A lot of us developers who are passionate about technologies do this. Read technology experts' and fellow developers' blogs Follow technology news Listen to tech podcasts, watch screencasts etc Do part time pet projects to assimilate know-how Take proactive steps at work to produce more valuable software Fine but all these activities...
I would like to hear about interesting projects which made use of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. ...
For a long time I've been trying different languages to find the feature-set I want and I've not been able to find it. I have languages that fit decently for various projects of mine, but I've come up with an intersection of these languages that will allow me to do 99.9% of my projects in a single language. I want the following: Buil...
When you interview someone for a job, or are helping to interview someone for a job, is it rude to ask why they're interviewing in the first place? Sometimes the answer is easy like "well my company is laying off a thousand people this year and so I've decided to move on" or "they've decided to get out of software development and instea...
We have been trying Scrum But for a while now and are trying to formalize it within as our own version of Agile Application Development. Here's how our current process works. There are two main drawbacks to it as it stands right now. Wanted to get input on whether you have a similar approach and if the community has any practical tips fo...
Hi guys, I would like to ask you for your opinion. It's about solution for our new project. see the details below. Problem summary - our webapp integrated into client website, as simple as possible integration - need technology independent on environment, possibly only xml, html, javascripts - most of data provided by web services on...
I'd like to hear about interesting projects making use of playstation 3 (ps3) hardware. ...
I have done a few silly things in my time as a developer and have therefore learnt the hard way in some respects. Here are a few examples: Missing out the WHERE clause in a DELETE tableName sql statement. No error handling in an application that was using files & db connections. Releasing an application without testing (a...
When my children tell me that they hate school, I often tell them that they need to get used to continuous learning because they live in a generation in which constant learning will be required. How do I know -- because I live in a generation and work in an occupation in which continual learning is imperative. Do you agree with this se...
I've been working on database-driven web applications for a few years now and recently took on a project involving a CMS that is XML-capable. This has got me to thinking about the usage of XML/XSLT in general and in what situations it would be more useful than the approach I've always used, which is storing all of my data in a (My)SQL da...
This is a sensitive question, hence I post this anonymously. Over the last year, I have been working as the senior programmer for a group of existing and new scripters. This group is lead by a separate lead. I am the programmer of the code's script interface the script programmers work with. One of the new guys has caused me countless h...
One thing Delphi does that is very useful is retaining multiple historical versions of modified files. This way I can easily make wholesale changes without checking code into repository every 10 minutes without fear that I can easily go back a step. ...
So I'm in Des Moines, Iowa and we have a good number of user groups in our area considering our size. Ruby, .Net, Java, Agile, *nix, etc... Well, tonight a good number of us "leaders" of said user groups got together for a couple drinks and to talk about how we can work together to help make the "DeMo" (I keep seeing this on Twitter) use...
I'd asked a question a while back about ways to encourage my team to collaborate. The tool we use is a wiki. Since this is the first time we are using the wiki (formally and as a team), we are learning by committing mistakes. One of the lessons has been that a wiki isn't suitable for tracking activities. It is better to use a tool buil...
I've been having some problems with stress/anxiety lately, and I'm starting to think that's giving way to depression. While I originally thought it was just the workload (unrealistic timelines when I had just transitioned to a new team - QA - where I was the only tester for a large chunk of changes) or the job (large consulting firm, ex...
COs, Managers, PMs, senior developers may i hear a few words on your experience in motivating and guiding new programmers. ...
The glorified global variable - becomes a gloried global class. Some say breaking Object Oriented Design. Give me scenarios, other than the good old logger where it makes sense to use the singleton. ...
The large network (of small world graph type) I wish to deal with is dynamic in nature, new nodes are added and subtracted frequently. Presumably using D* over A* would be a better way to detect paths in this dynamic environment? How solid is D*? has it had any real world experience? like a cryptographic algorithm - is D* hardened by l...
Have you ever been in the situation when looking at the code you couldn’t tell if something is a bug or poorly implemented feature? Or you simply didn’t dare to fix something that looked like a definite bug to you, but were not sure if anyone already relies on the functionality behaving in a certain way? What are your best heuristics ...
People may like this discussion of the history of innovation. What caught my eye was the remark about the importance of providing learning environments where failure is safe (gymnast mats, for instance). It caused me to wonder what makes programming environments characteristically safe. Here are three attributes that I have identified...