on a major enhancement for legacy code, I have been wrestling with myself over whether this is a good case to use the Proxy pattern, and more specifically whether a good case to use the Java Dynamic Proxy API.
BACKGROUND
We have a "FIXConnection" class used to send orders to a destination. The application maint... |
I'm a big proponent of unit testing (I'd love to be involved in test driven development). The company I work for seems rather reluctant to spend much effort beyond largely manual end user testing towards the end of development cycles. We have a fairly large solution that has been under development for a couple of yea... |
Has anyone defined a standard for reading code out loud, for any language? I imagine this is important to software like screen readers for the vision-impaired. This sort of thing also comes up when you are discussing code with someone, reviewing it in a group, or teaching a class.
In the C family of languages, there ar... |
Given any arbitrarily double-recursive function, how would one calculate its run time?
For Example (in pseudocode):
int a(int x){
if (x < = 0)
return 1010;
else
return b(x-1) + a(x-1);
}
int b(int y){
if (y <= -5)
return -2;
else
return b(a(y-1));
}
Or something along those lines.
What methods ... |
Whats the difference between the two procedures?
When should I be using a recursive function instead of a normal for-loop?
|
I am given the charge of finding a version control + project management setup, and also training and maintenance, in addition to my regular jobs; I will be known as "the git guy" (or whatever) from now on.
We develop PHP (in netbeans), C# (in VisStudio) and Python in windows XP and Fedora. The system is to be hosted on... |
For example, company that uses our software suddenly has found a serious bug and can't continue to work. The bug has exposed a big problem in software design and fixing it will take few days. What is the best approach to solve such problems? What developers should do: start to rewrite code to fix the bug, writing a qui... |
I always loved this article on JoelOnSoftware called "Getting Things Done When You're Only a Grunt" . I could especially relate when I was newbie (and still feel like I will ALWAYS be one).
About #4, neutralizing the bozo's. What advice do you have for actually implementing this in real situations at work? It doesn't s... |
I'm working on an application written in PHP using OOP principles. The classes in my application usually represent a table in the database; for instance, 'student', 'teacher', 'class', 'schedule', etc. As the application gets more and more complex, I start running into situations where it feels like writing a new query... |
I'm only a junior developer but my job forces me to work with really terrible PHP code (think about the worst PHP code you've seen; then think about code twice as bad). I usually try to fix bugs and fight with the codebase to add new features. Sometimes I'm ordered to get things working ASAP which more often than not i... |
Just like the title says, are there any PHP web application frameworks that don't use a front controller?
The Front Controller Pattern is a software design pattern listed in
several pattern catalogs. The pattern relates to the design of web
applications. It "provides a centralized entry point for handling
requests."
T... |
Most programmers have their own personal preferences for syntax-highlighting color schemes, but I've been wondering, has anyone ever done an actual scientific study on what the best color scheme would be? I imagine such a study would look at things like the readability of the code, whether the programmer's eyes are dra... |
I am planning to develop an enterprise application using .NET Framework. I will sell that application to other companies. Do I have to make any payment to Microsoft, like royalties or something else?
|
I'd like to have my database schema synchronized with my Visual Studio .dbproj database project.
Right now, I'm using SSMS for most of my database development work, and I've to manually use the schema compare tool of visual studio when I need the db schema and the .dbproj to be synchronized. Why would I want this? beca... |
I'm tempted to create a final class CaseInsensitiveString implements CharSequence.
This would allow us to define variables and fields of this type, instead of using a regular String. We can also have e.g. a Map<CaseInsensitiveString, ?>, a Set<CaseInsensitiveString>, etc.
What are some of the pros and cons of this appr... |
In a recent blog post by Roy Osherove, it is pointed out that his switch from primarily .Net development to ruby development has seen a huge difference in community involvement and really enjoys it.
The quote that spawns this question is :
there is no master overlord that dictates what you will or won’t work with.
I... |
I am a programmer, I am developing software expected to be between 50k to 100k line of code. I'd like to hire a company to develop an interface to my tool with other software by writing a plugin. This company has done it successfully in the past and I was recommended to use them.
However I have never negotiated before ... |
I hope this isn't so general a question as to be thought a "discussion." I'm writing a simulation of an old (ca. 1960) computer, and I'm thinking about how to queue events from the GUI to the CPU "model." The GUI consists of momentary-on buttons (pushbuttons and typewriter keys) and toggle switches. Of course, I don... |
I'm working on a Silverlight application. I've split it up in several assemblies:
Domain
Repositories (everything with persisting to the Sterling database)
UI
...
This is how I've learned it, but I wondered. If you know the DLLs are not going to be reused, is it necessary to split them up? Or could you put everything... |
My company just (5th July 2011) received the following email from Apple:
Starting in the first week of July,
apps that meet the following criteria
are required to comply with French
Encryption Laws/Regulations if you
intend to distribute your app in
France.
This requirement applies to apps that
use, access... |
I know its not possible to 'know' or 'learn' Java fully in a couple of days but I really need some help on this guys.
I have just graduated from university with a degree in computer science. The languages I would say I am 'proficient' at are: HTML/CSS/PHP.
I have a job interview on friday and I have to prepare a presen... |
Over the years I've used various naming conventions for services in my applications
for example:
[ClassName]Service
[ClassName]Manager
[ClassName]Factory
[ClassName]Provider
[ClassName]Helper
I generally only use the "Helper" suffix for utility classes that have no external dependencies.
However I find that ... |
To start I don't think this is a repeat of other questions on unit testing. What I'm looking for help with is articulating its value to a team of programmers, analysts, managers and testers. By automated tests, I don't think I need to make a distinction between unit tests (e.g. JUnit), BDD (e.g. JBehave, Fitness) and U... |
Completing my Computing A-level in 2003 and getting a degree in Computing in 2007, and learning my trade in a company with a lot of SQL usage, I was brought up on the idea of Relational Databases being used for storage.
So, despite being relatively new to development, I was taken-aback to read a comment (on https://sof... |
Does anyone know of a template / checklist that can be used to conduct a software health check. My team supports a number of legacy applications and we have been asked to present a score card to senior management on the health of the applications.
The template would be used to:
Identify you have performance or stabil... |
Would you include an XML schema for a new file format in a software specification document or would you consider this too specific? Or would it be already too specific to require XML at this point?
|
Why is there so much buzz about closures among developers? In my career I never intentionally used them, though don't clearly understand what they are.
UPD: just to clarify. The question is about why the closure concept became so talky these days.
|
It seems to me that, despite being one of the world's most used languages, even some of the leading experts of JavaScript like Doug Crockford think JavaScript suffers from some pretty big design flaws (JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language) that make development confusing and ambigious.
Progra... |
I've been told that I am to be a team lead of an upcoming project. I've not ever been team lead before but the responsibilities are what you would typically expect, with revolving door of 3 to 4 other developers through the 8 or 9 months it takes to complete the project.
My problem is this: one of the developers who wi... |
Let's say I have a class that just stores data:
ClassData
Field1
Field2
Field3
Now let's say I have a function that uses Field1 and Field2:
public void DoStuff(string field1, string field2){
if(field1 == "something"){
//Do something
}
if(field2 == "somethingElse"){
//Do somethi... |
This question requires a bit of setup, please bear with me.
Last week my company rolled out a new change management procedure. Any change destined for production requires a change control record; this policy was already in place and I don't disagree with it. The new procedure, however, involves a highly convoluted, s... |
It is questionable whether this question really belongs here, but, in any case, it does not fit in Stack Overflow or any other Stack Exchange site. So here I go.
The purpose
My current pet project consists in developing a software tool to generate code from business process specifications.
The program's inputs are...
... |
If we only work with one branch in Subversion, should we even bother? Can't we just work on the trunk to speed things up?
This is how we develop with Subversion:
There is a trunk
We make a new development branch
We develop a new feature on that branch
When the feature is done, it is merged in the trunk, the branch is ... |
I'm working on a project and I've found that I've modeled the two largest components as trees.
My main uses so far are:
Generically model physical containers (and sub containers, sub sub containers etc)
Model liquid samples (and sub samples, and sample derivatives - and subs of those, etc)
I now need to model some ev... |
Have you ever seen, met, or worked with a smart/intellectual search library/framework/algorithm during your career? I need a very nice mechanism to search among text, I don't need a "Personal Google", just thought that programmers' community have met with such problem and know/can provide a good solution.
Is it possi... |
I am writing up a description/guide/wiki of an "open source software framework for the easy integration and utilization of datasets, algorithms, tools, and computing resources". I feel like software integration framework sounds concise and to the point, but I want to emphasize that it can also independently integrate a... |
I just graduated from college with a degree in CS, so I would like to find a job where I can learn more about the field and build up some professional experience.
I've interviewed at a company that uses their own in-house programming language, and I don't think any others use it. They have not mentioned using any ot... |
Does anyone know if there are any IDE's that can hit breakpoints on a condition?
For example, if I'm looking through a large list or iterating through a map or something, I may want to only suspend execution when an ID == "foo"
1.) Is this even possible to implement for IDE's
2.) Are there any plugins available for Ecl... |
I just started working at a company and we're currently in a fairly intensive (full-days most work days) training program to bring us up to speed on the way the company does things, and train us in VB.NET, along with some C#.
They're beginning to migrate towards a modified Model-View-Presenter architecture, with server... |
Single-programmer project. I'm constantly having to rewrite my own code on an on-going project. It's not buggy, but every time I expand my program (which previously-planned features), I keep having to expand previous classes, which cause me to re-write code that worked fine before.
I have unit-tests, so bugs aren't... |
I currently work for a company that has recently downsized. I do all in-house work, client installs, builds, QA, and, well, basically all the in-house work.
My direct boss is VERY nontechnical and lately I have found it VERY hard to deal with his lack of knowledge.
The biggest issues I have had are as follows:
I am on... |
I work in a small development group with 3 developers. We are loosely managed and have no structure to the team. There is no designated team leader and the manager is fairly hands off. The Senior developer has been with the company for 4 years, in that time he has had a huge hand in setting up systems and keeping th... |
I'm a small company needing to outsource software development. I've written both functional and technical specifications for GUI developers and back-end (C or PHP) developers to implement my software application. I'm a little nervous handing over copies of these documents to request bids from numerous companies.
Looki... |
Everybody keeps saying that one of JavaScript's problems is using + [example] for string concatenation. Some say the problem is not using +, it's type coercion [see the comments from the previous example]. But strongly-typed languages use + for concatenation and coerce types without any problem. For example, in C#:
int... |
If I have an application that is using a less secure method for storing passwords, such as SHA-1, how would I go about converting to SHA-256 or SHA-512?
|
I've been going through phpunit's docs and came accross the following quote:
You can always write more tests. However, you will quickly find that only a fraction of the tests you can imagine are actually useful. What you want is to write tests that fail even though you think they should work, or tests that succeed eve... |
I have limited experience when it comes to build and version control systems. I feel like I've run into a common problem but I'm having trouble uncovering how it is typically handled.
Say you have four source code projects:
fooLib - Shared library
fizzLib - Shared library
buzzApp - Application that depends on fooLib
... |
I'm working on a software project where so far I'm the sole developer. As of right now the code is unlicensed, but the copyright of whatever I've written belongs to me (this is true at least in North America AFAIK).
Before I release the software to the public, I'm going to license its distribution, probably under somet... |
I'm looking for some ideas on how to improve our current Quality Assurance process. There is no official QA method in place right now, but we basically just get some requirements using a ticket system and we go back and forth until all the requirements are covered. The problem right now is some requirements change and ... |
I am delving into the science of UML. The tool I am using is ArgoUML. I feel very confident portraying OO designs through this tool. But what still vexes me is the incorporation of the database. What does one do in UML to show table structure? Stored procedures? So on and so forth.
|
By time sensitive I mean for example a script that only runs once a month or a script that runs continuously but gives a certain output only once a month. Obviously you can unit test for a lot of cases but there are exceptions ( in my understanding).
A recent example I ran into was setting up a cron job to run on th... |
Suppose I'm building a blog that I want to have posts and comments. So I create two tables, a 'posts' table with an autoincrementing integer 'id' column, and a 'comments' table that has a foreign key 'post_id'.
Then I want to run what will probably be my most common query, which is to retrieve a post and all of its com... |
For code review technique training, I have to cover various topics. One of them is premature optimization. I found 3 traits of it as:
It's generally evil; causing inverse
effects.
It's an unnecessary pain, causing no
gain.
It demands lot of effort to achieve
little benefits
Is there any other trait which am I missing... |
We have a huge legacy C project which runs in VC++6. And I hope this will be ported to later versions of visual studio. But I think it will be a huge work. Actually, I just tried to recompile the project with VS2005 and got so many errors.
So, do you have any experience of this type of porting? Any recommendations?
|
I need to allow some of my users to design and upload blank forms, to be downloaded, completed, and uploaded by other users. It would be nice if I could verify the completeness of the uploaded forms, but it is not absolutely necessary. The respondents are motivated to complete the forms, but it would be nice if I cou... |
How would you store text information - in a relational database or maybe using NoSQL? The problem is that the text should be divided into various parts, each of which satisfies to some requirement, e.g. the same text should be contained in several "places". Is there another way to organize this?
I have several books (... |
I work for a fairly small consulting company, roughly 100 employees, and I've been with them for about a year currently. This is my first job out of college. As a company we do not specialize in any specific technology, but my day-to-day usually consists of some sort of .NET programming, whether it be ASP.NET, custom... |
I don't know if I should be very irritated or what. I single handedly built over 300 queries for a large database, and developed a naming convention so I could find them later. No one else in my office even knows how to build a query, but I came in yesterday to find that all of them had been renamed. I am now having a ... |
Can I license different parts of my code (different classes) under different licenses?
E.g. I have downloaded and modified a class which licensed under the BSD 3 point.
Can I then say, file AObject.class is BSD, and BObject.class is LGPL (or MIT, or MPL, or PD, etc etc)
|
This is a simple question but a design consideration that I often run across in my day to day development work. Lets say that you have a class that represents some kinds of collection.
Public Class ModifiedCustomerOrders
Public Property Orders as List(Of ModifiedOrders)
End Class
Within this class you do all k... |
I am writing a desktop application in Java, which has all of the Airband radio frequencies for the UK in it.
I would like to make this frequency database downloadable so people can print it. Would it be best to create the database in XML or use PDF for the download to print? Or perhaps there is another, better option?
|
Both these syntaxes are correct and equivalent:
With brackets:
foreach ($listOfThings as $thing) {
echo $thing;
}
Without brackets:
foreach ($listOfThings as $thing):
echo $thing;
endforeach;
Two questions come up in mind:
Is there any real difference between them or are they totally identical (performence, for ... |
I'm trying to come up with a good version strategy to fit our specific needs. We've proposed settling on this and I wanted to ask the question to see if anyone's experience would suggest avoiding this or altering it in any way.
Here's our proposal:
Versions are released in this format: MAJOR.MINOR.YMDD.BN. Here it is b... |
I just read a very compelling blog post from Scott Hanselman where he quoted colleague Erik Meijer as follows:
JavaScript is an assembly language. The JavaScript + HTML generate is like a .NET assembly. The browser can execute it, but no human should really care what’s there. - Erik Meijer
He goes on to give examples... |
I have two instances where I'd like to display information in a "justified" alignment - but I don't care if the values are switched in order. One example being displaying the usernames of people online:
Anton Brother68 Commissar Dougheater Elflord Foobar Goop Hoo Iee Joo
Rearranging them we could get exactly 22 charact... |
I am part of a developer team that works with many other teams to maintain and improve an application that has been in use for at least 15 years. When it was first built and designed, TDD was unheard of.
The application is fairly stable, and we rarely encounter a show stopping bug, but we do average about one or two bu... |
I want to develop a paperless application in .NET to reduce paper usage at my university. It will contain Exchange data and reporting.
What do I need to study before I start?
|
After being hacked companies often give numbers and details on how much of their data was compromised e.g "13K user and passwords".
After a possible intrusion how do you know what the hacker did in your server?
|
I am using the TFS 2010 SCRUM template.
So, let's say I have these user stories:
As a user I want the ability to add contacts directly from the Partner page.
As a user I want the ability to add contacts directly from the Project page.
Design wise the contact forms should be the same and so should the functionality. So,... |
I am currently using TortoiseHg on windows. I want my server to be available automatically as it is switched on.
But I need to do these:
when I set up a new project, I need to enter the localdir=URL pairs under the [web] each time I set up a project.
I need to run the hg serve or the Tortoise frontend each time to get... |
I am asked to create a pseudo-random number generator using the following algorithm:
The generator will generate every integer from 1 to N-1 exactly once
The algorithm for N=2^n
Initialize an integer R to be equal to 1 every time the tabling routine is called and then on each successive call for a random number:
set ... |
I watched Douglas Crockford's JavaScript talks recently, and at one point, he said that Microsoft did not consider JavaScript important because they saw the web as a passing phase of internet usage that would be supplanted by something loosely known at the time as "Internet X", and they wanted .NET to become "Internet ... |
I am a college student majoring in CS and I have yet to take an internship. I am wondering what the normal workday for a junior programmer is like. What is the normal daily work load like? Are there any specifics or office ettiquite to being a programmer that's different for other junior-level employees?
|
I am a computer science student currently in my 2nd year of bachelors. My problem is pretty straight forward yet still so far has not been self-resolvable. It is simply is that I am tired of programming. I don't know why but it just happened.
When I started my first course in c++ I was very excited. So excited that I f... |
I have a job interview tomorrow and it's for a junior web developer role. I am really excited about it because I really want to get my foot in the door in this industry.
I have been told how the interview will pan out. It will consist of a 45 minute interview with two of their developers and an 'aptitude for programmin... |
A company I'm going to interview with says they deal with huge amounts of data. How does one prepare for an interview where that fact is telegraphed beforehand as something that one really ought to ponder over?
Should I memorize maximum file sizes for Ext4 file systems or something? Or just be aware of the need for the... |
Imagine a system which has a number of functions and a number of users. A user must have rights to a specific function. Users may belong to a group. A group may belong to a group.
So as a simple illustration, user A has rights to function 1 and 2. User b has rights to function 2 and 3.
User A is in group1 which has rig... |
I just started working with Django coming from years of Spring MVC and the forms implementation strikes as being slightly crazy. If you're not familiar, Django forms starts with a form model class that defines your fields. Spring similarly starts with a form-backing object. But where Spring provides a taglib for bindin... |
In order to provide a more comprehensive educations for computer science students at my old university, I'm trying to develop an open source group they can contribute to.
What should I be looking for in project ideas so that they provide the maximum educational value for students who aren't very experienced in real-wor... |
I'm beginning to work on my first WordPress blog, however I've noticed most tutorials just have you do modifications (such as theme changes, installing plugins) on the production site. This worries me for a few reasons:
No backups
No version control
If you make a mistake, your production site is affected
Developing re... |
My manager, an enthusiastic programmer, is full of good energy to program. But he has a ... habit were he will be negligent in meetings if he can't understand the issue or argument. As a result, he screws up a couple of things.
For example:
When we were talking about the design process for REST web services, I suggest... |
I ask this from everyone's perspective. If you are in America and you outsource to offshore programmers, are you disloyal to your countrymen? If you are in India and you outsource to offshore programmers, are you disloyal to your countrymen? This question applies to all programmers and people in a position to hire prog... |
We are currently usign a roll-forward approach to DB changes, akin to Migrations, where each developer creates and checks in a script that promotes the latest version of the DB to a new state. Problems arise when multiple developers concurrently work on non-trivial tasks and end up making changes to the DB that interfe... |
I'm a SQL guy, but I know there is Not Only SQL databases - document-database mostly. As with most technologies there are pro and cons for each technology.
I've read some articles, but they were too theorical. What I would like is two real cases :
when a switch from relational- to document-database gave an improvement... |
i am glad to say that we are going to make Advanced Electron Forum (anelectron.com) an Opensource project, since we have a lack in developers and we think that this will make the development wheel turn much much better,
we are going to post the source code to public in github, but we are not sure about the license tha... |
When writing Cocoa Applications for MacOSX, you have the choice of either having a custom preference dialog, or using the Settings.app to manage your preferences.
Functionality wise, there is no difference at all between the two (apart from the fact that preferences in the Settigns.app can be accessed when your app is ... |
Anyone know if great enterprises (Google, Oracle, SAP) uses Functional Point Analysis to estimate software building effort?
|
As most projects use a C++ API, they deal with constraints of the API and constraints of the project itself.
I'm a beginner at programming, I don't like to use OOP at all because nobody clearly managed to explain to me WHY it's is so important to restricting yourself with private scope to prevent others programmers to ... |
I did my degree in physics and moved later into programming. I have two and a half years experience under my belt and like to think I write good code. I am, however, concerned that not doing a compsci degree has left holes in my knowledge. I would like to fill those up now since I know I want to be doing programming fo... |
Inspired by a question from SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6623391/how-to-gain-control-of-a-5gb-heap-in-haskell
It can be a long debate about FP's numerous advantages and disadvantages, but for now, I'd like to narrow the scope to principal efficiency of FP on modern hardware.
Thesis:
Functional paradigm impl... |
I recently came across some code which generates an identity value for a key:
DECLARE @ID INT;
SELECT @ID = MAX(ID) + 1 FROM Person;
INSERT INTO [Person]
([ID], [FirstName], [LastName])
VALUES
(@ID, @FirstName, @LastName);
I brought this to the attention of a coworker who claimed that not using a built in au... |
Sometimes I spend ridiculous amounts of time (hours) agonizing over making code "look pretty". I mean making things look symmetrical. I will actually rapidly scroll through an entire class to see if anything jumps out as not looking "pretty" or "clean".
Am I wasting my time? Is there any value in this kind of behavior?... |
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