How do you manage not being able to do what you what to do or feel is the right approach to something? Have you ever been in a situation where you are told to "follow the spec" even though there is a blatant issue (design, UI, performance, etc.) with it? Have you ever looked at a problem and recommended a technology that would solve it ...
I am sure there are many developers out here who have team spread across different time zones. What are some of the challenges people face and whats the best way to tackle them? ...
I just got my copy of Code Complete by Steve McConnell, and there's one area I'm a bit confused about. On page 51, he says: Robustness is the ability of a system to continue to run after it detects an error. Often an architecture specifies a more robust system than that specified by the requirements. One reason is that a system co...
Let's say your company has no consistent way of accessing a 3rd party component. You want wrap the component into a centralized web service for everyone to start being consistent; however, have been told that the initiative is already started (awesome!). Later you find out that while the service is done, it won't be released until it h...
I've noticed a lot of code lately (mine included) that, e.g. makes a DAL call, and then checks to see if the returned DataSet is not null, then checks to see if it has tables, then it returns Tables[0]. If there is no DataSet, I would rather see hell raised ... and a few exceptions, than have a user wandering where all there invoices ar...
In my thirty years of programming experience, it seems to me that the vast majority of the source code that I have read, and the vast majority of the programmers that I have encountered, tend to write all their code at the lowest possible level of abstraction. Allow me please to provide an example. I answered a post earlier today in wh...
Lua's most direct competitor in the scripting arena is Python. So it commonly gets compared with Python, however I've heard many times that Lua is very much like Lisp(Scheme) in terms of expressive power and flexibility. Now I'm a Lua power-user, and know its intricacies in and out, but I've only tried Lisp once or twice, so obviously ...
This is a general question about helping other programmers solve their problems, which specifically applies to StackOverflow. Sometimes when I'm asked for help with a programming problem, I find that there are really two problems: the one that the person is asking to be solved and often a larger problem that, if solved, makes the former...
Hi, how do you go about migrating your (large, important, well-tested) application to a new Linux distribution? Did you do so recently, if so, how did you overcome the problems of large numbers of upgraded components with changed behaviour? How did your build system cope with the overlap when you had to support old and new version? Did ...
How would you write this block of code? A user can have 3 levels of permission: Suspend Lock Ban We have to decide if we want to delete the users account automatically. The business rules are as follows: Delete User if: suspend + lock + ban Warning Message if: suspend + lock So how would you write this code block? Keeping code ...
I am working on JUnitMax, a project to increase the utility of automated tests. I'm looking for novel, unexpected ways tests prove valuable. For example, I use tests in responding to defects--one at the system level that fails, reproducing the defect and another at the unit level so I know what code to change (perhaps derived using the S...
I was just reading this post on ars technica "Is MySQL really this bad?" and was really surprised most people seem to agree that MySQL is indeed bad. I was just curious, does it really matter for most applications? Should everyone stop using MySQL? I'd really like to hear from people that have worked with various databases. ...
One day, I was told to make "a quick fix" in some horrible code. I just opened it up and entirely read it, understood it then fixed it in one row. I mechanically added some comments to explain what the code was doing, what I did as a fix and some "// TODO" to keep tracking of the improvement it would be nice to make. It took me less tha...
Py3k just came out and has gobs of neat new stuff! I'm curious, what are SO pythonistas most excited about? What features are going to affect the way you write code on a daily basis, or have you been looking forward to? ...
When 64-bit processors came out, it wasn't too big of a deal. Sure, C++ people had to deal with the fact that their 32-bit pointer math doesn't work on 64-bit machines, but that's what you get for not using sizeof (or not using Java!), but in most cases, our languages already had 64-bit primitives, so all the compiler needed to do was ...
Is your boss a "really good" programmer? A business manager that knows nothing about computers? Does he/she treats you well? When you write good code, does he encourage you or only bash on you when you write bad code? I'm really interested to know more about the kind of boss you have. On a side note, maybe you could add what you would li...
For a while there seemed to be an aggressive trend towards outsourcing development jobs to India, Ukraine, et al. However, recently I have been hearing anecdotal stories from friends in the biz that it is falling out of favor for a number of reasons. I am interested in what the experience of the SO community shows on the topic. So here...
I am extremely new to python, having started to learn it less than a month ago, but experienced with some other programming languages (primarily C# and SQL). But now that Python 3.0 has been released and is not backwards compatible, what would be the advantages and disadvantages of deciding to focus on Python 3.0 or Python 2.6? ...
Python 2.6 was basically a stepping stone to make converting to Python 3 easier. A lot of the features destined for Python 3 were implemented in 2.6 if they didn't break backward compatibility with syntax and the class libs. Why weren't set literals ({1, 2, 3}), set comprehensions ({v for v in l}), or dict comprehensions ({k: v for k, ...
Delphi is currently ranked as the 10th most popular language (Dec 2008) and has approximately 1.75 million users worldwide. So why were there so few people at the CodeRage III virtual conference put on last week by Embardero? I really enjoyed the sessions I was at, but many were attended by fewer than 100 people. Even Marco Cantu's tal...