With all of us having only limited time and many of us not being programmers in their private life, I was wondering what would be the best approach to stay up to date in your field of work. I realize that there are vast numbers of resources available to do so, but you can only consume a limited amount of them depending on how much time ...
I am a volunteer for Let's Talk Science, an organization which places science graduate students into elementary school and high school classrooms to present short, fun, yet educational demonstrations or experiments related to their particular field. Physics, Chemistry, and Biology have an abundance of such demonstrations, however as a co...
I'm a software test engineer embedded in a development team. A large part of my job involves checking over the state of the project's automated tests (mainly unit/integration tests). I'm not a short-sighted zealot who wants to force testing down everyone's throats, but I do want to help everyone to get the best out of the time they spe...
Hello all, Im going to sound like a complete idiot here, and thats because, well, I dont know much about computer related fields of study. I do a lot of Industrial Automations Control, and its a cool gig, especially since I work for Cirque du Soleil, but now I have an option to go back to school and finish a degree. I am interested in le...
There are a number of programming books considered to be absolutely essential (as seen here). I am fairly novice programmer, and most of what I've learned I've learned by reading various language reference books. Is there any particular order I need to read the "essential" programming books? Does one book depend on learning the concep...
A colleague of mine caused a long e-mail conversation by saying: Of the probably 30+ people I’ve given a phone interview to, not a one (including people with Masters degrees in CS!!) has been able to tell me the big O of bubble sort- or any other sort for that matter, and maybe 2-3 seemed to have an clue what I was talking about. Am I ...
I hope, certain times people may ask you to write strange things. What is the most infeasible application/program you've ever been asked to write? ...
I am taking a C# class and I need help understanding the following code. The code has an array which represents responses to a survey, with values 1 thru 10. The output displays these ratings and the frequency of how many times a value was selected. The following code is from my book, but I have modified it to just a basic example. i...
Hello everyone, I am looking for some reference/samples about how to define good KPI for education industry. I want to define KPI from school/department management perspective to measure various school performance, students/faculty/others. Any advice, referneces or documents are appreciated -- more appreciated if with the context of SQ...
I'm attempting to retool myself more towards .NET (coming from an opensource background) and am looking at learning Microsoft SQL Server to complement my skills in C#. How easy would it be to transfer my skills from Postgres to Microsoft SQL Server? Furthermore would a book on SQL Server 2005 (Database Essentials - Step by Step, Microsof...
I am looking for ways to explain "Agile" to a non-developer. You could try to summarize it yourself, but a reference to a short article, blog post or podcast could also prove helpful. ...
It is very difficult to write perfect code because the standards upon which our code is judged is evolving every day. The beautiful as it may be now, is probably going to be ridiculed later. Have you ever look back at some of your old code and grimaced in pain? If yes, do you have any idea how to overcome this? ...
Is there any difference between these occupation names: Programmer Software engineer Algorithmist / Algorithms specialist Systems analyst Do they all require different education and work experience, or should a good programmer be able to be all of them? And should all these positions exist in the same organization, or is it just a w...
There seems to be a lot of good references for learning how to write a compiler. But I haven't been able to find much in the way of how to write a debugger. Is each debugger completely unique, or are there common techniques used to implement them? I'm particularly interested in debugging interpreted languages, but at this point anything ...
Let's say your company has given you the time & money to acquire training on as many advanced programming topics that you can eat in a year, carte blanche. What would those topics be and how would you prefer to acquire them? Assumptions: You're still having deliverables to bring into existence, but you're allowed one week per month fo...
I had a piece of work thrown out due to a single minor spec change that turned out not to have been spec'ed correctly. If it had been done right at the start of the project then most of that work would have never have been needed in the first place. What are some good tips/design principles that keep these things from happening? Or to...
In my particular neck of the woods, .NET development is a little dry and low-paying, while is appears Java development is still pretty hot. Contracts are going for very good rates as well. What avenues should I take to parallel my development expertise in DotNet with Java? I'm a senior developer/architect/dba. ...
I've been programming off and on since 4th grade (for about 20 years). Technology is one of my passions but after working in the field for a couple years out of High School, I spent nine months and $15,000 getting an accredited certificate in music performance instead of CS. I've been doing lots of self study but I think a CS degree is ...
I heard (and think) that modern programmers hardly use flow charts. If you structure your code well you'll have small functions, isolated functionality objects, and simplicity of each code chunks (file/class/function). I also heard talking about flow charts as "spaghetti programming". I personally think that flow charts were (and still a...
A cousin is going to college, probably in computer science, and he asked me where is a good school to go. I told him some schools and current topics in CS, he asked about them and I was wondering, are there some colleges that actually put Design Patterns, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, DOM Scripting, XML, and web architecture in their required ...