Does your team develop its own coding guidelines? How long is the document? How often do you read/need it? How often do you make mistakes by not abiding to the guidelines? Who has permission to edit it? ...
Has anyone ever had the experience of maintaining code that was initially written on or before the date you were born? Personally the oldest code I ever worked on was first written in 1982, so it did not predate me. One of my best friends is a mainframe developer and he worked on code first written in the early 70s, but it did not pred...
In the U.S should programmers be licensed to practice much like electricians must be licensed to practice in the state they are in? Personally I would be opposed to such an idea due to feasibility and political issues but I am curious what others think. Thoughts... I could see some merit to the concept and with software being a missio...
Currently I am in college to be a business app developer of sorts. We're learning C#, and VB.NET almost exclusively right now. This makes me think as to why we are. I've read that C# is efficient with almost anything you could ever want to do with it, and that's great. We tend to do a lot of those out of the book review projects, which g...
What was the weirdest (or most awkward) time and place that you've found yourself thinking about a programming problem? ...
To all of you information addicts out there - I was wondering how much information can you take. At the moment I have 104 active subscriptions on my google reader, mostly development stuff, and I can barely keep up. I do not really read all the stuff that gets posted - I scan with my eyes and if my fast forward algorithm gets some keywo...
Similar questions have been asked for .NET and Java, but not for Ruby. So, what’s your favorite feature in Ruby? You might also be interested in hidden features of Ruby. Please be specific and post one feature per answer. An explanation or a code sample would be nice. ...
Hi everyone and Merry Christmas! Please share your favorite programming bookmarks. Blogs, newspapers, forums, whatever. Stuff you NEED to read everyday! =) EDITED Suggested one per reply, to clarify voting ...
At my school, since Spring 2007, each Computer Science major may declare one of the following areas of emphasis: Computer Systems Software design Computational Science and Visualization Modeling and Simulation Internet and Information Technology Theoretical Computer Science Artificial Intelligence (AI) Note: An area of emphasis does ...
I was wondering when most people wrote their unit tests, if at all. I usually write tests after writing my initial code to make sure it works like its supposed to. I then fix what is broken. I have been pretty successful with this method but have been wondering if maybe switching to writing the test first would be advantageous. ...
Related to web pages / application, what is the worst web usability error you have encountered? The one that hit you the most; that which arguably could trip the most users? Or, from another point of view, which error would you choose to be eliminated from the face of the Earth, if possible? ...
Imagine you have millions of dollars and can reach to the best programming/creative minds in the world. 1- What would you build/work on? 2- Who would you hire? 3- Where would your office will be and how would it look like? ...
As an outgrowth of "Why should I learn C++ rather than C# question, here is a poll: who is using C# for things that are not related to Windows GUI? Web programming qualifies, even if I think it's borderline. Ideal example would be a back-end application where you chose C# specifically because of its language features, and not because tha...
Who pronounces the datatype "char" as in "charbroiled" or as in "character"? count as of 2009-01-01 12:38 EST: charbroiled 12 character 8 car 2 both - 1 ...
I was reading today about every 30 GB Zune failing at exactly the same time. As it turns out, the cause is probably an infinite loop that will only appear on the 366th day of a leap year (see this write-up). So just curious...have you ever written an infinite loop that made it all the way to production without being detected? ...
What feature is missing or hidden in Notepad++, that can be added while keeping it still the small, fast and efficient source code editor that it is? Have you found a feature to be missing only to later discover a way to achieve this anyway, perhaps with a plug-in? ...
Does anyone have a reasonable definition of Code Quality? I don't think there is a good definition, and I see plenty of bad definitions. There are many definitions for Correctness, but I would expect correctness to be a given, and quality is meaningless if the code is broken. I suspect quality is something like: correctness ...
I've heard two good pieces of advice when it comes to choosing which language to use in a development team. To paraphrase: Use the language you're most familiar with unless you have a compelling reason not to. It'll provide the best return on investment. and Different languages have different strengths. Be fluent in ...
When I started programming web pages, it became immediately obvious that the WYSIWYG editors sucked. The HTML output was difficult to maintain, did things in ways you may not have agreed with, completely messed up existing pages if opened, couldn't handle code in the page, and was polluted with dead or irrelevant code like <font ...></f...
I was recently answering a question referring to the Joel Test and found that our company did not do well on some points (hallway usability testing and daily builds) but that these points for our company are relatively minor, while I agree that some points are an absolutely must (source control, bug database, interviewees writing code). ...