In The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention, the authors mention that one creative way to boost productivity in software development is to implement "productivity games" where employees compete against each other in a way similar to gaining reputation and badges on Stack Overflow. One example they give is the Microsoft "Vista Internal B...
Hi, I wonder who of you can work on several projects the same day, dedicating only a short piece of time for each one. Or if you are able to work in the same hour, on two or three or more projects at the same time. I have so many things to do, that I am starting to wonder how could I do this? I thought about using several workspaces, a...
Right now, I design all of my web pages with plain old HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I use a text editor and Apache server on my computer. I make changes to my code and press refresh in the browser. Is this a good way to design websites or is a tool like Adobe Fireworks more cutting edge? If I want to step up my game, is this software s...
for example: I want to know if i change anything in this selector then how many places it will effect? How many page are using this selector and which places? #annualReportInvestorContainer p a {.........} ...
I work in a bank, and the boss now want's that we, the programming team, work on rotating shifts. He wants that sometimes we work from 7am to 3pm, and sometimes on 11.30am to 7.30pm. He says that we will be more productive working this way, because he has worked with teams just like that and he just knows that. Nobody of the team wants ...
Many programmers have security clearances and work in "secure" facilities, offices, etc. To all of you working in such an environment, what impacts does it have on your productivity, if any? ...
I am in the precarious position of "managing" a team of developers at a small company. I say "managing" because although I assign work and provide feedback on their performance I have no recourse in actually disciplining an individual. Some of my team I don't know what to do with, they are unable to work on their own, require massive a...
I'm asking this because I've found that I get less done when I'm working along side others heavily. If we're working on a big project and each small group (2-3) or single person has descretion on smaller tasks, I don't feel the time pinch as much, but when 5-6 of us are forced to work together on a 3 week project (3 weeks for 1 person) s...
I consider myself somewhat familiar with Vim, hate the arrow keys (let alone the mouse), regularly look up tips and plugins to get the most out of this tool, use it daily to manage my cloud servers, etc. However, I always find myself doing the same mistakes probably inherited from the GUI-world: too often switching to visual mode t...
My site carries some products that can be sold individually or personalized with a tag. The tag option has a total combination of 1140 variations. 3 Shapes 19 Clipart designs 15 Color choices I created a configurable product and ran it through EasySKU extension and later associated the products as "group" product. The configurations ...
Year 2010 and we still have to write boilerplate codes. Lets assume we are building an online application (it doesnt matter wherter it is fancy or not but a funtional one). We first make database design and put some business logic on it (stored procedures, unique or not etc) then we code server side and write most of the business logic o...
One of Vim's great strengths is object-select, offering quick manipulation of content inside words, paragraphs and assorted delimiters. For example, vi{ will select everything inside a pair of {} braces. Is there any equivalent functionality for selecting a here document or heredoc: <<<HTML .... .... HTML; ...
Hi SO members, What Tools do you people use to work with Scala? For my learning phase, I used the Scala REPL and hacked some code with TextMate and compiled it with the scalac CLI. But as the projects grow in size, much more sophisticated tools are required. I am aware of the Scala plugins for Elipse, IntelliJ and Netbeans and I tried ...
For testing I don't want to upload css to FTP on each change till site complete , but site and content is online. (i'm not talking about saving page locally then apply css) Can i just apply css locally to any online page. it would be easier to edit and see changes locally till css work end. and i want to see applied effect on FF and...
After looking at RescueTime for windows/mac, it seems that there's a version for linux but doesn't seem up to date. Also, it's the weekends and I want to spend time playing with X11.. I'm thinking of making a simple productivity-polling app, that every short interval polls the active windows, and intercepts (and passes along) mouse and ...
Every time I build an ecommerce application I need to invest a considerable amount of time into categorising products. Factors such as ambiguoty, duplication and subjectivity can often lead to rework and wasted time. Are there any standards available (such as ISOs) that can be applied to categorising products like computer or car parts ...
I recently became part of a complex embedded project team for which I will be developing a part. For the part which is my responsibility there is only old code and not much documentation. I am keen to make a good start but shyness and fear of appearing stupid makes it difficult to ask questions. How to ask questions ? I wanted to ask ...
Occasionally , we have to write methods that receive many many arguments , for example : public void doSomething(Object objA , Object objectB ,Date date1 ,Date date2 ,String str1 ,String str2 ) { } When I encounter this kind of problem , I often encapsulate arguments into a map. Map<Object,Object> params = new HashMap<Object,Object>(...
A lot of developers get an exciting idea and they create a project, but eventually life gets in the way and you have to stop working on the project. Some time passes and you know you should probably get back to work on the project, but you just can't make yourself do it. What do you do to motivate yourself to get back to work on a proj...
Has anyone worked with Pomodoro technique and found them really useful? I recently read about it online and I am intrigued. My technique is mostly brute-force (get-on-it-until-it-is-done), and I simply haven't found anything that beats this. Should I use techniques like Pomodoro? ...