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I've been proposing that my workplace implement Behavior-Driven-Development, by writing high-level specifications in a scenario format, and in such a way that one could imagine writing a test for it. I do know that working against testable specifications tends to increase developer productivity. And I can already think...
I searched and couldn't find any business reasons why git/mercurial/bazzr systems are better than centralized systems (subversion, perforce). If you were trying to sell a DVCS to a non-technical person what arguments would you provide for the DVCS increasing profit. I will shortly be pitching git to my manager, it will...
So I'm not doing any unit testing. But I've had an idea to make it more appropriate for my field of use. Yet it's not clear if something like this exists, and if, how it would possibly be called. Ordinary unit tests combine the test logic and the expected outcome. In essence the testing framework only checks for boole...
Before you chastise me for asking this, I have an Adobe Air app that has a lot of investment in it, and if there is a way to utilize the existing code-base in any way, it is worth considering. I have heard news reports in passing about Adobe creating some kind of tool to allow flash or air apps to be ported to native o...
C++0x adds pretty darn comprehensive type inference support. I'm sorely tempted to use it everywhere possible to avoid undue repetition, but I'm wondering if removing explicit type information all over the place is such a good idea. Consider this rather contrived example: Foo.h: #include <set> class Foo { private: ...
I am making a database to store information about the users of my website (I am using stuts2 and hence Java EE technology). For the database I'll be making a DBManager. Should I apply singleton pattern here or rather make all its methods static? I will be using this DBManager for basic things like adding, deleting and...
Suppose you have an application that reads an input file, on a language that does not support the concept of None. The input is read, parsed, and the contents are stored on a structure for later use. Now, in general you want to keep into account transformation of the data from the input, such as adding default values w...
Kind of a hard topic to search for, as architect turns up a lot about software architects instead. After 8 months of PHP self-study, I finally stumbled across the php\|architect site. The length of time it took me to find it makes me suspicious of its quality. 3 related questions: do professional PHP coders read/care a...
Has anyone had experience with out-sourced testing? Is it worth the fairly high premium you have to pay? Can you simply hire some off-shore 'mechanical turks' (who offer the same services, but a lot cheaper) with a testing script as a cheaper alternative to professional software testing services?
The other day, a friend told me that in USA, they pronounce SQL like squel, not es-qu-el. I was surprised. I was wondering how "SELECT *" is read/pronounced while talking. select star? select asterisks? select all?
Question: Can RMI or CORBA operate over IP? I don't think RMI can - does it not operate over IIOP?
Question: Why might RMI be a sensible option for communication between client and server in a web application? So why would RMI be used for communication between client and server in web apps?
Something I've noticed over the past few weeks is how many big commercial websites use jQuery combined with lots of plugins - but don't admit it. They will rename the main library to something obscure, as well as the plugins. Quite a few will even remove the comments that contain the MIT/GPL license information. (just ...
Consider Train.Passengers, what type would you use for Passengers where passengers are not supposed to be added or removed by the consuming code? I'm using .NET Framework, so this discussion would suit .NET, but it could apply to a number of modern languages/frameworks. In the .NET Framework, the List<Person> is not su...
Reference question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4303813/help-with-interview-question The above question asked to solve a problem for an NxN matrix. While there was an easy solution, I gave a more general solution to solve the more general problem for an NxM matrix. A handful of people commented that this genera...
This is something I was never taught. I have seen alot of different types of authoring styles. I code primarily in Java and Python. I was wondering if there was a standard authoring style or if everything is freestyle. Also if you answer would you mind attaching the style you use to author files that your create at hom...
I was wondering how you guys start out if you need to design a multi-client project where multiple clients can interact with a server. In specific how do you go about dealing with different states and message handling, how do you start designing and considering all these cases? For example a video webchat application w...
I often try to avoid telling people I'm a programmer because most of the time I end up explaining to them what that really means. When I tell them I'm programming in Java they often ask general questions about the language and how it differs from x and y. I'm also not good at explaining things because 1) I don't have t...
Does anyone else have that one thing they always forget to do when programming or developing a website? Personally mine is forgetting to include the Doctype in a website...the amount of time i have spent ages fixing/adding/hacking around with CSS to fix IE problems and it turns out to be the F'in Doctype declaration!!!...
I'm pretty new to doing contract work and finally landed a decent paying project. The guy actually offered to put down a deposit and I'm just wondering what percentage I should consider asking for. I was thinking around 25% since its not a terribly large project (only about 20 hours). Also, I can't use PayPal (have had...
I am a solo developer in my department and I have a lot of individual projects, all created and managed by me. I started using SVN at ProjectLocker via Versions on the Mac a couple years ago when the variety of projects started getting unwieldy. Scenario 1: Now I have a process that is of reasonable complexity it can b...
Our client has an eCommerce site which was developed by an in-house team, and is now showing its age. I work for a firm brought in as external contractors to build a replacement. Part of the current site is a Flash viewer applet which displays media about the product - zoom-able images, 360-degree views, movies, and so...
From a reasonably common programming language, which do you find to be the most mind-bending? I have been listening to a lot of programming podcasts and taking some time to learn some new languages that are being considered upcoming, and important. I'm not necessarily talking about BrainFuck, but which language would y...
I am currently learning symfony and going through the book A Gentle Introduction to symfony and came across this section in "Chapter 4: The Basics of Page Creation" on creating templates (or views): "If you need to execute some PHP code in the template, you should avoid using the usual PHP syntax, as shown in Listing 4...
I guess I should have pre-faced this with: Yes, I know there is no need for a new templating language, but I want to make a new one anyway, because I'm a fool. That aside, how can I improve my language: Let's start with an example: using "html5" using "extratags" html { head { title "Ordering Notice" ...
There are so many frameworks for writing GUI application using Python. But is there any one key standard framework? For example we have a bundle of .NET/C# on Visual Studio. I am thinking in other perspectives also. In future if I give an interview for a Python programmer job, which GUI framework will be considered? I ...
Obviously, the easiest way to solve a bug is to be able to reproduce it in-house. However, sometimes that is not practical. For starters, users are often not very good at providing you with useful information. Customer Service: "what seems to be the issue?" User: "It crashed!" To further compound that, sometimes th...
Licensing is something that I really haven't paid any attention to; I guess I felt there was no need. However I can't but help thinking that I should. So which are the most common licenses that I, as a programmer, should be aware of? Also, it would be helpful if you could include a brief description of each provided.
I came across coderun the other day does anyone know any better editors/ide's espeially that can be used relatively easily on some of todays smartphones for asp.net ?
Would posting a high salary on a programmer job advertisement encourage strong candidates and weed out lesser candidates? The salary would be relative to the position. Edit: Maybe it wouldn't alter your application, but would you have any concerns or does this raise any red flags? It wouldn't make them seem desperate?
Since my SO thread was closed i guess i can ask it here. What practice or practices are good 90% of the time when working with threading with multiple cores? Personally all i have done was share immutable classes and pass (copy) data to a queue to the destine thread. Note: This is for research and when i say 90% of the...
It seems that, in my experience, getting us engineers to accurately estimate and determine tasks to be completed is like pulling teeth. Rather than just giving a swag estimate of 2-3 weeks or 3-6 months... what is the simplest way to define software schedules so they are not so painful to define? For instance, customer...
Microsoft has moved away from the COM stack, VB6 is so last century and .Net rules the (MS) roost. Yet I find myself still banging out reams of VBA code am I dinosaur? The need for VBA is a new project automating Excel seeing as you ask. I've tried to doing the same kind of thing using VSTO and it was just too damn bug...
Is it possible for a programmer to suffer the equivalent of writer's block? What strategies are there to overcome it?
This question I am asking because I couldn't find any source which gives complete overview of java development. I just want to know where java technology currently in market & what is preferable for development ! Java always remain top programming language for development point of view. However, java is combo of, j2ee,...
This question arises out of the question https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/25569/is-haskell-worth-learning Generally a few often repeated statements are made, about how Haskell improves your coding skills in other languages, and furthermore, this is because Haskell is stateless, and that's a good ...
If you were going to write a chess game engine, what programming paradigm would you use (OOP, procedural, etc) and why whould you choose it ? By chess engine, I mean the portion of a program that evaluates the current board and decides the computer's next move. I'm asking because I thought it might be fun to write a ch...
I currently have Apache httpd running on a production Ubuntu VPS server. I write php scripts. I'm interested in learning Java and I was wondering how I would go about writing some server-side Java to work on my current set-up. How are Apache Tomcat and Apache HTTP Server related to each other? Can Tomcat be a module of...
Title is the question. And why I am asking is because from what I read about most PHP frameworks (e.g. Code Igniter, Kohana, Cake, Zend) is that they're ether too complex, or are designed mostly for small applications (like blogs).
What Obj-C/C libraries have you used for manipulating git repos in your Mac apps? I am working on a Mac app that I would like to be able to clone and modify git repos. Using git directly is not an option as it is GPL and I'd like to sell my app commercially without opening the source. I've seen libgit2, which I could l...
Which dependently typed programming languages could be used for real world application development? I will mostly be writing toy applications at first, after that maybe web development or a simple DBMS. These are some points, that I think are important: documentation example programs a good/big standard library an eas...
By now everyone is aware of the massive boom in social-networking (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and obviously a big part of its business model revolves around being able to mine this data to create information that can be used to make money for someone. Gartner has identified 'Social Analytics' as one of the top 10 str...
Yesterday I had a terrible experience in an interview. Interviewer asked me about pure virtual function. I said, It may or may not have definition in base class, but derived classes should provide definition unless they also want to be abstract class. But interviewer kept on asking that "Can pure virtual have definitio...
What are some techniques for updating a production server's code base / database schema without causing any downtime?
I try to understand the benefits of distributed version control system (DVCS). I found Subversion Re-education and this article by Martin Fowler very useful. Mercurial and others DVCS promote a new way of working on code with changesets and local commits. It prevents from merging hell and other collaboration issues W...
So here is a question for you, having read some great answers to questions such as Test-Driven Development - Convince Me. So my question is: "Can Test-Driven Development be used effectively on non-Greenfield projects?" What problems could a programmer face if they attempted to use TDD in a project that already had non...
As a software developer until now, I've mostly worked on projects that were quite "monolithic" with hardly any dependencies on other projects, without building automation (no Make, Ant, Maven, etc.) and kept on a simple version control system (mostly Subversion) with just a few easily managed version branches. Now toge...
Someday s ago we was discussing about the current project, and suddenly sir and my senior started talking about the new feature to add in the project , and i become lost :). i was not able to find how i should provide my input for the new feature. So i want to know what things should be discussed for developing new fea...
I am working on a large(ERP level) Rails project. We have 150 tables and more than 150 models. It takes minutes to find a model. Should we add all models under the models folder or should we put them in different subfolders? Same thing goes for controllers and views.
My main source of income is web development and through this I have come to enjoy the wonders of programming as my knowledge of different languages has increased over the years through work and personal play. At some point I reached a decision that my college education was not enough and that I wanted to go back to sc...
I've recently become responsible for choosing which source control and project management software to use for a company that employs me. Currently it uses Jira (project management) and Subversion (version control). I know there are many other options out there -- the ones I know about are all in this article http://ma...
I recently started using Haskell Platform. I created a source file using Wordpad and named it add. I tried double clicking it so I can open it in ghci but I get <[1 of 1] Compiling Main (C:\add.hs,interpeted) C:\add.hs:1:6: parse error on input '\' Failed modules loaded: none.> What do I...
As a soon-to-be graduating high school senior in the U.S., I'm going to be facing a tough decision in a few months: which college should I go to? Will it be worth it to go to Cornell or Stanford or Carnegie Mellon (assuming I get in, of course) to get a big-name computer science degree, internships, and connections wit...
I am currently using dev++, I am a complete beginner, (Freshman CS major) learning C++. I can get one of the newest versions of visual studio (2008 or 2009 i think) for free through my school. Not sure if it is worth the trouble of getting. thoughts?
I am not asking this question to start arguments (people often consider Java and .Net as religions) but which provides a better foundation and helps to gain real programming skills (of Computer Science and Web Development), I have worked with ASP.NET and C# but most of my time spends on Dragging and Dropping i am a C++...
I have been working for more than a year for this company. Now they want me to create a KT Document for reference. Is there any template available for me to document the coding done by me..
My company has recently switched to an Agile way of working and as a part of it we've started using SCRUM. While I'm very comfortable with it and feel that this way is superior to a traditional one, some of my teammates don't share the same opinion. In fact they are very skeptical about "all that agile stuff", and don'...
Problem: user has left review of iPhone app which is simply incorrect Question: is there a way to make contact with the reviewer and a) explain how what they've said is incorrect and help them with their issue or b) challenge the review? Edit Sept 2022 This is probably no longer relevant given that it was asked 12+ ye...
This question is focused on extracting the advantages and disadvantages of using Web based Frameworks: such as Cake PHP, Zend, jQuery, ASP.NET). This question is completely language agnostic. Let me start with the notion of "Standing on the shoulders of Giants". Advantages: Empowers Developers - by taking features th...
A few months ago my company found itself with its hands around a white-hot emergency of a project, and my entire team of six pulled basically a five week "crunch week". In the 48 hours before go-live, I worked 41 of them, two back to back all-nighters. Deep in the middle of that, I posted what has been my most successf...
Few languages are as restrictive as Java with file naming standards and project structure. In that language, the file name must match the public class declared in the file, and the file must live in a directory structure matching the class package. I have mixed feelings about that approach. While I never have to gue...
What is a good design for a simple web site with mostly static pages and a blog? I am helping a friend build this for their small business. We are looking for a simple approach that can be implemented fairly quickly. (I am a programmer and can help with coding, hosting, etc.) One option is to use a site like virb, wh...
I was always confused about header files. They are so strange: you include .h file which doesn't include .cpp but .cpp are somehow compiled too. Recently I joined a team project, and of course, both .h and .cpp are used. I understand that this is very important, but I can't live with copy-pasting every function decla...
So I'm reading a book for architecting applications for the enterprise from the Microsoft Press. It's a great book, and I'm learning a lot. However, it's very high level, and can be applied to a lot of different domains (not even just .NET, even though that's how the book is geared). The first project I want to develop...
I work in a department where no one has ever used source control before, including myself. I am trying to push the concept. I have spent a little while researching SVN. I some basics learned. I can Create/update/checkout/commit with command line and from Tortoise. I am starting to learn how to tag and branch but still ...
According to what I read, the compiler is not obliged to substitute the function call of an inline function with its body, but will do so if it can. This got me thinking- why do we have the inline word if that is the case? Why not make all function inline functions by default and let the compiler figure out if it can s...
I work as fulltime programmer and have a pretty well paid job for the country where I live, but I could do with a bit of extra cash at the moment (wife nagging about new kitchen etc.). I'd be interested in taking on small projects in my spare time. I'm not interested in writing malware or get rich quick schemes. I've c...
I like to keep my lines of code under 80 characters because: I don't have to do any horizontal scrolling; I know the line is probably too complicated if it exceeds this limit; and it prints out nicely on paper. Concerning the latter, I've met only a few who actually print out code to look at (I'm one of them). So how...
Is there a resource or site which illustrates building the same application (desktop or web) using several different contrasting architectures? Such as MVP versus MVVM versus MVC, etc. It would be very helpful to see how they look side-by-side using real-world code instead of comparing written theory to written theor...
The University of Antioquia in Colombia teaches its introductory programming courses in Lexico, a Spanish-based, object-oriented .NET language. The intent is to teach programming concepts in the students' native language before introducing English-based mainstream languages. There are many other Non-English-based progr...
My Boss has sold a few 'iPhone apps' to clients, we are a web development shop. I have explained to him that I do not know the first thing about them, but it's such a powerful buzz-word and we need to meet clients expectations. I do have some experience in C, Java and Python which should help if I need to use objective...
I am a relatively young programmer. I am 23 and I have been programming professionally for about 5 years. As most programmers I started with C, learned some x86 assembly for fun and then I found C++ which turned out to be my greatest passion in the programming world. Programming with C and C++ forces you to learn platf...
I'm playing around a bit with my own C like DSL grammar and would like some oppinions. I've reserved the use of "(...)" for invocations. eg: foo(1,2); My grammar supports "trailing closures" , pretty much like Ruby's blocks that can be passed as the last argument of an invocation. Currently my grammar support trailing...
We've just come across one of those situations which occasionally comes up when a developer goes off sick for a few days mid-project. There were a few questions about whether he'd committed the latest version of his code or whether there was something more recent on his local machine we should be looking at, and we had...
Everyone says the same thing: "a real programmer knows how to handle real problems." But they forget how they learned this ability or where: it's not taught in schools. What can I do to improve my ability to tackle complex programming problems? What strategies have worked for you? Are there specific areas I should be f...
How does SSL relate to the Public Key Infrastructure?
Originally, it is the duty of the developer to write the test, but I noticed that in many cases/e-mature developers those cases are not giving even 80% coverage. How about I have a QA person dedicated to write ALL the tests for a given project instead of the developer? Are there any cons to that?
As noted by the title, is nesting types (e.g. enumerated types or structures in a class) considered bad practice or not? When you run Code Analysis in Visual Studio it returns the following message which implies it is: Warning 34 CA1034 : Microsoft.Design : Do not nest type 'ClassName.StructueName'. Alternati...
Just out of curiosity, I started wondering whether a language which doesn't allow comments would yield more readable code as you would have be forced to write self-commenting code. Then again, you could write just as bad code as before because you just don't care. But what's your opinion?
I recently joined a new development team where the language preferences are mixed on the .net platform. Dev 1: Knows VB.net, does not know c# Dev 2: Knows VB.net, does not know c# Dev 3: Knows c# and VB.net, prefers c# Dev 4: Knows c# and VB6(VB.net should be pretty easy to pick up), prefers c# It seems to me that th...
I'm working on a greenfields project with two other developers. We're all contractors, and myself and one other just started working on the project while the orginal one has been doing most of the basic framework coding. In the past month, my fellow programmer and I have been just frustrated by the design descisions do...
I'm looking for a way to test my webpages that have dynamically generated graphs (using such things like Google Graphs). Does anyone know if there are such tools that exist (perhaps Selenium would do this). Thanks
Preface I'm writing a template language (don't bother trying to talk me out of it), and in it, there are two kinds of user-extensible nodes. TemplateTags and TemplateDirectives. A TemplateTag closely relates to an HTML tag -- it might look something like div(class="green") { "content" } And it'll be rendered as <div c...
I've seen some freeware projects in the past where the author(s) invested a significant amount of their personal time and resources and never even considered charging for the software. A lot of these projects were donation based, and from what I've heard, donationware can never be a viable business model (even to simpl...
Are there any techniques in programming that you find to be overused (I.E. used way more excessively than what they should be) or abused, or used a bit for everything, while not being a really good solution to many of the problems which people attempt to solve with it. It could be regular expressions, some kind of des...
For fun I was thinking about how a programming paradigm could differ from OOP and came up with this concept. I don't have a strong foundation in computer science so it might be common place without me knowing it (more likely it's just a stupid idea :) I apologize in advance for this somewhat rambling question, anyways...
My coworker and I recently got into a debate over a proposed plan at our workplace. We've more or less finished transitioning our Java codebase into one managed and built with Maven. Now, I'd like for us to integrate with Hudson and Sonar or something similar. My reasons for this are that it'll provide a 'zero-click' b...
I recently made a change that caused some code to be run far more often than it used to. This lead to the discovery of a bug. This bug had the potential to happen any time that code was run but because it was run so seldom it never surfaced. When I brought this to the lead developer's attention he wanted me to undo the...
I guess there is a tool called Py2Exe to convert a Python application into an executable file. Since I am also using PyQt4 for GUI apps., what are the external dependencies for such an executable? What type of files I need to bundle along with my Setup? Is there any Python Setup Builder tool?
Should a software engineer also act as technical support? That is, should a company allow their engineers to wear both the software engineer and technical support hats. It seems that it would remove the ability to write software if much of an engineer's time is taken up by technical support.
Recently I came upon a community event called GiveCamp. GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where technology professionals from designers, developers and database administrators to marketers and web strategists donate their time to provide solutions for non-profit organizations. Since its inception in 2007, the GiveCamp ...
I am a Web Developer in PHP, and also know Javascript and some bit of CSS which is needed for web development. I use Symfony framework to build Websites and Web Application. As now i want to learn new Programming Language, which is best for Web Development(like Ruby, Python), as i have heard about Frameworks like Rails...
I was thinking about hosting my private project on my server (i may use 'gitolite') and have a copy on my local machine as backup (git clone then automated git fetch every few minute). I want to know what happens if there is a bug gitolite or somewhere else on my server and the source code and git repository has been t...
I am taking part in the development of a PHP CMS (yeah I know you are like, meeh). It is currently using simple tags for tagging content. What I want to do is push the whole thing to using Taxonomy but I am not sure on what to pay attention to, or how to go about structuring the whole vocabularies/terms. I'd love to b...
Do you know any scenario where asp.net mvc can outperform asp.net? Because while comparing these two, people always say that each of them are different beasts and may be a better choice depending upon the scenario.
I would like to know why you decided to build your own framework in your company. By framework, I don't mean few libraries you use often. I mean a specific way of building applications on top of it, with base classes, convention, etc. So why did you built your own framework? How could you justify that to the person t...
Ok so here is the question: What are the advantages and Disadvantages of Using an Aspect Orientated Programming Paradigm. My advantages and disadvantages thus far: Advantages: Complements object orientation. Modularizes cross-cutting concerns improving code maintainability and understandability. Disadvantage: No...
I am involved into development a rich UI project: desktop windows application. Application uses asynchronous invocations and in its turn it should be ready to process external messages (events). The problem is clear: at first time it was built as a simple prototype and it was not stress tested and all was fine. Then ap...
I have heard of many web APIs like that of Facebook, Twitter, etc., which helps third party access data and manipulate it. I would like to know how a web API works. What are the basics of a web API? If I want to create an API for my site, so that people can access or update it, what will I need to start with?
Is it a code smell to call public method in private method of the same object instance?

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