I recently accepted a large project which was basically making a lot of CRUD (create, read, update, delete) pages for the database of a company. The reason the project was large was, there were a lot of tables, and there were a lot of fields in each table. Envisioning that the project will take at least 10 days of work, I quoted appropr...
If so, why? What's missing in Windows that I get for linux (excpet GCC, and we have MingW for that)? I know it's subjective but I want to hear some opinions before I switch OSes. I'm not familiar with either Emacs or vim. Is there another IDE that you guys would recommend? What's the best development env. linux distrubition? ...
One of the main reason many developers choose Ruby-On-Rails is its promise of increased productivity. As many people in the rails community claim "It is the fastest way of going from and idea to implementation". I have seen anecdotal references to Rails vs. java OR Rails vs. PHP coomparision claiming Rails applications to be 3-5 times...
It is so easy to get interested in something (including Stackoverflow) and lose a total track of time doing it, even when you have a lot of things to do. What tools and techniques do you use to track your time. I have come across hamster-applet, promodoro technique. RescueTime seems a nice tool to introspect, but there is no proper fro...
What do you use Python every day for? If you don't use Python every day, please include any answers with your usage on a non-daily basis. ...
Say you are the new guy on an existing project. You know the language that is being used and you may even know the framework. You want to get productive as soon as possible. What do you do to get up to speed and get familiar with the current code base? Do you read every piece of documentation available? Do you pair program for the first...
Is there a unix based terminal (extension or app) that does link resolution. In particular when I see things like: /home/sam/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.2/lib/action_controller/benchmarking.rb:68:in `perform_action_without_rescue' /home/sam/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.2/lib/active_support/core_ext/benchmark.rb:17:in `...
Ok, the question is usually, how can one measure a programmer's productivity. But I want to put a slight twist on the question. How does one measure one's own productivity when coding? Do you measure yourselves by problems solved, questions answered versus asked, or the dreaded "lines of code"? ...
Can I define custom "surround with" templates in Visual Studio 2008? ...
I ask because I noticed while researching a new laptop, that Lenovo keyboards have the Fn key in the left corner of the keyboard instead of Ctrl (famously it seems). I also discovered the same configuration is present on Apple laptops. Obviously Ctrl is used quite frequently by developers: they are often power-users, relying on many s...
David Allen's "Getting Things Done" recommends keeping a "Next Action" list to organize your work, where a "Next Action" is the next physical action you will do to make progress towards an objective. In programming, determining what to do next is often almost as hard as doing it (sounds like the halting problem). Most of the work is exa...
What tutorials or guides about features/techniques influenced the way you did something. Eg a compelling tutorial (located here) about unit testing got you into unit testing. Your code improved dramatically. ...
In personal projects I often find myself tinkering over code and keep rewriting it because there's always something that can be improved. I'm looking for ways to tell myself 'ok the code is not perfect but I need to move forward now'. How do you motivate yourself to go forward and take the imperfect code as is? merged with "How to sto...
Is there a plug-in for Visual Studio that will track time spent on a project as well as the files being worked on? It would be really useful to be able to generate a report each day with the projects worked on the files that were being worked would be used to match up a task to the time. ...
I'm thinking about the windows that pops up right after you type the opening bracket. EDIT: I meant the tooltip :) ...
I've heard a lot about Vim, both pros and cons. It really seems you should be (as a developer) faster with Vim than with any other editor. I'm using Vim to do some basic stuff and I'm at best 10 times less productive with Vim. The only two things you should care about when you talk about speed (you may not care enough about them, but yo...
Our team is working on old hardware and trying to justify buying new hardware to improve our productivity. Mainly to improve compile times, better use of Virtual Machines, running multiple instances of Visual Studio, etc. Our app today takes about 1 minute to compile on our current hardware, and from some benchmarking will take about 1...
What are some clipboard management software that help with developer productivity. There are a ton out there when I google so I just wanted to get some actual recommendations. What are some techniques you use with the software that give you a good productivity boosts? ...
Not a repeat of the "Keyboard For Programmers" question, though that one is certainly worth reading. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/687/keyboard-for-programmers I know there are a few keyboards out there with programmable function keys, but let's say you've already found the keyboard of your dreams and it has no such feature. Ideal...
I recently got a job working for a company who uses several programming languages but mainly focuses on C#, and thus uses Visual Studio 2008. As lame as it sounds, I don't know how to use it productively. I don't know any of the keyboard shortcuts, I didn't know you could restrict builds to certain parts of a solution until someone sho...