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A 'bad code' interview is one where the interviewee is shown a snippet of 'bad code' and asked to correct it or point out things that are wrong with it. I have trouble with these interviews because it takes me some time to read the code, figure out what its doing, and point out the flaws. In a situation where there's t...
I am developing a web application written in Clojure using the Compojure framework. My question is, should I deploy to Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine? I've read this article on running Clojure code on GAE, but I am still a bit concerned about the limitations on GAE. I am going to be running sandboxed Clojure code, w...
In a perfect world, we tell the client we follow an agile methodology where we allow the scope to increase/decrease as the requirements change and we bill per hour for each iteration. In reality, estimates need to be delivered before the project starts, and there is always pressure to hit that estimate number while bei...
My 2 friends and I are preparing our senior project idea for next year. I need some of different ideas while deciding the base environment of the project, especially from software developers/engineers who worked in huge software product developments. We have limited human resources (just us, 3 students), limited time ...
The Einstellung Effect refers to "a person's predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though there are "better" or more appropriate methods of solving the problem." As a programmer with a decent amount of experience, how can one combat this tendency to always approach problem solving from "tri...
I've recently gotten into learning about functional programming. I've been coding in Scala most of this past year and am just now starting to fully grasp the power of a functional language. I want to build a data-driven website from scratch using functional techniques. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how to ...
I have an idea that I would like to develop as an app. I have no programming skills though. -Can someone point to some resources on how I can hire a reputable company to do the job for me. What are important factors I should consider when choosing? Any warning signs or red flags that I should be aware of when choosing...
I've met a student from the computer science department and I discovered that they only teach java and aspx. I asked him why they didn't teach php since it is the top one programming language on the net. He says that it was a "easy" (or hobbyist's) programming language. I'm not sure what that means. What's your opinion...
In the real world , why do we need to implement method level security ? We either have a web application or a desktop application , where the user accesses the user interface (and therefore directly cannot access the method) . So where does accessing methods directly come into picture here ? edit : I ask this question...
I've been thinking a bit on how dependency injection could be better integrated directly into a C# like language. I've come up with a potential solution I'd like to hear your opinion on. I haven't used many dependency injection frameworks so there might be something I'm overlooking Anyways, the idea is to be able to d...
Sorry, it is NOT duplicated question, just read it please, I'm totally new to Java world, I'm a .NET developer, and I have a good exprience in ASP.NET. Now I have a task to make a demo for JasperReport, I need QUICK start to Java and Java web application on Apache and then I will figure out how to use JasperReport. Tha...
Both cloud computing (specifically SaaS) and SOA promote the idea of services for transforming software to a commodity. However, most SaaS providers focus mainly on providing the service to the end user, but the products aren't well suited for back-end integration. Most providers provide only an API access to their ser...
I'm trying to understand a constant 0x9e3779b9. What kind of data is this? It's not binary, not decimal, what is this? It's a constant used on the TEA algorithm. It says it's derived from the golden number, but the golden number is 1.618?
I am an email person, but found that at my new job, co-workers use IM a lot. I have to admit that I have been largely ignoring the IM/SMS as a way of communication by thinking it is only for teenagers... The IM-style of communication is quite different from emailing. The sentences are shorter and there is less time f...
Aside from the technical specifics, what should be on your checklist for when you go live with a program? Are there last minute things you can do to make a piece of software go into production smoothly? (assuming you used sound principles in development and tested the average amount) More testing? Discussion with the c...
Title says it all. If the CSV's system delimiter was " (as opposed to a comma or pipe or other common alternatives), how would anything deal with it? The crux of the matter is of course that by definition, CSV will surround any values containing the delimiter with quotation marks, and will convert all quotation marks t...
I work in a small software development company. I just received a NDA and IP contract to sign, but it doesn't have an expiry date. Does this mean that it's a lifetime agreement with the corporation? Lacking an explicit expiry date, is there an implicit date at which the contract expires? If/when I leave the company, d...
The current tendency to ship even the smallest applications (like simple games, tools, etc.) as a Windows Installer (.msi) or even with .exe that can do virtually anything is very annoying. After the application is installed it is run as standard user, but it is useless if during installation it can do what it wants. F...
What Enterprise Service Bus would you use and why?
I never understood why C and C++ compilers try to recover from errors and continue parsing. Almost always, the first error generates a stream of bogus errors that will disappear as soon as the first one is fixed. After several years of experience, I simply stopped looking at any error except the first one of every file...
I'm working on a commercial application that requires .NET 4.0 Client Profile, but I need to make a call to HttpUtility.ParseQueryString, which is not included in the Client Profile but it is in the normal one. So I just figured out that I can use Reflector to get the whole method and all the other required methods fo...
I wrote a small multiplatform app and I am considering publishing the osx version in apple store. I've licensed the app under a GPLv3 license. I sort of like the GPLv3 license but I also like the easiness of apple store. I'm worried about the GPL's "freedom to distribute a copy" requirement - which seems to be incompa...
I'm looking for a comprehensive (or as close as possible) list of all the prototype-programming style javascript work done to date. Does anyone know of such a list somewhere, or have the knowledge to compile it somewhere and then reference it here?
I realize that the "header comment" format varies from programmer to programmer, but what would be an example of a "good" header comment?
I'm in a position where we've got some brittle code that constructs SQL-like queries via text concatenation with parameters for inputs. The data source that it queries is fast and scalable but lacking tool support. Over time, addition entities and properties have been added to the data source that need changing or have...
We had a security audit and it was brilliant. Are there companies that do web usability audit?
In what way(s) is LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) Low Level? (At the time of writing, I did not find this expansion of the abbreviation "LLVM" on its web site, but on Wikipedia.) Is it called "Low Level" in what is it designed for (a compiler infrastructure) or because it is works on a "lower level" than other tools? ...
As someone who has very little experience in it, I would like to know what makes you think that Joomla can fulfill all you requirements?. What makes you choose it over development from scratch (or using a framework like Yii or Kohana). What are the most common or crucial problem that you are facing when using Joomla? S...
When developing an iOS application (freelance) for a customer, how do you handle the iOS Developer Subscription? On the one hand, I have no problem submitting the app using my own subscription. On the other hand, the subscription is per year which means the customer would be dependent on me actually renewing my subscri...
Python 3 was released in December 2008. A lot of time has passed since then but still today many developers hesitate to use Python 3. Even popular frameworks like Django are not compatible with Python 3 yet but still rely on Python 2. Sure, Python 3 has some incompatibilities with Python 2 and some people need to rely ...
I am learning new technologies and doing some small projects to practice these technologies alone. And I want to learn the agile methodolgy along the way but don't know if it's a good or bad idea to learn it alone and how far I can go with it. Another thing what good resources to learn it (books/articles)?
I'm taking a software design class where I should choose an open source software to analyze from the Software Design point of view. It has to be a big project: not less then 100,000 lines of code. I would really like to choose a software that is very well designed and architected to have good insights on good software ...
The question about default values in general - default return function values, default parameter values, default logic for when something is missing, default logic for handling exceptions, default logic for handling the edge conditions etc. For a long time I considered default values to be a "pure evil" thing, somethin...
In my work I have started development of a website/webapp that will be viewed primarily on smartphones and tablet. I have now been given the task of buying the necessary hardware for testing the webapp. As I'm not really a mobile-nerd, I'm not really up to date with the latest and greatest on the mobile market. So I ne...
Is it conceptually feasible to have on a Postgresql Cluster a transactional database and at the same time a datawarehouse that would get feeded by the transactional database ?
I'm using the Repository pattern in my application right now. It is a console-based batch processing tool. Essentially I need the repository to be able to randomly access the data. The trouble I am having is that my data needs to be: read in once (from flat-file) accessed randomly from the repository written out on...
Have you had problems managing information and found ways to effectively manage information? When I say "manage" I'm talking about storing, grouping, tagging, prioritizing, searching, sharing, etc. When I say information I'm talking about website links, feeds, videos, emails, documents, your thoughts, tasks, appointmen...
In game development there is a lot of C/C++, in business applications C#. I have seen C/C++ devs express concern over how a single line of code translates to assembly. In .NET some go into IL, rarely. In C#, "micro-optimizing" is frowned upon, rare and usually a waste of time. This does not appear to be the case i...
In web development, you often hear the terms "element" and "control". The term "element" is often associated with HTML, and you hear the term "control" most often in Asp.NET development... but the w3c refers to controls in the Forms in HTML documents recommendation, blurring the lines a little. What is a control and wh...
Today I posted a question asking about which language C# or Java would be better for me to study. I had some great answers. One thing that came up was that perhaps Java is now rather behind C# with new features. I saw some web links and most pointed out what C# had and what java did not have. So my question to you all...
In recent years, I have only written small components for people in larger projects or small tools. I have never written a unit test and it always seems like learning how to write them and actually making one takes a lot longer than simply firing up the program and testing for real. I am just about to start a fairly la...
My company just bought new computers to replace old 2GB Windows XP machines. Someone on my team noticed that they came with hyperthreading disabled, and told everyone to reboot and turn it on. Is there a benefit to programming on a machine with hyperthreading disabled?
I see the mantra of "profiling before optimization" repeated again and again here, on SO, and elsewhere. Although I certainly use profiling tools, I'm only occasionally surprised by the results. It seems like, as often as not, the profiler is just giving the same information that you could reasonably deduce by knowing ...
As a primarily web-based programmer, a lot of my projects involve significant amounts of text content. In my previous job, I frequently worked with a project manager notorious for his unwillingness to proof-read, or to even use basic spell-check software. I regularly corrected the text content he provided for grammar,...
Recently I was asked to show "a page with code" for a job interview. Being mainly a back-end programmer, and that's the position I applied for, I first said to the person I was talking to exactly that: PHP is executed at the server and therefore not visible by just giving a "page". However, following their desire, I ...
As a programmer, I enjoy embarking on small personal projects and I have a load of open source scripts that I host on github. I am very much a programmer and not a designer. However, it is inevitable that sometimes I am forced to design. These are usually cases where there is no point in paying for a designer, but i...
I'm trying to learn cloud-computing, especially the idea of distributed operations (Grid Computing?) for a project I'm working on. We'll need to perform distributed fault-tolerant operations over a very large data set, which we will also be responsible for storing and maintaining in an optimized way. If I'm trying to ...
I always find myself wrestling with this... trying to find the right balance between try/catching and the code not becoming this obscene mess of tabs, brackets, and exceptions being thrown back up the call stack like a hot potato. For example, I have an app I'm developing right now that uses SQLite. I have a Databas...
I have a data layer that strictly interacts with the database and returns the result into a model. I have an asynchronous connection with the DB so sometimes I have to chain results where I have to do many queries. I have about 1000 lines of code in a single class and It's getting hard to manage. My question is, how...
I'm having a debate with a colleague over the correct usage (if any) of trigger_error in the context of magic methods. Firstly, I think that trigger_error should be avoided except for this one case. Say we have a class with one method foo() class A { public function foo() { echo 'bar'; } } Now say we w...
I am taking over management and development of a website developed in Java using Hibernate and Postgres, running on Apache/Tomcat. I am an experienced Java developer, and have experience in Ruby on Rails, and am expert in Oracle SQL. What is the best documentation for me to read?
I'm adding functionality to our website which performs long-running processes asynchronously using MSMQ. Doing this ansynch, however means we need to notify users when their requests are completed. Using the command pattern, I created an interface* called INotify and composed that into the message class, so the message...
I've been a software engineer in .NET for the past 3.5 years, and did my own integration and unit testing, but nothing too extensive. Now I'm being interviewed for an entry level QA job, and I wanted to know what concepts I should become familiar with.
I am a programming intern at a company in Australia. Is it normal for a programmer to be given a project that has to be completed within a week? For example, I have been given a task to create a Facebook app for one of the companies we have, I have 2 years experience at University in a Bachelor of Computer Science & my...
How would you distinguish the man from the machine?
I'm currently evaluating Hibernate Envers 3.6.2.Final; an auditing module part of Hibernate. As far as I am in my evaluation, I feel a little disappointed by Envers. I would expect much more from it : More clear documentation The documentation is sparse or unclear; lack of small drawings in the document More activi...
If I want to bundle fonts and images with an application released under the GPL, are there specific requirements for the license of these assets?
I was hoping to brainstorm a little bit on the subject of storing n-gram data. In my project, I am trying to solve linguistic problems where I know all (n-1) data items and want to statistically guess my n using linear interpolation over all applicable n-grams. (Yes, there is a tagger that assigns tags to known words a...
I am always hearing people talk about how Java does not support first class functions, that it is an advantage you get from functional languages, the only way to simulate it in Java is through the use of anonymous inner classes etc.. However, from what I can see Java does support first functions through the use of its...
Our shop is attempting to move towards a more "distributed" architecture. I didn't want to use the term "SOA" because I'm not really sure if that's appropriate in our situation. For each new feature that is developed, a new service (WCF in our case) is created specifically for that feature. A feature is defined as new ...
Say you have tests for two methods of a class. The first method gathers data from another tier and puts it into some sort of storage independent of the runtime (such as a SQL table), so all of the data handled by this test is hardcoded into the test. The second method is responsible for taking data from where the first...
Unit tests are never perfect at capturing functionality, particularly in certain parts of an application (such as the GUI), so everyone needs some measure of black box testing. Does TDD have anything to say regarding black box testing? If it does not say much, could it be true that while writing unit tests is the devel...
Assume that I know zero about freelancing, but I am a good .NET programmer. I want to start freelancing. How would I get started?
...One of the most important features a new employee should have is compatibility with the spirit of the people who already work there. {...} I am convinced that gaining insight into the developer's real personality is just as important as checking for professional competence, because one bad fit can destroy an en...
Can having too many senior programmers in one team turn out to be a bad thing? Having like say, 4-5 senior programmers in a team of 6-7 people. What is the optimal number/ratio in these kind of situations? Can this lead to too much philosophy and arguments about ideas? Has anyone had such an experience, that can share...
IBM's Watson has a lot of book information encoded into a 'database' that Watson searches in real time. Does anyone know how that information is coded? It seems hard to imagine how humans could type in all of those rules.
I'm working on a project where we're adding automated testing to an existing project. We're starting with a central component, and setting up both unit tests at the code module level, and tests that run on the whole component, albeit in the developer environment. The intent is that this test suite must pass before co...
It seems alot of times on stackoverflow, that people (programmers especially) tend to over complicate a solution to a problem to where the solution is vastly much more complicated then the original problem? Im not an expert by any means, but alot of times I try to go with the simplest solution that works (and obviously...
I'm working on an ERP Project where two Members(Freshers) in my team are not performing well (for small tasks). Their work is littered with bugs and other issues. As I'm a Team Lead in this Project, I end up having to write their code/tasks. This may be creating a heavy burden for me as I have to speed up things everyd...
I work in an organization that does extensive Java development. Our group is small with a short-lived project, agile development charter. We will leverage existing QA resources of other groups, and potentially contribute code to customers and partners. The primary arguments against Scala development have been: QA wi...
Whenever I find myself writing the same logic more than once, I usually stick it in a function so there is only one place in my application I have to maintain that logic. A side effect is that I sometimes end up with one or two line functions such as: function conditionMet(){ return x == condition; } OR function ru...
One of the major advantages of software transactional memory that always gets mentioned is composability and modularity. Different fragments can be combined to produce larger components. In lock-based programs, this is often not the case. I am looking for a simple example illustrating this with actual code. I'd pref...
I occasionally worry that when I borrow snippets of code from websites, etc. there's at least the theoretical possibility that this will be copyright infringement. However, small pieces of code to accomplish common tasks may be too unoriginal for copyright and in practice this kind of sharing happens all the time. Wh...
These posts seem related, but my brain is starting to melt, trying to think this through :P My employer has just started using source control, primarily because before they hired more developers, the "repository" was the hard drive of the lone dev, who works mainly from home. All of the .NET code he'd written was check...
Just found out something rather interesting about Reddit's database schema: The way we’ve changed is we use an “open schema”. Sometimes it’s called “entity attribute value”. It’s basically a large key value store. We have two types of tables for every data type. There is a “thing” table, and then a “data”...
In licenses such as that of libjpeg and freetype, there are clauses like the following: (2) If only executable code is distributed, then the accompanying documentation must state that "this software is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group". or: o Redistribution in binary form must provide a d...
How do you differentiate a web application from websites? It's language/platform agnostic.
I was wondering what would be the best method for creating a web end for interfacing with a C++ program on the server. At first I simply thought just using shell execution from the web server side language (like shell_exec() in PHP), but I was wondering if there is a "better" way. Maybe something more native or is this...
Does a web application have to live in a browser to be called a web application? Or is a thin client that uses a web service for most of it's functionality a web applicaiton?
i was working on a website with FF4 and while resizing an element with Firebug, FF4 just crashed my nVidia Display Driver. Fortunately Windows 7 was able to help me by recovering from this serious error and i was able to completely recover my work again. So my question is, should those browser developers get into low l...
There is an overhead associated with continuous integration, e.g., set up, re-training, awareness activities, stoppage to fix "bugs" that turn out to be data issues, enforced separation of concerns programming styles, etc. At what point does continuous integration pay for itself? EDIT: These were my findings The set-up...
Let us say I am writing a Facebook like application. I write code like below $this->get_user_friends(); then next morning the boss says that we don't want to call Friends friends anymore, we will call them Pal. Then all the templates are changed but what about the code above? After 2 years when some programmer will ...
This was my experience at a previous company. As it was a small startup company, some of the normal software development procedures were not followed strictly. One of my colleagues was a senior programmer with the company for 2 years. His skills were quite lacking. He would allocate his tasks to me and then take cr...
I've used some older languages before C# and I always felt the need to comment what I was doing so it is clear for anyone who reads the code. But now that I use C# decently, I often feel that it's a pain to write most of the comments because I feel like I state the obvious. So unless I do complicated formulas or algor...
Suppose I have a situation where I'm designing a website for a shoe reseller. They have different brands and kinds of shoes and of course, they want a really good search function. So there are different properties that shoes can have. They can have exclusive properties, such as size, width, gender, and children's/adul...
I think most web developers will agree that it is often easier getting something to work well in most browsers, but not as much in IE. I was wondering: When designing/developing a website, how important do you think IE-friendliness is? I mean, how worth it is it to bust yourself trying to make a website that works perf...
So when choosing what language to use for a project, in an ideal world the language is chosen because it's the right tool for the job. However, I often prefer to use a language that I am fluent in rather than one I would have to learn or that I am only conversational in. Of course language fluency also entails knowle...
I'm trying to think of a nice and easy way to do this, but I thought I'd run it past some people for a second opinion: Say you've got 8 clients (one project for each customer) and each project derives from a core project. If a bug is raised that has to be fixed in core, our current approach is to create a bug and clone...
As a newbie, I am overwhelmed by the amount of information out there and the amount of self-direction that one needs to develop as a programmer. How did you get oriented in the programming world? Are textbooks really the way to go? Or is it best to find a mentor? Was there some sort of guide or should there be some sor...
From a developer point of view which platform would you consider for a large social web application? If you could provide some details on what you consider to be the strengths of which alternative it would be great.
I am writing my first research paper on distributed storage systems. We also have a prototype working (partially). The project was a complete implementation based project where we envisage to take this project a step further and do some future development. So, my questions are: 1. How should I go about creating the "sk...
I've recently finished reading a couple of Gerald Weinberg books on Quality Software Management. In them, he strongly recommends that organizations distinguish between software failures (which we would call bugs) and software faults, i.e. coding errors. He also recommends than an organization keeps separately track of ...
This question relates to a one I asked earlier: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5448574/under-what-conditions-could-we-justify-an-attempt-to-introduce-a-one-size-fits-al When re-reading "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software" by Eric Evans, I noticed that the possibility of achieving a ...
Why should I use this software instead of, say, Microsoft Project? What kind of level of familarisation with TFS does it demand? Is there anything similar I could use with SVN instead?
We wasted a lot of time on our last integration test on a bug that I think should have been found in unit testing. The problem was that an interface / service we called behaved different than we expected and the unit test didn't find this problem because we mocked that interface for the unit test and our mock was of co...
I have a number of machines running VS, and each has a slightly different config - display styles, installed plugins, source control extensions, project templates, service packs and so on. Not only is this annoying when moving from machine to machine but also I have no real way of wiping an install and starting again....
I have been in several software projects but not as a leader. In all the projects we all knew the tools and languages etc. before the project started. I am wondering if it is ok or is it a good practice to have a time for developers to familiarize themselves with tools and technologies after project kicks off (eg. Aft...
I'm working on a project that has very tight schedule. I don't have much time to code and test (even though I work more than 12 hours everyday, it's still delayed), and the result is very fragile. Its code is also very dilemma. This program is used by all offices in our customer's company, which is located in many coun...
I'm moving to a new company, with a new team lead. I find that this is a great time to set our mutual expectations from each other, to help us both start the role on the right foot. Do you have ideas what expectations I should set from him? In what areas should I determine his expectations from me?
I feel like a reasonably qualified programmer, but a lot of job postings I run into make me feel otherwise. Almost all of them separate qualifications into requirements and desirables, but even the requirements part can be daunting. I've seen a lot of postings that say they require several years (2 or more) experience ...

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