Let's suppose that I would prefer not to buy books from Amazon.com. Does anyone have any other favorite sites for buying tech books? Inexpensive, easy to find books, usable wishlist, and good selection would be nice, of course. ...
There are now several places that offer free audio or video tech talks/presentations online: I'm thinking of Google Tech Talks, IT Conversations, as well as some of the sites recommended in the answers to this question. So: are there any specific presentation(s) that you consider as "must-see", either in your area of interest or for all...
There are a large number of software development conferences held around the world every year, but I've yet to find a website that contains anything approaching a comprehensive list of them all. Does anyone know of one? I'm particularly interested in conferences held in the US or UK for Microsoft products or technologies, as well as co...
Hi everyone, I'm reading through head first design patterns at the moment and while the book is excellent I also would like to see how these are actually used in the real world. If you know of a good example of design pattern usage (preferably in a OSS program so we can have a look :) then please list it below. ...
I am seriously considering actually reading through the whole Art of Computer Programming by Don Knuth. Though I know not many people actually manage to do this, and it's a ridiculously huge task to attempt, I wondered what people thought reading the whole lot will give me? I believe it'll give me a deeper and wider understanding of pr...
Ok so a good few months back i started hearing about F# and all the goodness it has, i bought Don Syme's book and started reading. At first i was really excited at how elegant it seemed to make certain tasks. But then i found a problem, although the language seems great it is quite different from what i use in work which means my co-...
What tips to people have for getting hobby/home projects done? What tools do you use for designing & planning code? (Pen and paper, software, both?) Do you use software to plan and track your project? How do you choose libraries to use (e.g. to make yourself productive)? Are there any good books/sites on planning small projects? How do...
What are your favorite code kata? What do you do to practice software development? Where do you go to find new small projects to practice? We already know Jeff's answers. ...
Does anybody know any good resources for learning how to program CIL with in-depth descriptions of commands, etc.? I have looked around but not found anything particularly good. ...
I'm writing up some productivity/metrics tools for myself to help monitor my focus throughout the day. Recently, I've noticed that I tend to get off track more than usual and feel the need to get up and go for walks/drinks/etc and I'm concerned that I'm "wasting" too much time. Since I always lock my computer when I go anywhere, and I u...
I know this is the sort of somewhat open-ended question that we're discouraged from asking, but there are lots of open-ended questions around already, and this is something quite relevant to me right now. Do you ever get those times when you're about to start work on a new function/feature of an established system, and you get "coder's ...
What are the best toy projects to improve generalised programming skills? I'm talking small programs that you build from scratch and play with yourself to develop skills in a given area or areas. For example, you might put together a very simple notepad-type application, or a simple calculator program. For example, what is the best proj...
I would like to know how people implement the following data structures in C# without using the base class library implementations:- Linked List Hash Table Binary Search Tree Red-Black Tree B-Tree Binomial Heap Fibonacci Heap and any other fundamental data structures people can think of! I am curious as I want to improve my understa...
I have worked as a developer/analyst for 10 years primarily in OpenVMS COBOL and SAS. I have been given the oppurtunity to "dabble" in asp.net as well as other things such as Informatica. But everything has to fit in within the scope of my current duties. I would say that actual development work takes up about 70% of my time while the re...
Recently, a member of our team got burned out and had to leave. Basically, he got into a death march situation on an overdue project, started by working late to catch up which grew into stranger and stranger hours. Eventually, he was leaving when everyone else was arriving and starting work in the evenings. Consequently, he developed s...
In question: "What causes developer burnout?" I told of a co-worker who got burned out and ended up leaving the profession. Have you seen developer burnout? Tell the story here. Whether it is funny or just plain sad and touching I'm sure it will tell us something about our profession. This will give us a sense of how common it is as w...
Sometimes it takes me two or three attempts to explain how a piece of code functions or how a process works within an application so that the person I am speaking to understands (or at least responds as if they understand). I'm reading a few different books on Technical Writing but what can I do to become a better verbal "code communica...
It's getting close to the time when I need to submit training and travel requests. I'm looking for conferences and classes in the coming 12 months that are geared toward improving coding and software development, best practices, system architecture, etc. They need to be in the US or Canada since I'll never get approval for anything else....
What do you do when your source control / bug database / network / email system is temporarily unavailable? This is to guage how productive we can be under such a situation? ...
What are the first steps to getting back into programming after many years of tech support? ...