I've been programming since college, was a hobbyist programmer as a kid, but never got serious until I was a freshman. That was almost a decade and a half ago. One thing I've noticed is that when people reach a certain point in their skills they never really move beyond that. That is if they suck as a developer when you hire them, they w...
What are your favorite code kata? What do you do to practice software development? Where do you go to find new small projects to practice? We already know Jeff's answers. ...
So I'm sitting here playing catch up listening to Stack Overflow Podcast #20 and Joel is talking about the Excel guys at MS who wrote their own compiler to improve the performance of code that worked with pointers and it got me wondering when is it NIH versus being a sensible investment of time? Given the situation back then that t...
In particular, what functionality is not available? what restrictions are there on its use? ...
I suggested the testing and functional teams to use Freemind map for jotting the functional flows and test steps. There was some paranoia but our module took it up and the QA teams were surprised to see near zero review comments. There was misconception among the team that there are doing more work. I assured them that by the time others...
What is required of an updated and legacy free Graphical User Interface API for Java? //TODO: Add your ideas below. ...
How would you begin improving on a really bad system? Let me explain what I mean before you recommend creating unit tests and refactoring. I could use those techniques but that would be pointless in this case. Actually the system is so broken it doesn't do what it needs to do. For example the system should count how many messages it s...
What single aspect of agile development should we implement first to improve our development process, and why? I'm in a situation that's requiring me to "tweak" my process, rather than re-engineer it, and "agile" seems to be the mantra of the day. If we can make only one change that will improve something--quality, time to market, do...
I have a Delphi 2009 program that handles a lot of data and needs to be as fast as possible and not use too much memory. What small simple changes have you made to your Delphi code that had the biggest impact on the performance of you program by noticeably reducing execution time or memory use? Thanks everyone for all your answers. M...
How many monitors improve programming speed? Do you have any experience with programming using 1,2,3,4... monitors? Which configurations increase work speed and are worth trying out? Is it worth using 90 degrees rotated screens? ...
I currently have an algorithm that operates on an adjacency matrix of size n by m. In my algorithm, I need to zero out entire rows or columns at a time. My implementation is currently O(m) or O(n) depending on if it's a column or row. Is there any way to zero out a column or row in O(1) time? ...
I read somewhere that Ruby is the love-child of Smalltalk and LISP, with Miss Perl as the Nanny. I have a lot of respect for Ruby's parents, but I'm not sure I like the influence Miss Perl had on the child. Specifically, I don't like the predefined variables: I need a cheat sheet to know what they mean. You could say "just don't use t...
I guess that many of you have read 7 habits of highly effective people. They're great, but still too general. Can you suggest some good habits of a highly effective programmer? The habits that make you more productive in work? Faster in learning? ...
I'm busy introducing myself to jQuery by implementing a little system where onmouseover on an element causes a text balloon to pop up close to the element. I feel like I'm using too much vanilla JS here, so please suggest where I can improve and what is wrong with this code: <head runat="server"> <script type="text/javascript" src=...
Hi! I'm using PHP in order to redirect some search query. There is some example of code here (click). And my PHP code is: audio_action.php : <?php $search_field = trim($_POST['audio_field']); $search_engine = trim($_POST['audio']); $url_params = preg_replace('/(\ )+/', '+', $search_field); $url = array('deezer'=>'http://www.deezer.co...
Hello Here is a simple form I am using to send XML data in admin_xml.php <form name="review" action="admin_xml.php" method="post"> <textarea name="xml" cols="40" rows="10"></textarea> <input class="submit" type="submit" value="Submit Request"> </form> Here is the XML which I enter in order to retrieve the data from MySQL Databa...
I have the following jQuery function (simplified): function doSomething(el, str) { el.find('.class').text(str)); } Don't worry about the .text() part, in reality I'm doing something a bit more complicated than that... But since that's irrelevant to my question, I'm just using .text() here as a simple example. The problem is, everyti...
hi guys, i just joined this new group and basically haven't even really done any heavy lifting development but just some basic web store migration stuff. and i've been given the challenge of coming up with improvement areas for the development process. I'm thinking of using Joel's list as the basis for determining what can be improved in...
foreach(self::getGroups() as $group) $group_ids[] = $group->getId(); Is there a better, cleaner and more efficient way to do that? Thanks! :-) ...
I know it's subjective but this was the result I came up with based on the answer to me previous question and it seems a bit "slapped together", as I have changed it quite a bit: Private Function ReadFromBuffer(ByVal objReader As NetworkStream) As Byte() Dim intRead As Integer = 1024 Dim allBytes(-1) As Byte While intRead...