How do you relate to non-technical people (read: your significant other/mom/dad/family/etc.) about your job with programming? When asked about how my day was at work, I find it rather difficult to explain anything specific without going over their heads. How do you handle such situations? ...
I'm working toward a software engineering major, (business) management minor, and technical communication minor, and I was wondering: What kinds of non-technical courses should I try to take before I graduate that I might not get as part of my major or one of my minors? If you prefer to think about it this way, a more general question w...
What non-tech skills have you found to enhance and/or complement programming skills? Try and think outside of the office setting, too. ...
I want to know specifically how you deal with explaining a timeline to a non-technical boss or client, and why it takes so long to do something they feel should take a lot less longer. I hear "Why can't you just..." a lot, and I have trouble without getting into the deep technical details explaining why something might take a few days or...
There have been a couple of other questions about explaining technical things to non-technical people, but I am specifically wondering if anyone has any tips for explaining technical problems to business oriented clients. For example, suppose the client asks for a specific feature, with certain requirements. However, the technical limi...
I'm supposed to give a presentation on agile programming techniques for my Business and Professional Communications class. One thing I'm having a bit of a problem getting right is the best way to give a quick and dirty overview of how agile programming works before I get into the meat of it. So what are some good ways to do this? Are ...
We are in college and I want get my projectmate to use the debugger as it will help improve his debugging speed. Despite offering to show him how to use it so that he won't have to learn it by himself, he refuses and to date still uses printlining to debug. I can understand why he refuses as he's probably afraid of the learning curve (E...
At the risk of getting downvoted I'm going to ask this anyway. What are your favorite metaphors for technical concepts? My most recent one I used was when a customer didn't understand why we would have to charge them for switching out one mapping api for another. My metaphor was: If you had a heat pump at your house and then boug...
How do you approach writing documentation that both, future developers, and non-technical audiences will have to use? Do you write two separate documents, or try to write one with enough information for both groups? Any other ideas? What are the advantages of doing it your way? ...
We recently had this question about our favorite metaphors, but in my experience, whether we like them or not, the Computer Science/Engineering field is full of metaphors that range wildly in appropriateness. For example, although it never bothered me, I had a computer science professor in my undergrad days who hated the word "partition...
I have been asked to present examples of code issues that were found during a code review. My audience is mostly non-technical and I want to try to express the issues in such a way that I convey the importance of "good code" versus "bad code". But as I review my presentation it seems to me I've glossed over the reasons why it is impor...
Most of us may have gone through a mandatory course in algorithms during our college days. In those classes I remember learning so many different algorithms (even for simple string comparison) that I have barely used when I started to develop software. Have you ever had use for any algorithms you learned back in college and have you eve...
Lately all modern programming languages have a definitive web site to support, distribute, learn the programming language, as well as community forums, e-mail lists and so on. Java has java.sun.com, python has python.org, etc. However C/C++ does not seem to have such a site. Which site do you use, say in a document, to link for C or C+...
how do you prepare a good software project presentation? How much balancing between the scripted run over features and a naturalistic use of the software. Especially to avoid something like a blue-screen of death on live TV. Thanks ...
What's the most important non-technical skill you've acquired that you feel makes you a better developer? I want to improve my skills, but I get the feeling that my time might be better spent somewhere besides learning the newest acronym of the day. For example, has your development skill been best improved by: Improving time managemen...
I am asking you this because I got job offer, but it has nothing to do with technology. I am reluctant to take it though I am unemployed. so in this current economy, would you consider any other job than the tech jobs. if yes, what do you think the impact that it will have in your resume? how would the future employer interpret it? Tha...
I have a project that will need to be able to export data for feed readers. Is there a non-technical reason I should pick RSS over Atom, Atom over RSS, one of the flavors of RSS over another or anything else? In particular, I'm looking for things like low or high adoption, difficulties/incompatibilities or particular ease with popular ...
You hear people talking about how joining an open-source project will help polish your skills, buff your resume, improve your credibility, etc. This is all true but do you think that these benefits are necessarily restricted to open-source? For example the source to a game I am working on is closed but I don't feel like I'm missing out o...
DUPE : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/464287/i-want-to-learn-c-closed (and even that question was closed as duplicate) Not quite a programming question but important none the less: Which book would everyone recommend for learning C programming language right from the beginning? I have been mostly doing JAVA for the last 2 years b...
I'm reading Robert Martin's book "Clean Code" and most of what I've read makes sense and I'm trying to apply as much as I possibly can. One of the simplest most basic things he talks about is that methods should be small, he goes all the way as to say that they should not contain more than three lines. Considering that I broke down a re...