Whenever I've come up with a new idea of something interesting to code, it has always been the "Eureka!" moment type deal. How do you come up with great programming ideas, and if you are having trouble coming up with something, how do you get past that block? ...
My company is allowing some local high school students to come on-site and job shadow for an hour or two. What are some ways that I can inspire these young people into potentially taking a career in software development? Any advice would be great. Thanks! ...
To me it's the Unix and C++. ...
What do you consider to be the best examples of website navigation and why? I'm trying to design a secondary navigation menu and I need a little inspiration, but I'm also interested just in general about learning best practices for navigation and information display. What are some of the more unique solutions you've seen? Links and varie...
Maybe the title is not the best wording, and I haven't seen any similar questions (though I may have missed them). Outside of 'keeping current' by reading tech news, Wired, etc, where do you go for non-technical inspiration on how to think about problems at hand in new/different ways? For example, assembling a LEGO set, or doing an oil...
Is it legal to more or less "copy" (or euphemistically, be very "inspired by") the idea and UI of a copyrighted program? This question popped in my mind when looking at "Things" which is a Mac-only program. How legal would it be for someone to make a Windows version of this program with a basically identical UI design and feature set? W...
Every now and then I go back and listen to a couple of specific podcast episodes to hear their message(s) again. Ken Schwaber's excellent "Intro to Scrum" podcast at IT Conversations. Peter Coffee's Agile 2006 Keynote speech about his four essential books and how they relate to the Agile Manifesto over at the Agile Toolkit Podcast. I...
In a previous question about homework on stackoverflow I made the following statement: I think it's extremely important for students to learn that real-world programmers work together, learn from each other, support each other, and share their knowledge and insights. It's this type of networking that inspires and excites us. This w...
I recently find my self stuck in state where I feel not very into code, I need some kind of inspiration, so sometimes I just review somebody's code, watch some kind of movie about coding or something like that, but not always I get what I need, if you know what I mean. How do you increase your mood for coding ? ...
What are the best sites for hobbyist programmers to get their inspiration? I often ask myself the question: 'What software will I make today?'. What sites do you get your inspiration from? I often do Mac/iPhone developing. Or is it just StackOverflow? ...
Where do you go when you want to know how other people solved a particular GUI problem? I'm still stuck at the Google Images level, but 99% of the images you find are screenshots from extremely boring UIs that are part of online tutorials. I know of a few webpages that maintain links to interesting new Web UIs, but is there any collabor...
After I read jQuery in Action, I could grok the purpose and strengths of the jQuery Core API. To date, I've used jQuery in several production applications. But now I'd like to graduate from a jQuery novice to a jQuery professional. Do any blogs or books detail how jQuery can be truly useful in production applications? Essentia...
Working on PHP frameworks lately, i notice that many of them are inspired by java or ruby frameworks. For instance, the Doctrine ORM is based on RoR's Activerecord (with maybe some elements of Java's Hibernate). The language Groovy is inspired from Java, Ruby and Python. This made me wonder about the history of the many programming langu...
Do you know any source for nice looking software designs? (non Web). ...
Next week I have to give a presentation to a group of under privileged college students about the possibilities of a career in software development. These students have no exposure to programming what-so-ever. I have a good idea of how to tackle the non-technical, general portion of the presentation. However, notwithstanding my decade o...
I was told by someone that, just as .NET started inspired from Java, WPF was inspired by a similar technology, as "Microsoft never innovates". However, I can't find anything remotely close to WPF. What particular technology did or could have inspired Microsoft to write WPF? ...
I am learning Clojure and I really am loving some of its features. The time is coming to think of some real "pet projects" and I realize I'm not sure how to actually use Clojure. I see many web and templating frameworks (e.g. Compojure), but somehow I'm in doubt on whether it's worth it. I feel that in the long run it can't serve the ne...
Not sure if this belongs on SO but nonetheless it involves web dev/programming... I think i'm pretty creative in general but when it comes to naming something giving its own identity im totally short of any inspiration..or rather incapable of providing something thats catchy.(Like Twitter and tweets etc) So you've got this great idea, ...
I'm aware that most things in modern programming languages are at least partially based on features in earlier languages. This leads me to wonder where java got the inspiration for interfaces from. Was it mostly their own creation? Was it based on fully Abstract Base classes(with multiple inheritance) ? ...