open-ended

To Which Open Source Projects Do You Contribute?

Are you regularly contributing to any open source projects? Which ones? How many contributions have you made? What attracted you to them? ...

Do you personally identify with your code?

On the latest episode of the Stack Overflow podcast (episode #25), Steve Yegge mentioned how bad it was to get emotional with your favorite framework, language, technology, etc. Do you call yourself a <insert your language here> developer? Is this a good thing? ...

How do you handle multiple (overlapping) projects in trac?

We are using trac and are really satisfied with it. However, out of the box, trac is best suited for single-project environments only. I'd be interested to hear about the various approaches people take to make it work with multiple projects nevertheless and their experiences with them. Are there any plugins to recommend? Any patches, twe...

How to recognize a good programmer?

Our company is looking for new programmers. And here comes the problem - there are many developers who look really great at the interview, seem to know the technology you need and have a good job background, but after two moths of work, you find out that they are not able to work in a team, writing some code takes them very long time, an...

Job interview coding task

According to Manoj's answer to my question here, what do you suggest as a good problem that should stretch the interviewee's (horrible word ;-) programming capabilities and show whether he is a good programmer? ...

How often do you use pseudocode in the real world?

Back in college, only the use of pseudo code was evangelized more than OOP in my curriculum. Just like commenting (and other preached 'best practices'), I found that in crunch time psuedocode was often neglected. So my question is...who actually uses it a lot of the time? Or do you only use it when an algorithm is really hard to conceptu...

How do you handle rude clients?

Hi, A friend told me he needed my services to code the web and DB system (it wouldn't be a basic system at all) for his business. However, his business partner is quite dishonest and rude. When we sit together to make up a design document, he often refers to programming as a matter of nothing - something that can be bought for a price. ...

Do you prefer functioning or including within one php file?

Hi, How do you manage your php codes? Do you prefer functioning within one php file or including larger blocks of "raw code"? Edit: In fact, my code is pretty nasty, as I don't use any namespaces and classes - only functions and including. I shall look the classes up ^^. ...

Is there any programming language where the variables types sizes in bits depends on the platform (32 vs 64 bit)?

I am C# developer and I am almost certain that in this language an "int" is always 32 bits regardless of the platform (32 vs 64 bit), a "long" is always 64 bits, a float is 32 and a double 64 and so on. There is any language where its not like that? Where the int size depends on the processor? ...

Is modern C++ becoming more prevalent?

When I first learned C++ 6-7 years ago, what I learned was basically "C with Classes". std::vector was definitely an advanced topic, something you could learn about if you really wanted to. And there was certainly no one telling me that destructors could be harnessed to help manage memory. Today, everywhere I look I see RAII and SFINAE ...

How much time do you spend writing code?

Hello all, as a junior developer I am curious to know: How much time do you spend actually writing code? As a bonus, what kind of code (e.g. scripting, OO, functional, db, etc), and what kind of industry. Personally, I've noticed that almost 90% of what the developers at my company do is maintenance, administration and other non-code wr...

Call external script within chroot environment

I use a chroot development environment for developing software for devices. The chroot dev environment isolates the rest of my system from my build-system hacking. The chroot environment is text-based, but I prefer to use a graphical text editor. Right now, I keep one terminal chrooted into the dev environment to build packages and one t...

when to use new in C++?

What's a good policy for when to use "new" to make an instance of a class? I've been hobby programming C++ for a while but I'm still not for sure when is the best time to do this: MyClass thing(param1, param2); over this: MyClass* thing; thing = new MyClass(param1, param2); Any advice? ...