I've had several false starts in the past with teaching myself how to program. I've worked through several books (mostly C and Python), and end up just learning the syntax without feeling as though I could sit down and actually write a program for myself. When I try to look through the source trees of a project on Codeplex or Sourceforge...
Everywhere I've worked, programmers carry about a ruled A4 hard-back note book. To avoid attracting attention, I dutifully carry one also, and once or twice in every meeting I nod sagely and pretend to write down something interesting. Occasionally people leave theirs unattended and I sneak a look. Mostly they seem to be writing a com...
Does anyone have recommendations for a good task/time management tool. Ideally this would just keep track of programming tasks / the project and the time spent also the option to produce an end of week report would be advantageous ...
What do you do on a Friday afternoon at work when you've lost your drive to work? ...
I'm looking for a pc app that runs in the background and collates simple information about applications im running. Hopefully including the opened project (whereby visual studio includes the title of the project in the window title). Also if it could include periods of inactivity that would be useful. It's intended to help me fill out t...
Hello, I know this is less programming related and more time management related, but I value the feedback of the users on this site. I'm finding myself particularly busy this semester, managing various tasks and timelines between work and school. Further, I find myself running around between labs, work, home, libraries, etc. For thes...
I was surfing the web and found myself at 3D Realms hiring page. It sounds quite nice what they are advertising there. Everywhere you can read things like "Freedom from arbitrary completion date pressures". This sounded very sensible to me since I sometimes have problems with schedules myself. But when I connected the statement with t...
Where I work, my role has been evolving from a pure development role to team leadership. I find that this suits me, and I'm generally enjoying it. One aspect of the job that continually vexes me, though, is time management. My day used to be pure coding. Now, I still have a largely full plate of coding duties, but I'm expected to mentor...
At any given time, I do consulting for between 2-4 clients, and I'm having some trouble keeping track of the hours and generating invoices. My current solution is to use Google Calendar to track my hours, and then at month-end, manually enter the data on an Excel template I have (one copy for each customer) and email it to them. While th...
I have been a working programmer since the turn of the century and I have always been fascinated by the open source world. I have wanted to contribute to these projects but I find it difficult to find the time that I think these projects would require. I find professional software development to be a huge time sink. Almost every projec...
Hi, Our profession often requires deep learning; sitting down and reading, and understanding. I'm currently undergoing an exam period, and I'm looking for ways to learn more effectively. I'm not asking about what to learn, or whether to prefer blogs over books, etc. My question is much more physical than that - What do you do when ne...
When working on a project - I always estimate my tasks and calculate how long it will take me to finish. So in the end I get a time-span in which the project should be finished (it rarely is). My question is - do you record your data and assumptions use in your estimates during a project and use them for later projects or refined estima...
Staying up-to-date is essential in the programming world as new technologies / methods etc.. are so quick to arrive (and depart). So how much time do you spend doing this? Does your employer allow you to do this on their time? Or do they expect that as a professional it is up to you to keep your skills up? On a related subject, how much...
With webapps being more and more common in business, it has not gone unnoticed by customers that you can roll out fixes and upgrades fast. I think there is increasing pressure to answer "will be done ASAP" to every request, especially to bug reports. For programmers, ASAP work sucks. It takes self-control out of the work. In the long ru...
My situation: I recently migrated my company's old ordering system to a new one I developed for them. It had to be backwards compatible and work with the existing database structure until the migration was finally completed. Now that the migration is partially complete, I would like to redesign the database, but I find myself almost 100%...
I have a developer on my staff that chronically overshoots deadlines, and estimates. On several projects the last week or two everyday I hear "It should be done by the end of the day". This developer does good work. I have already spoke to him about his problems. He seems genuinely frustrated, and miffed about what to do to correct them...
Some developers when given a task go straight into the IDE and start coding with very little design. They may have an idea of where the application is going as they are coding. I am 1 of these developers. I do this because I feel that if I spend a lot of time designing my application delivery time will be much higher as compared to if I ...
I'm a Java/J2ee programmer working in India. I'm very passionate about programming and I constantly strive to hone my programming skills by reading blogs, solving Project euler questions, learning new technologies, developing small apps etc;. But I find it very difficult to manage my time. Working for 12 hrs a day in office leaves me st...
Do you guys have any tips or advice on learning different languages and technologies at the same time? ...
I have problems developing my personal projects because I don't have deadlines, so I rarely find time to pursue them and when I finally find some time I usually find myself "perfecting" the code instead of adding more meat. In contrast, my for-pay projects are less than perfect but work to the customer's satisfaction, earn my pay and ar...