I'm scheduled to take the Zend PHP5 Certification next month and had a few questions regarding the aftermath. Specifically, I believe it is common to be deserving additional compensation after earning a certification. I have a few questions regarding the process (Assuming one passes the requirements for certification): How does one app...
I have a problem to solve that I think will take 4 days, but if I had a feature request sorted and a snapshot release then I reckon I could have it done in one. Superficially this creates a budget of 3 x my daily rate to get it the feature-request actioned. So my questions are, have you ever paid an O/S project member to fix something f...
Of course, most of the time this type of request comes from management that neither has a clue about what the users really want, nor does [s]he have a clue about the technical aspects of building a specific software project or software in general. See Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss for more detail. However, that's just one aspect. What ab...
I have a simple web crawler to request all the pages from a website's sitemap that I need to cache and index. After several requests, the website begins serving blank pages. There is nothing in their robots.txt except the link to their sitemap, so I assume I am not breaking their "rules". I have a descriptive header that links to ex...
I always thought you should never set/get a member variable directly. E.g. $x = new TestClass(); $x->varA = "test": echo $->varB; I thought you should always use object methods to access member variables. But I've just been looking at __set and __get, which imply it's ok to access members directly. Any thoughts? ...
After you have asked the questions in The Joel Test, is it appropriate to ask a technical question or two to see how the software developers who are doing the hiring respond? If I did technical interviews (and I have only ever done lunch format interviews so my opinion could change I guess), I wouldn't mind a technical question or two, ...
I've created an app, that is self-explanatory. What is the etiquette in the iPhone world: do I still need to have an About button that explains what the app does, website, email, all that? Or is that unnecessary? ...
Is it appropriate to contact programmers who work for a company you are applying to? I am really excited about a certain programming job that I am interviewing for soon, and I am reading a few blogs by the guys who work there. Is it inappropriate to send them an email telling them I am having a phone interview with their company, tel...
I'm using a BSD API to build my own API and I'm wondering if there is any restriction when I will release my own API in term of license choice, packaging, distribution ... I'm also curious about what do you guys think is the better way to pay homage to the API that we use : documentation citation, code source citation ... To summarise...
I'm considering writing a simple web scraping application to extract information from a website that does not seem to specifically prohibit this. I've checked for other alternatives (eg RSS, web service) to get this information, but there are none available at this stage. Despite this I've also developed/maintained a few websites mys...
I've been the creator of a small handful of little OSS projects in the past, and although in no case did I necessarily intend to recruit anyone else to join me on the project, I still wondered whether it was "bad form" to use a more recent technology, for example leveraging features from a recent release of the framework/language used (w...
Hey Hey, I've never had the chance to work with a team on a repo, so I'm wondering if there is a proper way to document your changes. For example, maybe add a tag(s) such as: bugfix, update, implement? Just curious on how professionals describe their commits. Hopefully it'll aid me in keeping the project organized... ...
Our team of software developers consists of a bunch of experienced programmers with a variety of programming styles and preferences. We do not have standards for everything, just the bare necessities to prevent total chaos. Recently, I bumped into some refactoring done by a colleague. My code looked somewhat like this: public Person Cr...
If you delete a public git repository, and then replace it with a different one, can that cause complications? Background: A while ago, I branched a project and made a few commits, which have either been pulled in or have become irrelevant (but the latest commit of my fork isn't an ancestor of the main repository). I'd like to delete my...
This was the closest question to my question and it wasn't really answered very well imo: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2022030/web-scraping-etiquette I'm looking for the answer to #1: How many requests/second should you be doing to scrape? Right now I pull from a queue of links. Every site that gets scraped has it's own thread ...
I have a question about righteous way of programming in Python... Maybe there can be several different opinions, but here it goes: Let's say I have a class with a couple of private attributes and that I have implemented two getters/setters (not overloading __getattr__ and __setattr__, but in a more “Java-tistic” style): class MyClass: ...