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I'm working on a project at the moment and I'm currently looking for some sources regarding creating GUI mockups. In my case, I'm creating basic diagrams with the intended layout of the design to ensure it will work correctly and consistently. What is this called? I've seen various names for it, including: GUI Prototy...
There's a lot of good idioms promoted in modern C++. These include RAII and elegant use of boost or STL or a std::algorithm to solve a given problem. Just like you can write C in any language, you can certainly write C in C++. However you can write really good modern C++ code with the right subset of features. When s...
I often hear co-workers saying to each other, "That's a horrible, horrible hack." What I can take away from that is that it's not good. When I asked them if it works they say "yes, but it's not good". Does that mean it's not a good solution? How is a solution bad if it works? Is it due to good practice? Or not maintain...
I have been working (alone) on an open-source project without using any sort of formal version control. I recently started using Git and GitHub for this project and am wondering if it is possible for me to build a code/commit history based off of the archived, older versions of the code that I have. Development thus fa...
For instance if I had only ASCII characters and then switched to Unicode now I have to consider special characters, and bigger strings or chars. What else along these lines should I be considering? I'm assuming a Unicode string contains special characters as well, but other than that, what am I missing?
I am starting to use the LOCAL scope in ColdFusion 9. I am trying to figure when to use it and when NOT to use it. Can you tell me the advantages/disadvantages of using the LOCAL scope either way? Should LOCAL be used on every page, or just in functions? WHICH SHOULD BE USED? <cfset ImageHeight = 36> <cfset ImageWid...
I'm familiar with architecture evaluation methods such as the technical Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) and more business-oriented Cost Benefit Analysis Method (CBAM). However, these methods are fairly large scale: they prescribe several brainstorming sessions, presentations, development of a host of scena...
Here is a plugin I wish to redistribute: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/TextAreaResizer I've written a Jquery plugin that needs the text resizer as a prerequisite. The license type says: License type: Simplified BSD License/FreeBSD License I did a bit of googling and it said you have to retain all license info, bu...
I was asked this in an interview test. I did okay on the test but didn't know enough to answer this question. I am curious to know what data structures I can use to query the data quickly. Basically the idea is there would be road sections (lines, made up of points) stored in some kind of data structure. It should be q...
I've currently inherited an application at work and to my dismay, I have realized that the user passwords stored in the database are encrypted using an in house encryption function, which also includes the ability to decrypt. So all someone really needs to do is copy the user table and copy the encryption assembly (any...
Given the Sony data breach and other events recently, is there any actual laws or regulation regarding how to store passwords? I think there are with credit cards, you're not allowed to store the 3 digit key or something. Is it illegal to actually store plaintext passwords without warning the user? Or it there a level ...
I have been asked to create guidelines for review CSS, JS and HTML. I know there are coding guidelines for JS but I don't know any about HTML and CSS. To review JS I will certainly follow those guidelines and mention them. But what about CSS and HTML? Apart from logical errors and indentation issues, are there any spec...
What are some pros and cons to learning functional programming before other paradigms?
In our company we have 3 teams working on different software. The level they are working on is very diverse from 8/16 bit microcontroller in C , via 32bit arm on C++ under winCE to PC software developed with C# and windev. The tools and procedures we all use are roughly the same, although some teams use VSS and others ...
I was recently encouraged by a potential employer to go out and buy a book and begin learning ADA. I generally find that starting out with a good book, then supplementing that learning with continued research on-line with reference as needed to the book is the best way that I learn. What books would you recommend to ...
Every time I read about Oracle programmers etc, I get confused. I don't know what exactly they do. From my understanding, application programmers need to develop the core functionality. The libraries they use might help in GUI development or database connectivity but the functionality that makes that application that a...
There are lots of great books and resources out there about managing new software developments, but very little that I've seen about managing ongoing maintenance of software systems. I'm not talking about big enhancements, I'm talking about the little 1 or 2 day bug fixes and updates that quickly accumulate once a syst...
I am looking for (common / abstract) templates and examples for the (end user) documentation of software. I especially need something for an "Installation Guide", an "Operation Guide" (operation / service / administration of the software), "User Guide" and "training documents". I have googled around, haven't found usab...
I am trying build a social media site, but I need a hands on senior engineer/architect to guide and assist me in the server-side development since I am a rookie. Technology (which I am familliar with) to be used includes Java, JAX-RS, Spring and Hibernate. Unfortunately, I dont know what other technology skills an engi...
What is the best practice to develop a visual component in Flex Hero? I do it like this: I consider a component has 2 "parts", the declarative part (the visual sub-components) which I define in the skin (just mxml) and the code part (event handlers...) which I define in an action script class. I load the skin in the ct...
Is it true that platform independency is more of a myth today? Because programmers look for efficiency and power over portability which have to be compromised to some extent when achieving platform independency. On the other hand architecture neutrality is welcomed because it provides a very powerful way to make a soft...
I often have to deal with customers or users which are reporting errors in applications. Most of the time their content is something useless as ERROR!!! x does not work without much more information. For resolving the issue I have to request every single detail of them, which often is more time consuming than fixing...
I'm pretty new to code review, and I feel often overwhelmed by incoming changes. I mean when there are serious code changes, coming from several developers I tend to accept everything without reviewing the whole, especially when I have lots of stuff to finish up. What are the techniques to help in being efficient in th...
I have read the WCAG documentation and I am confused. Does compliance to WCAG 1 AA preclude the use of Javascript?
We have a small team (2-3) of programmers writing a program with a lot of forms and dialogs. We have a problem where we cannot keep good consistency in what we write, or how we write it. The latest issue I've noted is that we have lots of places where we have a date range, and we use all kinds of wording to indicate t...
I have just started a new job as a front end web developer, this is my second day and I have just been handed quite a big project that involves lots of javascript which I dont know, this is leaving me extremely stressed (last night I couldnt get to sleep with worry) basically I got the job from the boss of the company ...
Our team works with a large number of different APIs and services, and we also have our own internal tooling and services we maintain as well. Right now, we do not have a good centrally managed system to list which projects we used a certain API on, or to attach documentation for all of our utilities/apis. I beli...
Today I was browsing through a book on SQL Server optimization and it seemed that a certain amount of the ideas were based on a linear model of storage. As SSDs have a completely different storage model, do they in any way change the game in regards to how one thinks about database tuning or optimization?
I'm tasked to use an API on a small embedded linux device. The use of the API is rather simple, but there are a gazillion of (face it, not documented) parameters to control multiple aspects of the codec. These parameters seem to be undocumented because they are not the responsibility of the codec supplier but core comp...
I recently stumbled accross this article from a few years ago. It argues that significant differences in the culture surrounding VB and C#, not the actual differences in the language, contribute to C# coders being generally more talented than VB coders. Obviously, that caused a lot of flame wars and the question of whe...
We're a client that recently hired a contract programming company for some fairly focused work (essentially writing 'scripts' to extend the functionality of a third-party enterprise application). We're trying to evaluate their performance on and the value of some work they did for us, but we're a little new to using co...
I have written an app for the computer in java, but i don't want to give it out for free. I only want to charge somewhere between $0.99 - $2.99, is there a website that i can upload it to, to do this for me. I am looking for something like the apple app store, or the android market, but for the computer. Does this exis...
I have a application which will be available in 4 languages: French, German, Danish and English. All the text in the app will be translated, but should the EULA also be translated? What is the common way of handling this? The lawyer has accepted the english version of the EULA and I assume all the translated versions s...
I'm developing mobile applications for Windows Phone 7. This application calls some web services and occasionally sends responses out via web services. I recently started looking into MVVM and noticed that, although it is suggested when developing applications in WP7, alot of developers say only to use it if its necess...
What are the pros and cons of outsourcing development and testing to two different companies? EDIT: Why do you prefer outsourcing development and testing to different companies or to the same company?
I'm finishing up a personal project in which I've implemented a library that I expect others may want to use. Without going into too much detail, the library provides a cross-platform interface for parsing a particular type of file, where none had existed before (at least in this language). The project was fun and re...
I'm just looking for some advice/best practice for this situation: We have a solution with a couple of web sites in it (one is a web site project, the other is a web application project). We have both of these sites set up to use our installed IIS (v7), as we have other projects that we need to access these via localh...
As a software developer, one of my main tasks is to keep complexity under control. However, in some projects, there is a moment when the complexity level grows so high that it reaches some kind of "no return" point. Past this moment, you can never return the project to an acceptable level of complexity in less time tha...
This article about application architecture design mentions "User Process Components" as part of the presentation layer. User process components. Your user process components help synchronize and orchestrate user interactions. This way the process flow and state management logic is not hard-coded in the user interface...
I've recently acquired a laptop with an Intel i3 CPU and an AMD/ATI 6300 card, running Ubuntu 10.10. How do I proceed in setting up a development environment that allows me to program the GPU? I assume I'll have to use OpenCL (CUDA is NVIDIA-only), but since I'm a novice with GPU programming, I'm asking the advice from...
We are internally debating in our team if we should continue to run our production boxes with logs turned off completely and just log errors and exceptions with log rotations. I want to know how everyone else logs info in their production environment and any particular strategy/tool that has worked well for you. Thanks...
I have been working as a maintenance programmer for a couple of years and am wondering if there is such a thing as a raise for maintenance programmer? I ask because responsibilities don't get wider, you're still doing almost the same things, maybe a little faster as time passes. If it's possible, then what would be th...
I'm reading about Algebraic Data Types (thanks to Richard Minerich I found this excellent explanation of the concept). While I think I understand the notion of sum types and product types etc., what I'm not quite understanding is how Algebraic Data Types are useful beyond specifying pattern matching. What other things...
My company has a suite of mature (roots go back 15+ years), computationally intensive applications (simulations) which we use to do consulting work. I work on the simulation/consulting side of the house, not the software development side. I recently learned about a particular feature of the architecture which concern...
I had an interview with a well known company. After completing the first round of interview, I was confident that I would be short-listed for the second round. But little did I know that my second round would be a disaster. The second round started and the interviewer asked me to tell him about my profile. Once this wa...
I'm not too, too far (I hope) from finishing a site. I want to have it reviewed with an eye to its accessibility. The site's job is to display streaming, up-to-the-10-second-period stock-option data. Does anyone know of a group or forum where I can post a request for a review of the site's accessibility? Thanks!
Developing iOS or OSX based applications typically requires knowledge of Objective C, since XCode is highly tailored to this language. Android, on the other hand, has chosen Java as it's preferred language for app development. Now, I know other programming languages can be used to develop applications on either platfor...
Are there any gotchas in contributing public domain code to an open source project? My understanding is that the existence of a copyright gives a project the right to enforce its license. And public domain code is, by definition, non-copyrighted. What I'm specifically curious about: If an employee of the US governmen...
General OO teaches us to encapsulate and best practices teach us organization. So we end up with re-useable self-documenting code that relieves us of any details regarding implementation. So, if I need to invoke the windows command line I use my command line class. class CommandLine { CommandLine(){} Invoke(st...
What was the single point of failure encountered when your company decided to replace the current processes with SCRUM? Can you give me some examples of things that have gone really wrong when a company tried to introduce SCRUM? I'd like to hear your anecdotes, something you experienced yourself, the big fail that you ...
My application has 3 shipping methods, the cheapest of which is free. The free shipping option is only available for orders totaling over $100. As soon as I built it, I thought of a way a user could easily circumvent this. Add items to the cart totaling over $100, then select your free shipping, then edit your cart to...
We basicly have project that always turn around the same pattern. But, it sometime happens that we have project that go absolutly at the opposite of what we usualy do. It become now more difficult to bid and give this bidding to a potential client. In harder case, there's sometime things which look very difficult to do...
Right now, I use Python for my quick scripts and prototypes (e.g. algorithms, my pseudocode is very Python-like as well). The oher languages that I am familiar with include Java, C, x86 Assembly and Scheme, and Python is pretty much the best for this among these in my opinion. Perl gets a lot of rep for this over and o...
Lately, I've been working a lot in PHP and specifically within the WordPress framework. I'm noticing a lot of code in the form of: if ( 1 == $options['postlink'] ) Where I would have expected to see: if ( $options['postlink'] == 1 ) Is this a convention found in certain languages / frameworks? Is there any reason the...
My company just recently invested in the Mono for Android tools for Visual Studio as we have a lot of .NET developers and were impressed with how powerful the monodroid tools seemed. After reading the ZDNet Post I was saddened to see that this project may be dead. Is there anyone out there who might know anything more ...
I work for a large corporation and I want to keep my skills fresh. I think contributing to an open source project would help, especially if I ever want a job at a startup. I have heard that large companies often own any development employees do outside of work. Could I face legal consequences by contributing to an open...
I am looking for a tool to manage requirements or features for a software development project. It will be used by a small geographically diverse team of 5-10 people to raise, discuss and track requirements. Consequently it will need: Support for multiple users Web-based Support a hierarchy between requirements, e.g. p...
I'm a programmer, and I'm pretty good at programming. I can easily pick up most technical topics such as Linux, Systems Administration, Databases and of course, new programming languages. I even dabbled with 3d modelling and wasn't horrible at it. However, I am awful at Graphic Design. I have no skill there whatsoever...
I'm in the early stages of development for a web application that has three developers (myself included) working on it. The project is, at its core, a web-based database that will be used by around 5,000 people. Its primary purpose is to track information about game characters while enforcing a set of rules and securit...
Dijkstra writes here: Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. I do not understand the latter part of this quote. Can you please explain or elaborate? P.S. I have grown up in India. I speak Bengali at home; I spea...
The question says it all really. I want to provide a service but I do not want to store any of the data myself in a database. With all the recent news of hacking etc it seems to me that it is nicer that clients have complete control over their data. The problem is that the data stored is potentially sensitive. What I w...
If there are 20 bit columns (non-null boolean), is it better to explicitly hold them in an integer type (int32)? Or, will the underlying database merge them in a single integer? I'm using PostgreSQL, though. Generally, is using bit-mask in SQL databases kind of anti-pattern? Backgrounds: The usage of these bit columns ...
So my teacher tells me that it is very important to not encapsulate the program code and the graphical interface code in the same classes, But to keep them completely independent. Im currently writing an iphone game with a grid in it. to me it makes much more sense to Create both the graphical grid and the technical co...
At the moment I'm 23 and working as a junior programmer at a software service provider. While I'm really happy with my job and my colleagues, I sometimes would love to have someone who could tell me what is bad about my code (architecture and so on), why it is bad AND what could I do to make it better. As we have no se...
Imagine that your current workplace is a Java shop. There is a lot of built-up knowledge about the Java language and there is a comprehensive build and deployment process in place to handle everything in a smooth and Agile manner. One day, a project comes along that just screams out to be written in, say, Ruby. Only t...
Surely two people sitting together doing countless other jobs you would see the same benefits. Why has programming been singled out for this practice?
I am looking at how to justify changes to those who control budgets. For example if we have Enterprise Library 4 on some systems and the latest version is 5, is it worth upgrading? How do you justify it? Is it best to continually try to keep frameworks that systems use up to date. Or is it better to do a major lift eve...
This is a long story but I will try to summarize it as best I can. We are a .NET shop that writes software for a variety of different types of funds. For example, we write health claims management software, pension management software, 401(k) software and some other financial-type things. Now we are entering a new real...
I'm an experienced developer which quite some experience in meta programming. I just found my way to Ruby and want to understand more of Rails (and related) project internals. Even if I understand the high level concepts, it's hard to get an overview of those projects. I wonder how other people approach that problem? H...
I have a huge program that I have been developing for almost 2 years. It will probably go commercial in about 6-9 months, but seeing as it is just me developing it, I'd had almost zero feedback about the code (efficiency, maintainability, proper use of best practices, etc.). I would really like to have someone or sever...
I've got to dive into a very large PHP site and have my first client meeting today. All they gave me so far was the URL. How do you guys go about gathering/structuring/documenting and preparing for a new project in a PHP environment? What things do you ask for up front? PS - I know there are other general questions ab...
I am a hardware/infrastructure guy going back to school to get my degree (FINALLY...) and am taking some low level intro programming classes. On top of the JAVA I am working on at school, I am also tinkering around in some other languages. I work in a shop with some very talented developers and am attempting to learn...
With Javascript appearing to be the ubiquitous programming language of the web over the next few years, new frameworks popping up every five minutes and event driven programming taking a lead both server and client side: Do you as a Javascript developer consider the traditional Design Patterns as important or less impo...
I was wondering if anyone has successfully used Windows Workflow Foundation for a BusinessRules/Validation engine, or if you know of some sample code or articles about this. If you have used it before, what do you think of it? How is it compared to other BusinessRule/Validation systems? I am thinking of rules like if ...
I've been asked to support a Java EE application. The data model was poorly-designed and will not support several necessary use cases; so I'm developing a new data model using EclipseLink (the old one was built on iBATIS). Mind you, I'm no EclipseLink guru, and still have many questions about the best ways to utilize i...
We currently use Team Foundation Server to do our builds. I know we can tell TFS to keep our builds for a certain amount of time or keep them indefinitely. What if we want to keep some or all of our builds indefinitely in case we need to go back to them for some reason? Do any of you use source control to store your...
I'm developing a web site in php in localhost and as modules of it gets completed, I upload it on the cloud so that my friends can alpha test it. As I keep developing, I've lots of files and I lose track of which file I've edited or changed etc. I've heard of something as 'version control' to manage all those but am no...
I'm currently working on a small library as a hobby project. I am the only one who actively codes for it, but a few of my friends have expressed interest in participating in the future. When using the library for my own purposes, I usually just add the appropriate source files to my project using an IDE. (E.g., dragg...
I've encountered bugs that are extremely difficult to reproduce reliably and/or explain definitively, but that appear to be solved. When this happens, how much time should I spend chasing it down? Example: this SO question and this related jQuery forum post, which offer differing solutions. The issue was reproducible...
I haven't done any serious web development stuff since last year because of family/time issues. I need to get back into it because it's my career choice and I'll be finished with my associates degree soon. I decided to revamp a previous website I helped the owner build. After deciding what to change, I couldn't make up...
The one thing that I am having a hard time figuring out with developing an extensible application platform in ASP.NET MVC 3 is how to modularize everything into an easy to update and distributable form. The ideal solution I think would be to be able to pack everything up is some compressed file like zip/rar/tar (but s...
In mathematics, there are notations for asymptotic lower bounds, upper bounds, and tight (within-a-constant-factor) bounds. When describing the growth of functions in general, it makes sense that all three might be relevant to some function or other. In algorithm analysis, asymptotic notation is usually used to describ...
I'm a .NET developer who's eying up new jobs for a change of pace. My career so far has led me to become quite proficient with C#, WPF, WinForms, MSSQL, and all kinds of goodies in the .NET framework including Entities, Parallel Tasks, etc. However one thing that I'm obviously lacking is ASP skills. Nearly every job in...
I come from a scientific biology background where we also use Python a lot. Now that I've begun to start with Web development, I've consistently found myself wondering just why it is that JavaScript is the primary client-side language on the Web. Is JavaScript's predominance a historical accident or something else? ...
When it comes to very small projects (just a few devs), how effective are distributed version-control systems (e.g., git) compared to systems with a central repository? I like the idea of having a central repository because it seems much more elegant and organized. However, after watching Linus Torvalds's Google Talk,...
Why has Ubuntu committed to a 6-month release cycle? Why should it have a fixed cycle at all? Doesn't that go against the "if it ain't broken don't fix it" saying?
We know about the deferred execution or lazy evaluation features introduced in C#. But at times, people become confused with them. Because there is no significant difference. You can only know if you know the internals. Shouldn't there be a syntactical difference between them to remove confusion? I think the keyword le...
I've been working as part of my service company for a client (ClientA) for a year now on building a platform. A few weeks ago another client (clientB) asked me for a quote for building a similar product. I said to clientB that we have been working on a similar product for a client and that we have a mature platform th...
Is there are a widely accepted standard for formatting SQL queries? I've never been given any guidance as to the "typical" or "standard" way of doing it. I've seen three styles in the wild, and prefer the second: All caps: SELECT GROUP_NAME FROM GROUP_TABLE WHERE GROUP_CODE = 'GRP37X'; Reserved words in lower case...
Do you think it's a good practice to implement a possibilty to allow an administrator user to login in as another user, by-passing password? This could by implemented by a master password or a function inside the user administration, "Login as this user". Administrators are asking for a such function to be able to try...
I like to write small GUI applications using Java and Swing, something like a client for the social website Tumblr Should I use Eclipse RCP or the Netbeans platform? And what benefits do I get from using either one over using plain swing/SWT? Do RCP applications require more dependencies than those developed using Swin...
I fairly understand that this Q+A site is programmers destination and questions on hosting are not permitted here, but anyone who has heard of Google's App. Engine is well aware that this question is suited for this site only. Google App. Engine supports either Java or Python interpreter. I want to know what type of ap...
I have reading about variety of frameworks for web applications like OpenRasta, Django, CodeIgniter etc. It is a passion of developers to dip their hands on any new technology, but from the job-seeker's point of view, what is the significance of these new buzzes. Is it better for a job-seeker to stick with the standard...
From time to time, I find myself copying a bit of code and modifying the copied version. I know very well that having two copies of the same code is a very bad idea, but those pieces of code are small and have significant differences. The problem is, when modifying the copy, I sometimes forget some piece of the origina...
At my company I am trying to make a case for why we should be doing TDD. Currently most developers just do whatever they can to get the project done, then go add unit tests after the fact in order to meet manager metrics. Any examples from reputable companies doing TDD and seeing the benefits would be greatly appreciat...
There are numerous questions on this site regarding questions to ask a potential employer during an interview. However, I was wondering if there were specific questions that should be asked when having an interview at a small start up? Working at a new start-up is different from any employer I've had to date, and I wa...
I am a Realtor in a large metro area. Our MLS provider is building the next generation of its MLS software on Flash. Many in the beta test group are against this, citing numerous reasons including lack of native iPad compatibility, buggy behavior, and the general assertion that Flash is simply the "wrong" platform upon...
After reading through a few "job hopping" related threads recently, I've been thinking how the opposite of job hopping can also be a problem. I've known many people (especially in large, relatively sluggish companies) who got comfortable in a cushy and unchallenging role and stayed around for a very long time - say 10...
I've recently learnt regular expressions and I love writing / using them. I'm looking for ideas and more opportunities to use them, however I don't want to overuse them as an all purpose tool, as often warned by people. What kind of things should I use regular expressions for, and where should I not use them? (Apart fr...
Some company is selling software through Apple's App Store which uses portions of code that I released publicly under the GPL. The company is violating the licensing terms in two ways, by (1) not preserving my copyright statement, and not releasing their code under the GPL license and (2) by distributing my GPL-license...

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