What would be your advice to a young student (e.g. a college freshman) looking to get a meaningful internship in Software development Embedded systems/hardware development I've experienced firsthand how valuable such early experience can be, but unfortunately the process I went through to get my first couple internships isn't general...
At what point in a team's growth must process change drastically? A lone coder can get away with source control and a brain. A team trying to ship large prepackaged software to local and international markets must have a bit more in place. If you've experienced a large transition in 'process': Was the team's process successfully chan...
What's the first program you ever wrote that you were proud of and why? For me it was probably a Delphi 2 program I wrote that simply monitored Windows' memory usage and displayed a bar graph in the shell notification area like the Task Manager CPU graph, but in blue! It was a big deal because I had a friend who was a better programmer...
Has anybody had a bad or very bad experience or stories with Scrum or Sprinting, that you can share with a n00b so that he doesn't make the same mistake? If you had a problem, what were your lessons learned? What would you do differently or have done differently, to avoid the problem again? ...
While developing products, we often need to create proprietary tools to test some of their unique features or diagnose problems. In fact the tools can be at lest as interesting as the products themselves, and some of our internal groups have asked for copies of them. So, aside from the obvious business-driven rules (e.g. don't retrieve...
This is a pretty general question - but what are some of your strategies / procedures for troubleshooting issues that users find? Specifically, I'm talking about web based programming - a combination of PHP, mySQL, Javascript (Ajax). We're running an ecommerce platform and we've done successful test transactions on all major browsers. ...
I just came across this question about initializing local variables. Many of the answers debated simplicity/readability vs. robustness. As a developer of (remotely deployed) embedded systems, I always favor robustness and tend to follow several seemingly conflicting rules: Handle every error to the best of your ability in a way that ...
At our company, we the developers tried some methodologies to be more productive. One thing we could not try was Pair Programming. The reason is, that we are a small company and have only few programmers (and more non-programmers). So it would be impossible to explain to our boss, that two programmers sit at the same computer and solve t...
What is your favorite non obvious feature of svn? ...
Recently I have been looking at jobs, and all of them require "X Years Experience in Y technology". If you have experience in Z technology (or multiple Z technologies) how can you get into jobs for Y technology? It seems they use this requirements as a filter and you must have this on your resume before they even look at you. Do you jus...
A relatively large number of people in the software industry do not have college degrees compared to other industries. In my experience, many of the best programmers/software engineers are those who learned outside of college. However, many employers stress a CS degree or equivalent and some require it. In your experience, what do sof...
What has been your best programming experience so far? Was it the first time you compiled hello.c? Was it the first time you made your name fill your fathers TV with that 80's home computer? Was it the time you saved the day by fixing that bug no one else understood? Let's share our good moments! (This is not a question of when you ...
I'm currently working professionally in the arts/entertainment industry where the quality of your work (as seen in your portfolio) comes before all else. An employer cares about the following in this order: Portfolio Work Experience College Degree A college degree is a small footnote, easily overshadowed by a strong portfolio. My q...
What is the long time you have spent debugging a particular problem? Was the solution trivial in hindsight? How did management react when it took so long? ...
In your own experience, which working environment has provided you the best/most satisfying opportunities to really get out and learn the software skills you now have, gain confidence and get some marketable experience? For me, it was making a conscious decision to leave the academic environment where I worked, swallow some pride, and a...
Lots of developers I know were self taught programmers including me. I was wondering how much of the developer community learned programming by taking a course in school or by experimenting, asking questions on forums, reading online articles, and just making it up as you go along? Post whether you were self taught or took classes, wha...
I'm graduating next week with a BSCS, having decided after my kids were grown to change careers to something actually marketable. I've gained lots of valuable experience co-oping for a local company; however, with the economic downturn I've been unable to find a job. I'm fortunate to be able to continue co-oping at least another semeste...
Is there a career path out there or its part of our job to find out security holes and such? And If there is, what path do you suggest a person who wants to become one? If there isn't, what experiences you can tell about security issues? (major or minor) ...
I made this a wiki because I think that some people may think it's too "thready" but I had to share and it wasn't appropriate on my blog. I've had a few, but I think the strangest was once I was on an interview (when I was consulting) and it was my first interview. I wasn't 100% familiar with the position, I knew they wanted to utilize...
To me it was the If statement, I'm psyched up, since then I believed that computers are very intelligent, or I can at least make it appear intelligent because of it. ...