I think mine would be the "Getting Real" concept by 37Signals.com Basically this is based largely on the same-old-same-old KISS principle, but that simply proves how valid this principle is in many working environments and certainly in IT. I still benefit from this basic principle in my day-to-day programming. What was your "eye opener...
In the umpteen years I've been in IT I come to the conclusion that most of the time management did not add a lot of value to my job as a programmer. I even dare to say that most of them lacked vision, enthousiasm and a sense of direction. All but one. One manager I worked for had a vision and knew how to motivate a team. We bypassed all...
I have had pain in my wrists in the past, and as someone who types all day, I was wondering what are some keyboards or mice that have helped for this sort of pain. Update: Many answers have recommended examining chairs/desks for ergonomics. As someone who isn't able to work from home and therefore doesn't have a lot of control ove...
What is your favorite Visual Studio keyboard shortcut? I'm always up for leaving my hands on the keyboard and away from the mouse! One per answer please. ...
How many of you prefer full screen for your applications? What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing this? Edit: I run all my applications full screen, that includes shell, browser, app etc. In this way, I feel less distraction and concentrate on what I am doing. ...
I usually find that after a couple of hours "in the zone", I need to take a break, get some fresh air and get a new perspective. Often, these breaks allow me to generate a solution to some stumbling block that was preventing progress. If, instead, I continue to pound at the code, I start to get sloppy, make mistakes and get more and mo...
I am sure I could get some great suggestions here since I am sure a large percentage of the StackOverflow user base could help me out here. Like most dev's I have dual monitor setup at work, and a gazillion windows open at the time, and often need to ping them back and forward between the two. Reaching for the mouse all the time, quite...
My whole department has owned individual copies of ReSharper for about a year, but I find I'm one of only two people that actually use any of its features regularly. I'm trying to get everybody to use it more effectively and would like opinions on the most useful features and their shortcuts so I can share more than just what I use it f...
One of the biggest general productivity boosters I've used is a good program launcher. I was a long-time user of SlickRun, and I've tried a few others. My current favorite is Executor - by far the best I've used. Other options: Executor: My current favorite Vista Start Menu: Pretty good, actually, but Executor is similar (binds to Win...
I have a bias towards the slim ones. (I am talking about technical books here ;-). By slim I mean the books I can read lying on the couch. That would approx to the books with no more than 400 pages I guess. GoF's design patterns has more pages, though I consider it as slim. I think you got the idea. Some of the best books I have read ar...
I know there have been many questions regarding legacy code here; however I want to broach the human side of the issue. How do you deal with being made to work on a very messy codebase with tight deadlines and an absolute opposition to refactoring? Personally I find it incredibly difficult and that difficulty impacts on my productivity v...
If you are finding your current workstation a pain to work with, how can you successfully justify an upgrade to management? ...
We've recently moved to using the wiki in our team. Earlier, we thought people couldn't contribute because it was difficult to. However, having a wiki (3 months now) hasn't helped as much as we'd hoped. Most folks still put it off as 'not my job'. How do I encourage my team to contribute to the wiki? NOTE: One useful resource I found i...
Every morning, after logging into your machine, you do a variety of routine stuffs. The list can include stuffs like opening/checking your email clients, rss readers, launching visual studio, running some business apps, typing some replies, getting latest version from Source Control, compiling, connecting to a different domain etc. To a ...
Reminiscing on your career as an IT professional, what was the biggest lesson you learned? [If you can accompany your answer with an story, anecdote, link to a website, article or book it would be great thing to inspire and teach the young IT professionals!] ...
I have many programs generating tons of logs in files. What freeware do you know, either for Windows or for multi-platforms (if they are in java for instance), able to tail (display the end of) those files ? A plus would be their capacity to display some line in a certain visual style depending on 'grep' criteria Quick update so far...
My machine is seriously underpowered, and I think I need to start conserving every spare cycle. I know that my Gnome environment seems to underperform compared to my coworkers' KDE setups. But if I'm going to make that big of a switch, I might as well consider running something even lighter. Is it possible to survive on a lightweight ...
Is there such a thing as having the most prefered design pattern for building applications in TDD or the iterative mode? ...
scenario: you have tightly coupled legacy code that you can not unit test. and you have to bug fix, what do you do to not get very depressed? I read working effectively... and refactoring.. by fowler, however in both book unit testing is indispensable. Refactoring is out of the question and a code rewrite is on the table however it will...
What would you say is the idea size physical work area per developer? Not the size of the desktop :-) ...