Hello, I am a solo developer, working in a very small web development firm. There is occasional support for development from contractors, but for the most part, if code is written in the office, I am writing it. Many of the articles and such on here talk extensively about the tools and techniques used for collaboration of developers ...
In a different thread Mr. Shark suggested to use your boss to be more efficient at work. What would be your suggestions for the best way’s to utilize your boss in a development team? ...
If you were to self-fund a software project which tools, frameworks, components would you employ to ensure maximum productivity for the dev team and that the "real" problem is being worked on. What I'm looking for are low friction tools which get the job done with a minimum of fuss. Tools I'd characterize as such are SVN/TortioseSVN, Re...
Ignoring the obvious benefits after the code has been written, I am interested to get a rough idea how much productivity is initially lost, or how much extra time is initially required, due to the requirements of TDD. I am aware of the benefits of TDD and the productivity gains that come from writing less buggy code, I am just intereste...
The title says it all, but I'm curious to find methods that people use that I never thought about. Considering my relatively short history with development, I've never had to deal with massive code bases. What sort of things do you do to get familiar with a large, complex, code base as fast as you can to be effective? ...
We're fortunate in our company to each have 2 decent-sized monitors and reasonably fast machines. This alone is enough to impress many of my peers who are stuck working with poor equipment. But should things like this really be seen as a luxury? What about a quiet working environment? Should this be guaranteed? How about comfy chairs? W...
There is always a lot of discussion about various coding conventions, with strongly held beliefs on all sides. But I am curious if there have been any studies comparing equivalent projects where there were different mandated coding conventions, or even no coding conventions whatsoever. I am especially curious as to what effect differen...
What environmental factors make you lose your motivation? ...
I started logging my productivity a year ago; some days I do more, some days I do less. And then, there are those rare few days, when in the course of a single day, I achieve more, than on any other given week. I call these "sparkles of productivity", and in the last year, I had about 4 of them (give or take). So, my question is: what ...
What is your favorite visual studio plugin? ...
How to you find the URL that represents the documentation of a .NET framework method on the MSDN website? For example, I want to embed the URL for the .NET framework method into some comments in some code. The normal "mangled" URL that one gets searching MSDN isn't very friendly looking: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/xd12z8ts.aspx....
How do you quickly find the URL for a Win32 API on MSDN? It's easy for .NET methods -- just add the method name (for example, System.Byte.ToString) to http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/. However, for Win32 APIs (say GetLongPathName), this doesn't work: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/GetLongPathName. I want to be able to use t...
I have recently been befuddled with comments regarding the speed at which some people claim to be able to develop various applications. I tend to feel that there is a definite relationship between application quality, reliability and speed of delivery. I take Stackoverflow as a good example. I love the quality of the site, (and I think ...
My primary development machine at work is a laptop. I currently run with two monitors, which the machine natively supports (an external monitor connected via the laptop's VGA or DVI port, plus the laptop's own attached screen). I'd like to add a third monitor to my setup. What are some good hardware solutions for adding a third monito...
If a top-tier engineer (e.g. a founder of this site) offered to come be your unpaid intern for two weeks, would you hire him/her, or would it be a waste of everybody's time? If you were to hire him/her, what would you have them do? ...
What are some techniques you use to get yourself to focus on the task at hand, even if it's one that you don't really want to do? Answers along the lines of "If you have to work at focusing, get a different job" aren't useful. ...
I've tried in the past but gave up. Thoughts? Edit: I'm a software engineer and can't afford the initial productivity hit. I'll need to use both QUERTY and Dvorak until I'm up-to-speed. ...
Team building, in my opinion, is often misunderstood concept! The wikipedia definition is also very theoretical. But i think it is real critical skill for any team leader. So, How do you "team-build"? Do you just book some conference room in a big hotel and discuss the same things you do at your regular meetings? Or you do you tak...
Let's just say the boss is addicted to the price of poor code, and will keep on outsourcing chunks of greenfield projects to cheap labour, only to get inhouse devs to fix the bugs. ...
Post your favorite Vim tricks (or plug-ins or scripts). One trick per answer. Try to come up with something other than the basics, btw. :D ...