Hi, I'm looking for management software for schools, that provides management for courses, students, registrations, classes, etc. Can any one name some free ones? I prefer Java/(j)Ruby but any good stuff will do. I'm not sure a CMS will fit my needs, since I will need some custom stuff like notifications and emitting grades/classificati...
I'm about to release a set of Eclipse plug-ins as Open Source and noticed that most source code released under the LGPL/EPL contains a header banner in each file that refers to the license or contains the license itself. Since adding these banners to each file manually seems to be a daunting and error-prone task, I was wondering whether...
Hello, I've recently begun evaluating a few project management projects for the company I work for. It's the classic case - growing company looking for the right solution (meaning, free or really cheap). It's a combination shop - Windows, Macs, and Linux on the desktop. The tech savviness, of course, ranges from newbie to unix guru. ...
I've been working with a small group of people on a coding project for fun. It's an organized and fairly cohesive group. The people I work with all have various skill sets related to programming, but some of them use older or outright wrong methods, such as excessive global variables, poor naming conventions, and other things. While t...
In the course of my career I've noticed that developers working on new functionality are, as a rule, more cheerful than these assigned to troubleshooting and fixing bugs. Good tips on keeping business support a happy? Organising business support in the way that team's morale isn’t hurt? ...
A mere sub-standard screwdriver can turn a quick Do-It-Yourself job round the house into an exercise in frustration that makes you feel really exhausted, annoyed and helpless at the same time. This is a feeling that is just too familiar not only to anyone who ever attempted to use a bogus screwdriver but most software professionals who a...
Like many organizations, I don't have a single software application that I run to support the enterprise. I have many different software components that facilitate the business and these software components are deployed to multiple machines. All of these applications were built with some enterprise monitoring and management in mind. S...
I'm sitting here frustrated that a team member broke the build and then goes on a long-weekend vacation. What happens on other teams when someone breaks the build? What would you consider a fair punishment? ...
Very often, my coworkers engage in silly discussions about general topics not related to the work making a lot of noise in the team's room. This distracts all the developers in the room, making them lose focus and productivity. I know that socializing and exchanging general information in the work is healthy.... But I think too much of ...
Joining an existing team with a possibly-large codebase already in place can be daunting. What's the best approach; Broad; try to get a general overview of how everything links together, from the code Narrow; focus on small sections of code at a time, understanding how they work fully Pick a feature to develop and learn as you go along...
COs, Managers, PMs, senior developers may i hear a few words on your experience in motivating and guiding new programmers. ...
A friend of mine working with an offshore team asked me to provide my definitions of the various stages of the developer life cycle. What did Entry Level, Junior, Mid Level, and Senior developer mean to me, and what were my minimum expectations from each level. Whats your definition? When would you change someones job title in you...
Hello, So, maybe I'm a bit old-school, but when we created websites in the past, we'd develop the site on a development server, then publish or promote the pages and files to the production server. This has always seemed to be a good way to go so that users didn't see messed up pages or (God forbid) a downed server because one of us sc...
We've been going at it for several months and we stopped implementing new features so we can enter the alpha program. Now, it is all about bug fixing until we reach a reasonable level at which point we will let a few customers test the application and of course, finally release to all our customers. How do you keep the motivation high d...
In the 60s and 70s, Harlan Mills of IBM promoted the idea of Lead Programmer teams, which he compared to a surgical team -- a highly trained and talented individual as the person who was actually "hands on the patient" and who was, in turn, supported by others who provided him or her with tools and routine procedures. He contrasted this ...
Hi All, I work for an R&D company in the energy business. We've developed some successful products, but now seem to be spending all our time fixing issues relating to those products. We don't seem to have any time to work on developing new products. Does anyone have any good ideas on how to both handle problems arising with the existi...
There have been many discussions, in StackOverflow and outside, of how you can judge a good programmer in an interview. Make him write code, check for common mistakes, observe his coding style, so on and so forth. All good. But what is less discussed, and probably considered even less important, is how do you evaluate and judge a progra...
I work for a small company that has about 25-30 employees. We make software for the hydraulics industry and most of our employees are mechanical engineers who are self-taught programmers including me. One difference that I find between myself and other employees is their lack of passion for software and their will to learn more about sof...
A few years ago I moved to a new job having been programming for 2 years using C#, however this new company was mainly using VB6. I made the case for .NET and won, but one of the consessions I had to make was to use VB.NET and not C# (understandable as most of the other developers were already using VB). Three years later it was time to...
Are there any good professional associations for IT Managers that I could join and network with other managers to share ideas and information? ...