Share anything you find important and think could be of use to others. Some questions you might want to answer: Do you use Jetty to run the application during development? Do you use another database than MySQL during development? How do you manage dependencies? Do you use Eclipse, NetBeans or other IDE's? Why did you make your IDE ch...
This article got me thinking. Languages are split in to about 6 groups in the article: The Cs Virtual Machine Languages Languages Formerly Known as “Scripting” Functional Straight Jackets Lisps JavaScript I would like to know if it is better for a programmer to be very proficient in one of this groups or be semi-proficient in all o...
ADDED: This question is now, I believe, subsumed by this one: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1075947/can-i-use-gnu-screen See also this related question: http://superuser.com/questions/147873/ssh-sessions-in-xterms-freeze-for-many-minutes-whenever-they-disconnect Original question: It would be nice if there were a way to ssh to ...
Given a team of developers collaborating on the production of a piece of sofware. How would you go about assessing individual developer performance and quality? I'm mostly looking for non subjective and (as far as this is possible) rational criteria by which the quality of the work of a developer can be judged (if not measured). I kno...
For some reason I find that I am at my best, in terms of programming, late at night. I'm not sure if it's because I lose my inhibition that keeps me from pushing forward or if there is something else to it but either way I get the most done after the sun goes down. What time of day do you find yourself the most proficient in terms of pr...
Closed as an exact duplicate of this question. When I write C++ code I compile frequently so that I can see that I'm not making a mistake or what errors to fix next. However, that practice is unfortunately highly inefficient, especially with bigger projects that take a long time to compile. Even if compilation takes only 30 seconds or...
I am using the vim editor and I wanted to empty out all methods in the class, for instance class A { public: int getNumber() const { return number; } void setNumber(int num) { number = num; } }; I wanted to have a regex where I could substitute so that the result woul...
After working hard and saving money for a decade+, I "retired" to be a stay-at-home dad. I'm trying to live modestly, to make the money last, but it will run out. Returning to work full-time would be a shame, and I don't need that much money anyway. I'd like to work part-time. I've always found my productivity as a programmer scales w...
I'm working in a startup company where the development team is a small team of three programmers; A project manager, myself and another guy. The issue is that the other guy regularly commits code into SVN that doesn't actually work! The base usually compiles okay, but the references to views/stored procedures in SQL either don't work o...
I have found this both in myself and managers have mentioned it to me regarding other programmers: about half way through a project, the progress of a programmer will slow to a crawl and it's hard to get them to finish a project. (Half way could be anywhere from 10% to 90%, it's just getting to the "home stretch".) I'm thinking it's mos...
My company sells developer tools. As a developer myself, it is hard not to assume that what is important to me is important to many other developers: In our case, the thing we lack the most is time. So, I'm willing to spend money on things like Microsoft Team Foundation Server which integrates well with Visual Studio and handles variou...
I'm trying to put together a business case for getting every developer in our company an Intel SSD drive. The main codebase contains roughly 400,000 lines of code. My theory is that since the code is scattered about in maybe 1500 files, an SSD drive would be substantially faster for compiles. The logic being that many small reads really...
Writing less code will give best productive/quality/performance! Is it true? ...
I love working with Rails but I keep tripping up against my own inefficiency: I'll spend time implementing some "useful" function only to discover subsequently that it was already in the framework, had I but known it! Particular areas of wheel reinvention for me are helpers and built-in class extensions recently-released features that...
I find that I often descend into what I call "rabbit holes" as I learn about a new technology/language/method/etc. These are the moments where you feel that in order to understand a detail of what you are working on, you start investigating and investigating and you end up in a related, but detached space. For instance, I'm learning Ru...
I live in a shared apartment with 3 other folks (students), and I'm renting a room which isn't too large. I'm looking for a comfortable desk and chair which will be good for programming on my small-ish laptop. Any suggestions on what type is best for programming? ...
When dealing with small projects, what do you feel is the break even point for storing data in simple text files, hash tables, etc., versus using a real database? For small projects with simple data management requirements, a real database is unnecessary complexity and violates YAGNI. However, at some point the complexity of a database...
Lately, I've been going through a pretty weird phase. I feel the need to write/rewrite all the tools I use ( text editors,IDE's,libraries/modules ) and I don't know why . Even though this can be seen as a good thing ( because I learn alot of things in the process , and my software design skills are improving constantly ) , the weirdest ...
After reading how to keep your dev machine from slowing down, I was reminded of my good intention a year ago to build a VM for my development machine. However, I'm developing WPF and SilverLight GUIs on Vista x64. I can run x64 versions of the OS under a VM but I'm concerned about graphic performance for WPF and especially running Expre...
Do you cultivate an alternative career/hobby which complements or refreshes your primary role as a developer? If so, what is it and why? Also see these related questions: If you weren't a programmer what would you be doing How do you vent stress as a programmer? What are some exercises you do to make you a better programmer? How do yo...