I'm doing an analysis of one of my previous projects. This one is really painful. I've worked in a software house. During my stay, we were ranked #1 out of 5-7 competitors. Although it may sound good at first, a meeting with the client shows that we are not up to their "standards" and want to raise the bar even higher (yes, and we we...
Let's say you're the lucky programmer who inherited a code that is close to software rot. Software rot as defined in Pragmatic Programmer is code that is too ugly (in this case, unrefactored code) it is compared to a broken window that no one wants to fix it and in turn can damage a house and can cause criminals to thrive in that city....
Sometimes, when I present a part of the software development process to certain people, say the supervisor or the manager that they don't have experience say Automated unit tests and integration tests vs. their manual functional testing. Using code generators, and scripts for repetitive tasks. I sometimes met with resistance. Some o...
Does doing "good enough" software take anything from you being a programmer? Here are my thoughts on this: Well Joel Spolsky from JoelOnSoftware says that programmers gets bored because they do "good enough" (software that satisfies the requirements even though they are not that optimized). I agree, because people like to do things th...
Hi all, I've recently gotten quite fond of netbeans for my php work because of the XDebug integration. It has made me all but forget about textmate (which imho still beats netbeans for the little things) What do you think is the one awesome netbeans feature I should know about, and more importantly why and how do I use it? I'm aski...
As a manager, what would you like the software developers under your management to learn? It might be knowledge of some specific technology/software engineering skill/some other skill or knowledge, or what? ...
How do you identify who can be potential programmer from people like students? Is it going to take like two weeks? You give them some ideas of programming and test them. Or is it going to be a 3 months? You give them a lot of ideas about programming and test them to see who can perform better in average? Any other methods or views? R...
I have the task to interview and hire a new web programmer for the company I work fo. Apart from the usual questions about previous employment and education, I've been using a SQL evaluation test to evaluate the candidate's technical abilities. For junior developers I ask them to code a simple CRUD page. What do you use as a fast test ...
I've been doing web dev for 10 years now, mostly the MS stack but some LAMP as well. There are so many choices these days for programmers and the job market seems to be all over the place. Before I dive into some new technology once again I was hoping to get some perspective from others in regards to additional benefits of being a ja...
What 1 thing in programming has had the largest payoff that you've learned over the past 3 years. Yes, 3 years is an eternity it IT. I'm trying to decide what to learn next and want to see what you've learned that has the most payoff and why. This could be anything like (but not limited to) coding to an interface, unit testing, TDD, moc...
When interviewing people I ask some lower level language and algorithm type questions. Nothing too tricky, but I am surprised how often I here programmers who claim to be senior level say they mostly work in a framework (that maybe they designed) and don't typically have a need to do low-level coding. Some of the questions I ask: The...
The single most effective thing I have done to improve my soft skills is to take an acting class. What is the single most effective thing you have done to improve your soft skills? Related questions: What is the single most effective thing that you have done to improve your programming skills? Advice to improve programmer communica...
I have a friend who works at a job that has no planned upgrade plan on getting off of VS2005 and Sql Server 2000. He's concerned that his skills may fall behind even though he attends user group meetings and tries to cover various topics on his personal time. After talking with him, it got me interested in what people may think the "cu...
Hello, I am making a team with my friend, my cousin and my brother, I want to make a small group that will create a network of websites on different topics. I am a web developer, thinking more like a programmer and doing mostly web applications(web based programs) than public websites, now the members of the team never worked on a webs...
How can I increase my proficiency in programming? I have a grasp of the basics of C#, but don't feel too confident about my ability. ...
Rails seems to be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. When I look at job postings for Rails they often contain a lot of requirements beyond just being able to throw an app together. This makes me think that even if knew the Agile Rails book from front cover to back I still wouldn't qualify for most Rails jobs. So if yo...
Past few years I have had this realization: I need to use a lot more of my non-technical skills (60%) than my technical skills as my interaction role expands. Role expansion is dealing with less of hardcore programming activities and more of problem resolution at various levels. I still think that a great architect+designer+programme...
For the past 5 or so years, I've been working with vastly different projects and systems. Code for those projects differed significantly in terms of quality, style, size. I saw examples of both: clean as well as disgusting 1000 lines functions and if conditions code. I still don't feel quite competent at reading other people's code,...
Looking back at my career and life as a QA engineer, there were plenty of different ways I improved my QA skills and testplans- reading other people's testplans, readings specs, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching screencasts. My question is: What is the most effective thing you have done that improved your QA skills? What w...
Folks, I have got to work with a new team and design the required skills for each of them, I want to put a compressed training plan for one of them to be the Xml Expert in the team, as part of this I put him to read about XPath, XSLT from W3Schools, but what else he needs to know ? or is there a better source ? ...