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I've always been of the mindset that properties (ie, their set/get operations) should be fast/immediate and failure-free. You should never have to try/catch around getting or setting a property. But I'm looking at some ways to apply role-based security on the properties of some objects. For instance an Employee.Salary ...
A couple of friends at work an me are going to set up a little startup / create our own software, probably moonlighting at first, since we cant yet afford to quit our day jobs. Neither of us has have this experience, we've all worked for other companies before, where a set of guidelines are set, and I think this is the...
Have you ever let your coding standards slip to meet deadlines or save time? I'll start with a trivial example: We came up with a coding standard at work around which brackets/formatting to use and so on. I ignore it and use the auto-format tool in netbeans.
Situation is I have a number of in-house clients who continue to have trouble grasping the concept of defining clear requirements for a project and committing to them. Unfortunately my job situation is that I can't decline such projects, and I am often forced into situations that I can tell are doomed to scope creep (o...
Today, my manager told me that I must work over time to make up for a lack of planning and project management. Instead of incentivizing this unpaid mandatory overtime, my manager has made it clear I have no choice in the matter. This isn't a single project. We currently have a dozen projects all on the go at one time, ...
I work in the web development industry and we implement a time tracking system to log our time (Project/time/comment). In the beginning of a project, we create a contract, and decide upon a price based on our hourly rate x estimated hours. We log out times to see if we go "over budget". Is time tracking in this indust...
I started seriously programming as a hobbiest, student and then intern about 4 years ago and I've always done small projects on the side as a learning exercise. Schools over now though, and I spend my days at work as a software developer. I would still love to do projects on the side to learn about areas in computer s...
To what extent do you unit test internal/private components of a class/module/package/etc? Do you test them at all or do you just test the interface to the outside world? An example of these internal is private methods. As an example, imagine a recursive descent parser, which has several internal procedures (functions/...
I have no clue where to put the following class and I've noticed I just keep putting them in a helpers folder which isn't much helpfull towards reusability in future projects. Example: I want to have the ability to use the DisplayNameAttribute together with resource files. In order for this to work I made a LocalizedD...
Our software dev team is currently using kanban for our development lifecycles, and, from the reasonably short experience of a few months, I think it's going quite well (certainly compared to a few months ago when we didn't really have a methodology). Our team, however, is directed to do work defined by project manager...
I must do a quick assessment of dozens of fresh students very quickly. I have 30 minutes meeting with each of them (in two or three days). I want to use most of the time to discuss non technical aspects. So I plan to use 10 minutes for technical questions. The same questions for all of them. They are all hired already ...
As I get it, having an error (even a typo like or missing ";") in your whiteboard code will often cost you some interview points. Avoiding that will inevitably make one proof-reading code again and again (losing time and possibly neural energy / concentration) or even using a simpler (and thus less effective) algorithm...
As a software developer, I've worked on projects ranging from tiny home-made apps to medium-size enterprise applications. In nearly every project I used a database or regretted choosing not to use it from the beginning. Now, I am wondering a few things about the databases and their usage in general applications: Why W...
In my web application, I give the user the option to import all of his/her contacts from their email account, and then send out invites to all of these accounts or map the user to the existing accounts based on emails. Now the question, is once all of these contacts are imported, would it be right to save these contac...
I thought about it and could not come up with an example. Why would somebody want to catch an exception and do nothing about it? Can you give an example? Maybe it is just something that should never be done.
I think the world now programs in English-based programming languages not only because of historical/economic circumstances, but because the English morphology in particular has some properties that suit algorithmic thinking best. But anyway it would be interesting to hear your opinions on this, especially if you are m...
I'm in the throes of getting myself enrolled in school to get a CS degree. The school I am looking at actually offers both Java- and C++-based for the introductory software development courses (object-oriented programming, design patterns, that sort of thing). It is student's choice which track to follow, but there is ...
When interviewing for a job, is there a delicate yet accurate way to find out if they have insane policies, like "no open source", or "no installing software without permission", "not upgrading software until it's about to lose support", or "no visiting blogs"?
In work we have just started using the Scrum methodology, it is working well but I have a question on the daily sprint meetings. We set aside 15 minutes for the meeting (between the three devs and the scrum master if we think he is needed) but I have found that we have normally finished by 5 minutes. This might be beca...
This is one of the things that I hate most when I see it in someone else's code. I know what it means and why some people do it this way ("what if I accidentally put '=' instead?"). For me it's very much like when a child goes down the stairs counting the steps out loud. Anyway, here are my arguments against it: It di...
Before my current job, I was always involved in the technical aspects of a project like: architecture design performance security etc Now I'm team lead of a project that's a game on a web site (not mine) and somehow got involved in the business side of the project: what users expect ads showing in which pages of the...
And why do most programmers quit coding and become managers so early compared to other areas? You can work as a construction worker, a lawyer, researcher, writer, architect, movie director for decades if not your whole life, without quitting the favorite thing you are doing. And yet most programmers think being a manag...
From my understanding, Ruby is a language that can be used to creat desktop applications. How does this get converted into a 'Web App' - and is a 'Web App' really any different than a Web Site with interactivity?
I've worked in a number of small teams over the last 9 years. Each had the obvious good practices, such as short meetings, revision control, continuous integration software, issue tracking and so on. In these 9 years, I've never heard much about development methodologies; for example, there's never been a "we're doing ...
Many times I have witnessed a sad tragedy. Here's what happens: A team design review for a new project. I see a simple design that has quite a few holes. I casually mention the holes and ways to avoid them. The warnings are ignored with comments like "that 'never' happen in real life" Eventually the things that "will...
While reading this wikipedia article, Brookes has told that there is a difference between "good" designers and "great" designers. What is the difference between them? How can I decide if a designer is good or great?
Lately we had a project, in which client was busy touring. As usual scrum team was formed, management decided to appoint our analyst as Product owner since Client won’t be able to participate actively. Analyst was the one who worked closely with client for requirement analysis and specification drafting. Client doesn’t...
After viewing this video on InfoQ about functional design patterns I was wondering what resources are out there on design patterns for non-object orientated paradigms. There are plenty out there for the OO world (GOF, etc, etc) and for architecture (EoEAA, etc, etc) but I'm not aware of what's out there for functional,...
The Single Responsibility Principle states that a class should do one and only one thing. Some cases are pretty clear cut. Others, though, are difficult because what looks like "one thing" when viewed at a given level of abstraction may be multiple things when viewed at a lower level. I also fear that if the Single ...
Lets say you are somewhere where coding and getting online isn't possible (On a busy flight, for example)what do you do to stay productive? Things I would do are read whatever tech book I am currently slogging through and maybe doodle some UI stuff or workflows. What else could I be doing?
We are starting the process of internationalizing our software. To do this we will be writing a series of filters to convert all of our different resource files (resx, text, java resource, etc) into a common format. We will then be outputting xliff files for translation. After translation the process will run in revers...
In Java, C and C++ I see people using intensively debugging strategies (because mostly they don't know about TDD). On the other hand, debugging too can help to understand software abstractions. So, when and how do you use debugging in Rails applications?
Two examples spring to mind: One of the reasons that .Net programmers are encouraged to use .config files instead of the Windows Registry is that .config files are XML and therefore human-readable. Similarly, JSON is sometimes considered human-readable compared with a proprietary format. Are human-readable formats ac...
...in percentage. For example 60/40 or 90/10 or 100/0. My hypothesis is that the bigger the proportion of time you spend thinking the smaller your code can be as a result (and the less time will be needed to write it down). Think more, write less, in other words. Do you think it is true? As a side note, I think in typi...
The best way to get data on computer language popularity that I know is the TIOBE index. But everyone knows that TIOBE is hopelessly flawed. (If someone provides a link to support this, I'll add it here.) So is there any data on programming language popularity that is generally considered meaningful? The only other ...
I have a common scenario where I have an object (a) that logically affects another object (b), like a makes a note on b, or a marks b as disabled (usually a is a user object of the system and b is some kind of business object like a customer or an appointment). In the past, the method was on the affected object like: c...
Just out of curiosity what's the difference between a small, medium and large size project? Is it measured by lines of code or complexity or what? Im building a bartering system and so far have about 1000 lines of code for login/registration. Even though there's lots of LOC i wouldnt consider it a big project because i...
It seems like there are a plethora of methods for dialing in and checking out what's going on on a client's PC. But they seem to boil down to just 2. Dialing in and checking it out with VNC and Remote Desktop. VNC seems abysmal with more graphics laden OS's and it sometimes is too much to ask to get a access to a term...
There are lots of books about programming out there, and it seems Code Complete is pretty much at the top of most people's list of "must-read programming books", but what about The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth? I'm a busy person, between work and a young family I don't have a ton of free time, so I have...
... and coded the functionality "manually"? As a rather metaphorical example, you'd hardly need a library for solving quadratic equations, although such libraries do exist and someone takes them seriously. As a more questionable case, depending on the circumstances I may ditch jQuery (for example when I don't need to s...
I'm reading Coders at Work by Peter Seibel, and many a time it has been mentioned that programmers who can't write generally make poor programmers - it's been claimed by Douglas Crockford, Joshua Bloch, Joe Armstrong, Dijkstra (and I've only read half the book). What's your view of this? Is an inability to express your...
There has been a few remarks about white space already in discussion about curly braces placements. I myself tend to sprinkle my code with blank lines in an attempt to segregate things that go together in "logical" groups and hopefully make it easier for the next person to come by to read the code I just produced. In f...
sometimes a programmer comes up with a brilliant idea to protect his/her webservice created with Windows Communication Foundation. I would like to hear from you guys, which techniques do you use to protect your WCF service and avoid unauthorized users to consume it? For example, you would: avoid Impersonate, use it on...
As stated by the title, what is the difference in years of experience in given language in terms of developers? For example, if one developer has had five years working with language A and the other developer has had two years working with language B followed by three years working with language A, would there be perce...
Many compilers have warning messages to warn the programmers about potential runtime, logic and performance errors, most times, you quickly fix them, but what about unfixable warnings? How do you deal with unfixable warnings? Do you re-write a portion of the code, or rewrite it in the "long, hackless way" or disable wa...
I'm experimenting with a new platform and I'm trying to write a program that deals with strings that are no longer than 60 characters and I'd like to populate the data store with some famous or well-known small chunks of code and equations, since programming and math goes along with the theme of my software. The code c...
I am using ReSharper since version 3 and I always used InteliJ Idea/Resharper 2.x keymap schema. Recently I have learned Ilya's Visual Studio keymap. They each have advantages. What keymap do you use/prefer with ReSharper?
I'm trying to learn more about Erlang than the toy projects I've been playing with. To this end, I'm reading through Programming Erlang and some of the archives from Armstrong on Software. I would also like to read over some example (preferably production) code that showcases the sorts of things you can build with Erl...
I'm developing a website which includes a section for reviews. I want to include Google's microformat for review information so that details of the review show up in Google's snippet thingy, like this: However, according this page, Google supports three different formats for the review data, "microformat", "microdata"...
Clang is able to be used instead of gcc? What your experience on that? What disadvantages there are yet? Performance of compilation is very better than gcc but about performance of code generated when executing it? Are there good tools as front-end (IDE) to run on Linux or Windows? EDIT: I mean C compiler. C++ it's not...
In this question I asked whether being a bad writer hinders you from writing good code. Many of the answers started of with "it depends on what you mean by good code". It appears that the term "good code" and "bad code" are very subjective. Since I have one view, it may be very different from others' view of them. So w...
In an answer that I posted to another question, I noted that there is likely to become more and more specialization in software development: there being experts or specialists for given type of programming. I'm wondering, what specialties are known to exist in reasonable quantities in the industry now (not academia), ...
When I worked at Sun, we used a DVC system called Forte SCCS/Teamware, which used the old SCCS file format, but was a true distributed source code revision control system. One nice feature is that it had strong GUI support: You could bringover and putback changes by simply clicking and dragging. It would draw trees/gr...
I considered posting on Stack Overflow, but the question strikes me as being far too subjective since I can't think of a reasonable technical explanation for Microsoft's choice in this matter. But this question has bugged me for so long and the issue keeps coming up in one of my projects, and I have never actually seen...
[This question was originally asked on Stack Overflow, but recommended to move the question here.] I can't find anything quite like the question I'm about to ask, so please forgive me if there's something just like it already, please feel free to point me in the right direction. It'll take a bit of background explainin...
Timesheets are something that I've never been fond of, but none the less something that is a requirement within my company. They don't bother me so much, but they seem to really grind some other people's gears. I suppose I have a few questions, and feedback would be great. Are you required to do timesheets, assuming y...
What do you consider a good client web framework to use on interface business application? jQuery? YUI!? Another? Some plugins useful? The application will be use mostly internally replacing a desktop application for data entry and lots of queries/views.
I have searched for many websites for a definition of "task pool", but most descriptions are very vague. Anywhere I can find a precise definition of it? More details. Are dependencies allowed in task pool? Can a running task exchange data with other running tasks? To phrase conversely, are tasks permitted to accept ...
What software do you use to track time spent on a project?
There are online services such as IKM that offer skills tests in many areas, including programming. Would you use these kind of tests when hiring for a senior developer position? What about just for objectively benchmarking candidates before calling them for an interview? Would you use it as a step after short-listin...
I'm wondering if the term Hacker means different things to different people. When most people hear the word hacker what are the first things that come to mind?
Theres talk about what syntax and feature you like in a programming language; i'll now ask what core principles or feature would you like in a library in your favorite (or any) language? An example is having adding list += anotherList valid as oppose to only allowing list += listElement (although some may see this as ...
I was trying to parse a java properties file to avoid some Properties loading pitfalls (non ordering, loss of comments). (Property are of the form 'key = value' where the value can span on multiple lines using the \ special char) I have tried to get the right regexp to parse the properties but after I gave up after fig...
I was at work last week and one of our "lead developers" (who said he has programmed C++ before, but I don't believe him) was talking about C++ and how our team of developers who only know PHP would not have a hard time at all learning C++. My first reaction was pure shock and then I laughed at his comment. He gave me ...
I was asked today if I had experience with "Service Oriented Architecture" and although I think I do. The concept, to me, seems so muddled I don't know how you could honestly answer that question anymore. I resorted to Googling the term in an effort to get a concise definition of the concept and how it differs from ot...
I have a few questions about writing a specification and they are: When we write a software specification, under the topic "User requirements definition" we have to specify the "Functions" and "Constraints" only ? Does "User Interface" fall into "functions" or "constraints" ? What are the major key areas (requirements...
Off the top of my head, I can think of a handful of large sites which utilize the Microsoft stack Microsoft.com Dell MySpace PlentyOfFish StackOverflow Hotmail, Bing, WindowsLive However, based on observation, nearly all of the top 500 sites seem to be running other platforms.What are the main reasons there's so lit...
A question on software specialties inspired this question. How valuable is a software generalist compared to a specialist? When I say generalist, I mean someone who can take a project from requirements to deployment, and is competent with all phases of the software development lifecycle. Someone who can put all the sp...
I am programmer who just started working on a startup idea. At the moment I want to bring onboard at least one programmer. This programmer should be a ninja - a 10x engineer. Since early days are probably the most risky for a startup, I want to make sure I approach this problem the best I can. How do I find these peo...
If you are doing code reviews How much time do you spend on code reviews, compared to implementation? How much of the changes undergo code review? you think it's to much / should be more? Are there any studies about effectiveness? [edit] thank you all for the answers, it's hard to pick a "winner" for such a question,...
I saw this asked in the SO Tavern, so I'm posting the question here. I thought it an interesting question. (Of course it doesn't belong on SO, but I think it's OK here.) Do you add periods (or, as the OP wrote, "full stops") in your code comments? To keep it relevant, why?
Generally speaking, what type of optimizations do you typically slant yourself towards when designing software? Are you the type that prefers to optimize your design for Development time (i.e., quick to write and/or easier to maintain)? Processing time Storage (either RAM, DB, Disc, etc) space Of course this is high...
I'm current the sole developer/architect of a fairly large web application (ASP.NET MVC stack, roughly 150K+ lines of code) and the end of development is on the horizon. As such, I'm starting to think about what needs to be done for the hand off of the project and I want to make sure I do the right thing for anyone tha...
What specific advantages and disadvantages of each way to working on a programming language grammar? Why/When should I roll my own? Why/When should I use a generator?
I see that most of the good programmers have the habit of reading big books for learning about technology. What does it really take to read technical books, apart from the real interest on the technology? How can I improve my ability to read these books?
I have been involved in many development models, and have found XP to be the best for a new programmer from the aspect of learning, as the collaboration between the team members is very high and the opportunities to share knowledge are great. What are the expert opinions on this?
I read few articles on web to find out how Agile, XP, Scrum, pair programming are different from each other / related to each other and I derived the following line: Scrum and XP are almost same. XP has shorter period of releases than Scrum Pair programming is employed in both Agile and XP methodologies But I was una...
Is a Program Manager a person who manages mutiple projects (under a single program) which are in turn managed by Project Managers? Or is a Program Manager a person as defined by Joel Spolsky here. NOTE: I am not referring to this.
In your own studies (on your own, or for a class) did you have an "ah ha" moment when you finally, really understood pointers? Do you have an explanation you use for beginner programmers that seems particularly effective? For example, when beginners first encounter pointers in C, they might just add &s and *s until it ...
Although I like VS2010's multi monitor support, I seem to have too many accidental window drags, where I unsnap a window without intending to. This behavior has made me still live in the mental model of vs200X's non-snappable windows. 1) Do you have a particular layout that works for general purpose work? 2) How have ...
As a longtime desktop developer looking at doing our first large-scale web application, what are the pros and cons of doing web development? Is developing a web application much worse than developing a desktop app? E.g., is it more tedious or annoying? Is the time to market much worse? Is the web platform excessivel...
1) Up-time2) Latency3) Throughput4) Server software such as SQL, etc.5) $$$ -- transfer, overages, etc. What else? And is there a web site rating hosts by this criteria that is actually reliable and not simply a dishonest advertising site... or do you guys have any recommendations? (BTW, someone with 150+ rep should cr...
Personally, I break out in hives if I don't put ADO objects that implement IDisposable in using statements. But at my current contract, I've found that their homegrown enterprise framework "data access provider" code does not 1) implement IDisposable and 2) call Dispose() on anything it uses, at any point, ever. User...
Basically, I want to learn lots of programming languages to become a great programmer. I know only a handful to depth and I was hoping someone could elaborate on how many classes or types of programming languages there are. Like how you would lump them together if you had to learn them in groups. Coming from a Java b...
What I am looking for is the most optimal solution for storing content revisions in an MSSQL database. We have an application that allows users to make changes to small HTML content blocks similar to a wiki, but we need to have tight audit control over the changes. At any point in time, the manager might want to look a...
Even if it could be bad practices, I would say that there is time that it would fulfill its purpose.
The specific example I have in mind involves the currently-alpha game Minecraft, but this is a general question that I think warrants some conversation. Minecraft is written in Java, and stack traces usually look like this (real example): java.lang.NullPointerException at d.a(SourceFile:247) at gi.b(SourceFile:...
Has anyone read all three of Mary Poppendieck's books on Lean Software Development? She and her husband Tom wrote: in 2003: Lean Software Development in 2006: Implementing Lean Software Development in 2009: Leading Lean Software Development Mary and Tom Poppendieck are highly regarded lean experts, so I should have ...
I'm working with a web company that's approaching a point where it will likely need re-think the product as a V2 - due to outgrowing some of its V1 foundations and principles that have been built into virtually everything, from the data model to the user interfaces. For various reasons, this evolution might involve a m...
I have recently started a job that has me working on an existing system. It requires tweaks and updates as well as new code. I have done several maintainance/feature adding projects now, and several of them have ended up being significantly different from what was actually requested. So, I had to program the item sever...
I feared programs that require installation a lot. They leave traces behind the registry even after un-installation, plus, some uninstallers are poorly-programmed (that means, some programs cannot be uninstalled). That applies to Windows. The good side of installers, they create shortcuts and file associations. However...
How do you go about explaining refactoring (and technical debt) to a non-technical person (typically a PHB or customer)? ("What, it's going to cost me a month of your work with no visible difference?!") UPDATE Thanks for all the answers so far, I think this list will provide several useful analogies to which we can poi...
How do open source projects maintain quality? What keeps the projects from people with relatively little programming experience checking in poor quality codes?
Is it possible to calculate shadow areas of buildings or simulate shadows of buildings in a city, using the heights of these buildings and the sun angle and azimuth? The basic light tracing concept using trigonometry is known. However, how would one come up with simulated shadow of group of buildings in one place?
I am the first developer in a large scale web project, in the real estate sector. I am not an expert in any field, I know the basic of all, programming, databases, something about design and a little bit about SEO, and website optimization / caching. And I have some knowledge about other technologies and stuff that cou...
I've always been curious about trying out online freelance sites... it would be nice to work from home, feel independent, get to choose what I want to work on, get to work on different technologies, lose the PHB, etc. However I never really gave them a chance because I'm used to American rates and assumed that I would ...
I'm considering writing a low level driver or OS components/kernels. The osdev.org folks seem to think that the important bits are not meaningfully testable this way, but I have read some discussions where people thought differently. I've looked around, but have failed to find any real life examples of TDD on low-level...
I know the general trend against comments explaining how something works, and how it's a good idea to use them only to explain why you're doing what you're doing, but what about using comments as a means of dividing up the code? Assume you have a script that does a preamble, searches through a bunch of records, prints ...
I am a web developer. Worked in many projects. Now I have changed my work place. It is big organisation. I and my group are thinking about new project. There is no difficulty to write project but our organisation is big and it's has little offices in many places (within the country). There is no any problem about inter...
I know that it is possible to get into software development without a degree in computer science, but is it possible (or rather, common) to be able to get an embedded programming job without the computer science degree (or any engineering degree as well)?

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