I recently read this article from Joel: The Duct Tape Programmer, I immediately thought of this ironic TDWTF article: Front-Ahead Design. I know of some crappy implemented applications, which suffer from all kinds of defects and frequently result in endless bug fixing sessions. But everything done wrong with these applications could be...
Hey all. I would like to get some insight on a question that I have been trying to find some information about. If you are the solo developer that is building a project from ground up, how do you manage the project? In the past, I have worked on a few personal projects that have grown into fairly large projects. In almost all of thos...
I'm wondering from your experience, what is the most useful techniques for finding (or preventing) bugs? Or to ask this another way, how do rank these techniques in your own experience? Continuous integration Code Reviews Unit Testing Manual Testing Focused testing days ...
Microsoft is planning to make Windows 8 an 128-bit operating system. I have always used 32-bit machines. I know 64-bit are common as well but I never went into details to understand how does it help a developer or in general. So my question is - What does 128-bit OS mean to a software developer? UPDATE I asked about this in general....
I want to make simple java program that will insert some text into current cursor position. That cursor position can be in any text editor, for example notepad. Is this possible? ...
Bugs can be difficult enough to resolve when they're your (or a coworker's) fault. However, we all know that the technology we use to implement our programs is written by infallible people such as ourselves. So it stands to reason that some people have been affected by bugs in the implementation of the tools they used. So, have you fo...
I tried to design the ui with some ui mocking software, but i found it's hard for me to settle down all the detail of the design, since the database didn't design yet. But if i first design software, then the same problem occur, I didn't have the UI, how can I create a prominent UI ? ...
A project that a group of mine is starting is going to be focused around the use of plug-ins which are extremely specific to the user. We are trying to essentially create an application that without the plug-ins is nothing more then a running environment, and hence will be driven by the addition of the user-specific plugins. I am not t...
I am looking for a graph-drawing software that produces diagrams that, unlike Gantt-charts, allow to define more that one, independent time-span for one line, because if there is no critical path, one can take up a project, leave it unfinished, start another, and take up the original project at a later time. ...
This question is a follow up to this question, except this is specifically about how to finance a small software development business (one person) without taking a huge loan or venture capital, but rather by financing it from your own savings. Basically, the question is, does it make any sense from a business perspective to start a softw...
I have asked a few developers who produced software they no longer maintain or let die, why they don't open source the software and let other developers take it forward and enhance it. Or at least not let it disappear. Most of the excuses were about the quality of the code. They don't want to open source because they are ashamed of what...
My old source was simply being around lots of other programmers and talking shop but now, I haven't worked on a traditional programming team in over a year and wonder what people in the same boat do to stay current with their language, tools and environment. Blogs? Sites? Newsgroups? Thanks for the ideas. ...
I manage a small in-house development team for a large organisation. We develop for both internal and external clients. I find it impossible to educate the non-technical senior management about the importance of team work, testing, etc etc. However, the most difficult thing is trying to make non-technical people understand what is...
I know of a similar question that got closed. But this one is from a developer's point of view. I must say my experience in terms of software development (not including testing) has been more painful on Vista than on XP. I'm wondering if you guys have had similar experience; and if so, does Windows 7 eases the pain? I'm using Vista on ...
Hi guys, I'm having issues trying to model a new system with nhibernate or even databases. I have lot of hardware which can be connected via IP or Serial Com Port (maybe more in the future). I want to be able to have different information depending on which one it is. I was thinking of a ConnectionInformation abstract class with Seria...
It's commonly agreed that successful software development is as much about teamwork and communication as it is about individual programming expertise. Given this, one might assume that by operating a geographically distributed team you are at an immediate disadvantage to a tight-knit team all working locally. When my startup company wa...
Hi all, recently I start to take a bigger responsability because I was developing a project and now is in production, so im coordinating the manteinance and other developments (with 6 more developers), what I need is to assing/manage task to developers and graphics-designers and see when they are busy or idle to take better decitions. i...
I need to provide some passwords, API keys and similar sensitive data in my code. What are best practices in that regard? Hard-coded? SQlite? Some cryptographic framework? ...
The company I work for has attempted to maintain configuration data for our application across multiple environments, but syncing that data has always been problematic and we've never come up with a good solution. To help clarify, we (developers or business) might change some configuration using our admin interface on the Staging enviro...
Hi I am just started to employ some new programmers for a trial period. They are students so nobody know if they're good or not. I would like to give them some typical tasks at the beginning to see how skilled they are. The problem I have is that I want them to write some bits for my asp.net mvc web application, but I don't want them t...