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The situation: Person X, who already has a full-time job, applies to Company A. Money is good at A, but the real reason X had applied is 'cause the work at A really excites X. Next someone from the technical dept. from A calls up X, gives some assignment and holds a round of technical interview over phone. X does very...
I've been developing concurrent systems for several years now, and I have a pretty good grasp on the subject despite my lack of formal training (i.e. no degree). There's a few new languages that have become popular to at least talk about lately that are designed to make concurrency easier such as Erlang and Go. It ap...
I'm having a discussion with a co-worker on Linq, I'll copy here: Co-Worker: Lets be honest here. Linq syntax sucks. It's confusing and non-intuitive. Me: oh come on, more confusing than T-SQL? Co-Worker: uh, yes. Me: it has the same basic parts, select, where, and from Co-Worker: Linq, to me, is a bastardization of r...
What I think about Build Numbers is that whenever a new nightly build is created, a new BUILDNUMBER is generated and assigned to that build. So for my 7.0 version application the nightly builds will be 7.0.1, 7.0.2 and so on. Is it so? Then what is the use of a REVISION after the build number? Or is the REVISION part b...
What are the advantages of recursion? Some programming languages can optimize tail recursion, but, still in general terms, recursion consume more resources than regular loops. Is it possible to have an iterative version of some recursive function?
This article on technical debt has some good points, including: Working on the "technical matters" works best when it is driven by stories. The code base is probably in need of work everywhere, but the payoff will be received only where the code is going to be worked on for user-facing reasons. If no stories are going...
I'm an experienced desktop developer who's recently begun writing iOS apps and would like to venture into Android development as well. I've been hearing a lot of talk surrounding the Appcelerator Titanium framework lately, but I'm not sure I fully understand it's purpose. As I understand it, it's a framework for buil...
Persistence in Java Over the past years, I have gathered experience in the field of persistence abstraction in Java, using concepts such as EJB 2.0, Hibernate, JPA and home-grown ones. They seemed to me to have a steep learning curve and lots of complexity. In addition, as a big fan of SQL, I also thought that many abs...
I've read several books and learned through experience that optimizing code to the point where it is inscrutable, or coming up with an extremely fast but extremely complex solution to a problem is not desirable when working in teams, or even when you're working by yourself and have to understand your clever solution so...
The idea of recursion is not very common in real world. So, it seems a bit confusing to the novice programmers. Though, I guess, they become used to the concept gradually. So, what can be a nice explanation for them to grasp the idea easily?
I'm interested in better learning functional programming. To do so, it seems obvious that I should force myself to use the purest possible functional programming language. Hence, I'm here asking, more or less, for an ordering of functional programming languages according to their purity. It seems to me that it would be...
Recently I was being interviewed by a company and faced one question. The interviewer asked me a question and at that time I didn't know the answer but if I had been asked about just 4 months ago, I could have answered it. The question was from new language that I learned just 4 months ago. But I just get overview of t...
Which management book would you recommend to read for a fresh Team Leader?
I was a Google Summer of Code student this year and successfully completed my project. It was an awesome learning experience. Just wondering, from an industry point of view - how is or how well is a Summer of Code experience viewed? I mean, if you were going to hire me, would it mean anything to you? I am just asking t...
Wicket Click GWT Vaadin As I understand them, these frameworks all enable gui components to be created using java (with all its benefits) without having to do lots of html/javascript. As well as considering the technical factors, I am also interested to hear if any are gaining popularity fast. Is a particular framewo...
For the first time, our team is taking a rigorous approach to technical code QA. We identify work to QA by picking out top level classes and QA'ing it and everything it calls or uses below it (and what they call/use etc.). I reckon our QA code coverage to be reasonably close to 100% and its an eye opener for me in te...
So far I heard about : Lambda calculus Lambda programming Lambda expressions Lambda functions Which all seems to be related to functional programming... Apparently it will be integrated into C++1x, so I might better understand it now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x#Lambda_functions_and_expressions Can somebod...
If a colleague on your team is planning to quit his job and this may cause bad feelings in your company, would you notify your boss?
Do you think being self-educated in software development is good? Please give an example of what you have learnt successfully by yourself.
I just read one of Joel's articles in which he says: In general, I have to admit that I’m a little bit scared of language features that hide things. When you see the code i = j * 5; … in C you know, at least, that j is being multiplied by five and the results stored in i. But if you see that same snippet of code in C...
I've been developing intranet web sites and public web sites with no big issues concerning security. There were nothing to steal and nothing to gain. Nothing to attract people to try to reach the website behind the scene. I don't talk about login & password but more about the security against user attacks. So, what's t...
OK, so hopefully this is a subjective enough question for Programmers, but here goes. I am continuously broadening my knowledge of languages and software engineering practices... and I've run into something that just makes no sense to me whatsoever. In C++, class declarations include private: methods and parameters in...
I know that there should be a kind of standard for developing software but in the organization where I work for (30,000+ employees), we have a very strict framework for Java development. In my opinion such a framework is prehistoric as we are therefor running at least 10 years behind (Standard is Java 1.5 but with supp...
While designing web pages using php, are there standards that should be followed? For example suppose there are two pages. First page looks like this: <body> <div> <?php include 'page2.php';?> page2.php file looks like this: <?php print 'some text';?> </div> </body> Is such designing a standard practice? Does it affe...
I have noticed a behavior in myself that I call "stopping point syndrome"... it means I cannot stop working until I reach a "stopping point" (or I become exhausted). In other words, if I am in the zone working on getting a feature completed, I won't stop until I get it done. If it's a bug I'm working on, this effect...
Is there any good reason (except "GCC is better") to use the MinGW win32api/headers/libs with LLVM/Clang. Suppose that in two to three years, Clang has matured enough (in C++0x and performance) that it's a competitor/replacement and has its advantages over MSVC like GCC does on some accounts. Why on earth would one wan...
I've noticed a lot of questions lately relating to different abstraction techniques, and answers saying basically that the techniques in question are "too clever." I would think that part of our jobs as programmers is to determine the best solutions to the problems we are given to solve, and cleverness is helpful in do...
There are quite a few different Continuous Integration (CI) frameworks out there and I'm wondering which is the most popular. Which frameworks have you used at firms where you work? Is there any reason one CI framework is more popular than another - perhaps this is to do with the features it offers, things that integr...
I decided to try to contribute Firefox development, and they use Mercurial for source control. In the documentation about using Mercurial it was advised to choose a diff program and to do it before you start coding. They list a bunch of options, one of which appears to be the standard Unix/Linux diff program, which I'm...
It seems that there is a whole mess around current JCP. Quite of number of highly respected guys like Doug Lea, Tim Peierls had quit JCP. Reference : Is JCP dead? and Final results of the JSR Review Ballot for JSR #336 This put Java in an unfavorable future. As a Java developer, will you still consider using Java in yo...
I really dislike the name "NoSQL", because it isn't very descriptive. It tells me what the databases aren't where I'm more interested in what the databases are. I really think that this category really encompasses several categories of database. I'm just trying to get a general idea of what job each particular datab...
I'm a self-taught programmer. I've been learning RoR since October with varying intensity (sometimes all day, sometimes nothing for several weeks). Before that I knew only Java, but knew it pretty well. I've heard so much hype about RoR and how it's supposed to make you happy, productive, etc. So far it's only made me ...
Inspired by this question: What to do about "stopping point syndrome"? I often find myself a half hour away from knocking-off time having just wrapped up a component of my work, and facing a "next piece" that is going to take more than half an hour. (That's happening right now, as a matter of fact. Hence my surfing sta...
The question might not be as simple as it sounds, as we have struggled with this a bit. If there are 5 separate bugs, which can be taken care of with a single fix, then it is wasteful to take this approach. One bug might slip through the cracks, and would take away from a complete picture, or just be hidden for some ti...
I'm looking to get a snapshot of Rails 3 at this point in time. We're about to start a new long term project, and I'm wondering if R3 is ready for real use. Or, if there are still a lot of bumps to be worked out. E.g. I saw questions about its compatibility with Passenger. (?) Thanks!
I'm working at my first programming job. My boss is a very smart software engineer, and I feel like I have very little to offer compared to him. Problem is, he is always busy, and needs someone to help him out. I feel like I'm not good enough, but I still want to succeed. I want to be a great programmer. What can I do...
I have around 8 years experience in software development. I have worked on application development all these years using C++ /win32. I few years from now I want to become a freelancer . I tried to look into some freelance sites and I am not able to find any projects on C++/win32. I feel C++/Win32 wont help me much and...
In many English-based programming languages like C++ and JavaScript, there exist long keywords like function, namespace, exception (in OCaml languages) and such. Do you think shorter keywords like func should replace them? Why or why not? What about replacing them with digraph operators? The long keywords we will be ma...
I'm reading about ColdBox, and I came across this word. So what is meant by convention based framework?
I always hesitate when talking to professors about trying to improve the percentage of people who graduate with a CS type degree compared to the number that start out thinking that is what they want. On one hand I really do think it is important for professionals to be involved and give this feedback, on the other hand...
I've noted that IDE support is nowhere near as good, but the language itself supports functional programming idioms much more cleanly.
We've got a reasonably good release management process. However large parts of it are manual tasks, i.e. Promoting builds to QA, deploying builds to internal groups, tracking releases, etc. The builds and tests are all automated with CruiseControl. Can anyone recommend some good release management / continuous deplo...
Possible Duplicate: Whats the difference between Entry Level/Jr/Sr developers? I'm curious what senior developer means because apparently the definition doesn't mean what I thought it would. I keep seeing these teens at 22-23 years old who call themselves senior X developer or senior Y developer. To me, a senior mus...
I am designing a suite of web applications that have the same base functionality. That is, they all will know how to create and operate on widgets. The differences will be in their target audience and how a user will interact with a widget. Essentially, if these applications were developed independently, there would be...
I'm really hoping somebody with more experience can edit the question as per my examples of answers: using version control test driven development debugging code (xdebug for php) use of UML diagrams use of OOP for maintainable, reusable code use of frameworks (like Zend Framework for php) for rapid application develop...
The "classic" development artifacts are requirements documents and design specifications. But the development process includes many other non-source code artifacts: bug tracking databases, emails, wikis. What kinds of non-source code artifacts do you think are most vital to your development process? And how do you keep...
I have just left my college after doing graduation in computer engineering,during my college life I tried to do some freelancing in local market.I succeeded in the last year and earned some small amounts based on joomla,wordpress and visual basic based job.I had some small projects on php,mysql also. After finishing my...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative I'm curious whether there are, anywhere in the world, worker's cooperatives that center on a technology business that involves either programming, IT, or some sort of IT or programming related consulting or services. The wikipedia link above is an overview of the concept...
Right now I have been working on language X for the last 2 years. I am very good at it, but language X is not popular so jobs are not readily available for it. Consequently, I am thinking to change from language X to language Y. But that means I'll be a fresher again. Is making the change worth it? Even if it means los...
Our department has been hit by some layoffs over the past year and we're running a skeleton crew. They got rid of most of our support staff. The remaining team members would rather worry about what others are doing rather than work as a team and figure out how to improve their own situations. The one co-worker (who...
Possible Duplicate: How Can I Know Whether I Am a Good Programmer? As many programmers I have worked in several languages. While of course there are some that I am more at ease than other, I do not have a real way to precisely measure my skill in a specific language. So I thought of a system which allows me to help ...
I'm college grad, soon to be graduating. SO i have started my job search. So my question is for New Grad who is interested in QA (API Level testing in particular). What is level of knowledge in JAVA required? I'm not that great in Java but can rate myself 5/10. So do companies expect candidate to have extensive coding ...
More info on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Software_Process What has your experience been?
We're using Pivotal Tracker for our project, which lets us choose from these three point scales: 0,1,2,3 0,2,4,8 0,1,3,5,8 And I'm looking for a resource to help guide our decision. (After using 0,1,2,3 for two iterations, we can see where one of the others would be a lot more useful or meaningful.)
How do sites like Facebook and Twitter optimize their sites for massive traffic. Aside from spending big bucks on getting the best servers, what can be optimized in your code to accommodate massive traffic? I've read about caching your pages to static HTML, but that's impractical for social networking sites where the p...
In sites like facebook or orkut or friendster what's displayed at the bottom instead of main web address like static.ak.fbcdn.net or profile.ak.fbcdn.net? Are these different servers or they are just used to misguide the hackers?
I'm currently looking to move to using an IDE for web development. The options I'm considering are: Aptana Studio Coda Expresso Please base your answers on the following criteria, in descending order of importance: Supports HTML, CSS, JavaScript Powerful (having good code completion, good debugger, great syntax high...
What database features/elements are necessary for a programmer to understand in order to create non-trivial applications? I was once asked in a job interview (by a DBA) to rate my understanding of database concepts -- I thought it would be interesting to get opinions. I'm looking for basic and advanced skills, also ...
Disclaimer: I do not specialize in [desktop] GUI design, but have to do it on occasion. I have seen co-worker's dialogs worse than the once I created, and my major problem with them is that they can be unnecessarily big, and things do not line up. To be more specific, I mostly do it in .Net Winforms, but occasionally w...
If you could ask a C++ programmer one question to measure their C++ skills, what would it be? The question I think is best is: Can you call "delete this;" inside a member function? (I put this as a link so you can think it through first, then go to The Best C++ Interview Question – Ever! to see the correct answer.) I...
I am sure I am not the only one who gets frustrated when they see a page of code littered with SQL queries. The ActiveRecord and other ORM patterns help mitigate a good amount of SQL used in a project, but in many cases of complex queries, the use of SQL is seemingly unavoidable. I am looking for opinions on how SQL qu...
I thought I did okay in the interviews but apparently the interviewers didn't think so. Is it appropriate to ask for a reason after I have received the rejection email? After all I don't want to annoy the HR person. I am a student, so not so much job hunting experience so far. Bear with me if this question sounds stupi...
What will you use for a webpage layout? Percentage or pixels? When should one use one over the other?
I have seen C code where people used enum heavily. But all it does is confuse others. In many places plain integers can do the same thing with less ambiguity. What are the common misuses of enum?
Is there any hard data (studies, comparisons, not-just-gut-feel analysis) on the advantages and disadvantages of working from home? My devs asked about e.g. working from home one day per week, the boss doesn't like it for various reasons, some of which I agree with but I think they don't necessarily apply in this case....
Should I bother to develop for JavaScript disabled? I feel that my time is better spent developing for the majority.
In an async call pair you would rather have a BeginDoSomething & FinishDoSomething or PreDoingSomething & PostDoingSomething pair? Cheers
I'm attending a company sponsored training event for JSF and JPA that crams 10 days of training into 5 days. I plan on getting all that I can out of the class, but there is no "final exam".
I'd like to get a sense for the range of complexity that algorithms fall into. I think it would be interesting and helpful for those, like me, trying to better understand how algorithms are formulated and how to deconstruct them. Can you offer a basic algorithm with explanation, an intermediate algorithm with explanati...
How can I say more than just "C++" on my resume, reports or other writings, to convey clearly what kind of C++ programming I've been doing? Are there well-defined styles of C++? ("Styles" might not be quite the right word.) Examples: using C++ as an "improved C" taking advantage of stronger typechecking, syntacti...
Does anyone practice the "code review" process for functional tests? Do you find it useful? The way that my current employer practices SCRUM we include functional testing as part of our "must have done" stuff in any given sprint.
Recently I attended a lecture given by Greg Wilson (Chief Scientist of Software Carpentry). From the abstract: The idea that claims about software development practices should be based on evidence is still foreign to software developers, but this is finally starting to change: any academic who claims that a particu...
(Figured this was too subjective for SO, so posting here...) I have some behavior that I can implement in various ways. At least two methods are shows in the code snippet below. Presume that the m_well data member is correctly set somehow at object construction time. struct Behavior { virtual bool behavesWell() {...
I've been taking some software design courses in the past few semesters, and while I see the benefit in a lot of the formalism, I feel like it doesn't tell me anything about the program itself: You can't tell how the program is going to operate from the Use Case spec, even though it discusses what the program can do. ...
Consider a company that is proudly certified for some non-Agile methodology, uses it as a selling point to its customers to demonstrate accountability. How do you go about introducing Kanban or Scrum progressively without breaking their whole system and still making them confident that it can still be just as accounta...
So, I'm sitting here, chewing on a couple of novel data structures. I'm thinking of coding them up, but I'ven't got any professional use for them at the moment. Nonetheless, they solve interesting problems, and deserve reference implementations. So, I'd like to publish them, ideally in a peer-reviewed journal, so th...
I asked a question yesterday Should I Bother to Develop For JavaScript Disabled?. I think the consencus is: Yes, I should develop for JavaScript Disabled. Now I just want to understand why users disable JS. It seems many developers (I guess people who answered the questions are developers) disable JS. Why is that. Why ...
Do web design freelancers (I'm thinking individuals, not companies) typically do all development and design work themselves? What are the options for those with a strong base in back-end web development but less with web design, color schemes, layouts, graphic design, etc.?
I'm currently revising a number of document templates for my company. One thing we've never had is a formal Architecture Specification, so I'm starting to put one together. What sort of things do you put into your architecture specs? Feel free to copy and paste a table of contents - that would be helpful. Are there an...
I really want to ask this questions to my fellow developers here in Programmers.SE because i am hiring freshers for my company.. Even though i know some basic questions that can be asked to a fresher during interview and i want to know, What are the skills you look for when hiring a fresher/newbie for developement?
For the last eight years I wait for Microsoft to add the basic C++ functionality of switching back and forth between .h and .cpp files, and it keeps astonishing me it is still not supported in Visual Studio 2010. Does anyone know why they refuse to add this essential feature?
I will be leaving my current project in a few days, and as part of securing my knowledge I have been asked to add comments to the code wherever I feel that can add value. The problem I am running into now is that the comments I want to write are not really suitable as comments, because they do not pertain to a single e...
So typically a CSV file uses a comma and the return character as it's field and line delimiters. This runs into obvious problems with text which can contain both these characters. Obviously there are options there (escaping them) but how do people handle this? Use different characters - pipes or tildas? Escape them? ...
Which according to you are the top languages to watch out for in 2011 and beyond? This article talks about 9 languages to watch out for in 2011. What are your views and inputs on this?
If yes, where and why would you use it? If no, please provide an explanation to why C is not acceptable to you.
I recently asked about leaving a position and got a lot of great answers. One of the common threads was that being around to train the new person would be expected and could go a long way. Now considering that (I think) most people don't stay at a company for a long time after they've given notice, and it will take tim...
I started using SVN about 9 months ago and it's been a game changer to say the least. Although, I feel I'm still a bit lost. I feel like there is a lot more I need to take advantage of to really step up my application development. For example I would like to be able to quarantine any volatile/major changes into some ...
For solo projects, do you keep your build / management tools on your local machine, or on a separate server? If the server is not guaranteed to be safer or more reliable than my own machine I struggle to see the point, but maybe I'm missing some things. Note that I'm not debating the value of continuous integration or ...
I have been learning Clojure and looking at Scheme and CL which introduced me to the world of prefix notation. At first I didn't like it but it is still starting to grow on me. To be honest though, there are still long calculations that are difficult for me to understand but I think that is an issue of me needing more ...
Sometimes we have some business logic represented in the controller code of our applications. This is usually logic that differentiates what methods to call from the model and/or what arguments to pass them. Another example of this is a set of utility functions that exist in the controller that may work to format or s...
I have an Access 03 program with a bunch of VBA code that is in use and the end user wants new functionality. I am finding it very difficult to add new functionality because my brain wants to use the most recent .NET technologies and VBA is not recent at all. How should I go about "rolling back" technologies in my hea...
I'm fairly new to working as a programmer, at least working as a regular employee in-house for a company. I often become frustrated with my company's management style as they basically just pick out whatever random tasks catches the lead developer's fancy that day, or the day before, and give me the task (with tasks us...
I work in a company where the CEO manages the product team, who mockup features and drop in the lap of developers to then implement said features. There is some iteration of course, developer's opinions are respected. But I wonder how effective this process is. Jason Calacanis just wrote : The Zuckerberg Doctrine: Dev...
I've been looking at a number of OSS java projects and a number of them still have not adopted generics. They're using raw types (e.g. List foo) instead of generic types (e.g. List<string> foo). Other projects have only begun using generics in the last few years even thought they've been around for a long time. I'm i...
Is there any way to use Python to replace Flash for in browser animation, gaming, webapps, whatever? Pretty straight-forward IMHO. Does anyone know how to do this?
If I release some code and binaries, but I don't include any license at all with it, what are the legal terms that apply by default (in the US, where I am). I know that I automatically have copyright without doing anything, but what restrictions are there on it? If I upload my code to github and announce it as a free d...
I have a project where I will be collaborating to build a fairly simple site with some database access. I will be doing the back-end work, and my colleague will be doing the web design. The problem is that my colleague has only worked with PHP developers and I have a lot more experience in Perl. The options would be to...
I asked a question on lines of code per hour and got torn a new one. So my matured follow-up question is this: If not lines of code, then what is a good metric by which to measure (by the hour/day/unit-of-time) the effectiveness of remote programmers?
When I write programs I using pass by value or pass by reference always seem to be logical methods. When learning about different programming languages I came across pass by name. Pass by name is a parameter passing method that waits to evaluate the parameter value until it is used. See Stack Overflow pass by name ques...
I have a "friend". Yes good start I know but honestly this isn't me! Basically he's been working on a successful project for about 4 years now, the difficulty is the technical debt has caught up and he's finding it almost impossible to stop supporting the product (tweaking this and that) and actually move on with real ...

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