I found quite an active discussion on WorkingWithRails but can't tell if this is the most active of the Rails discussion forums? Where do most people go to ask questions? ...
I was looking for Object Relational Mappers on Google and found this ORM (TierDeveloper O/R mapper). Has someone tried it? What were your experiences with it? Is it easier to use than other ORMs? ...
Virtual memory was introduced to help run more programs with limited memory. But in todays environment of inexpensive RAM, is it still relevant? Since there will be no disk access if it is disabled and all the programs will be memory resident, will it not improve the performance and program response times? Is there any essential requi...
Many of us probably follow the developer blogs of well-known names - Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, etc. Many of us probably also follow the technical blogs of people we've come to know through our careers or our interactions. These could be blogs of exceedingly high quality that are just not as well known. What developer blogs do you r...
This question is for anyone who has significant experience using ASP.NET WebForms who has made the switch to ASP.NET MVC. What was your business justification for making the switch? Do you consider the MVC platform to be mature? How long did it take for you to be productive using MVC (say 80% of your previous WebForms productivity leve...
Say I have three window classes, one for each OS I want to support: WindowsWindow OSXWindow LinuxWindow They all inherit from the Window class. This is also the class you instantiate. The Window class have the . -> and :: operators overloaded, and depending on which OS were running on (based on IFDEFs) it casts the this pointer to ...
Many of us use open source software to make our jobs easier. Sometimes, we may come across a tweak or small fix to the open source project, and we would like to contribute that back to the project itself. The problem is that software that you develop on company time often belongs to the company itself. Does your company allow you to p...
I recently came across a system where all of the DB connections were managed by routines obscured in various ways, including base 64 encoding, md5sums and various other techniques. Is it just me, or is this overkill? What are the alternatives? ...
Background: The Rise of "Worse is Better" and Wikipedia's article I read it ages ago, and, when looking back now, it seems that it had an influence on the way I approach software development. Though I'm not sure if that was for better or worse. (-: Do you agree that worse is better? How has it changed the way you approach development?...
The title is obvious, do you get freelance projects while you have a job ? How do you plan your schedule ? I mean when I get freelance work sometimes I feel very overloaded. How do you overcome this ? Which scale projects do you prefer ? Do you prefer new technologies to improve your skills ? EDIT : Working on freelance projects in y...
what is common if working in a team of developers: make special documentation that somebody introduced a method or changed a method (with his name or acronym) ///remark: introduced by sbd ///remark: changed on 12.12.08 by sbd or not doing this at all? in my opinion it is not necessary because i can get this information out of the so...
A few weeks ago at out local .Net User Group meeting we had our sponsor from TekSystems give a quick speech in return for the pizza and soda. He mentioned that Software employees are less affected by the down-turn. He threw out a figure that Software Apllication developers were still experiencing an unemployment rate of only %1. He al...
Syntactic sugar, IMHO, generally makes programs much more readable and easier to understand than coding from a very minimalistic set of primitives. I don't really see a downside to good, well thought out syntactic sugar. Why do some people basically think that syntactic sugar is at best superfluous and at worst something to be avoided?...
I hate capricious projects that change at the drop of a hat. I hate projects which are overly complex trying to maintain backwards compatibility. Where is the balance? When maintaining a project, what should one take into account when deciding to break backwards compatibility or not? How much effort should one put into conversion util...
I've always been a software development nerd. I got started with web development (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc) and continued with PHP, Java and C#. All along I never seemed to become really good at coding; when I solved problems it was equal parts copy-paste-customize and spending too much time on what seemed to be basic stuff. I thought ...
While developing for multiple sets of browsers, what issues have you faced while development due to differences in browser implementation? To start with I am listing some of those which i faced: A text node in Firefox allows only 4K data. So an XML Ajax response gets split up into multiple text child nodes instead of only one node. It...
I want to learn a new technology, but don't have time in the day. I am a coder by trade, which is fine in keeping up to date with stuff. I go to the gym at lunch time, to break the day up and not get overweight. When I get home I am mentally tired and on the weekend it's kids or girlfriend "quality time"... I need 8 days in the week. ...
I create a lot of websites that are fairly large database driven applications. The development time on these can be anywhere from 3 months to a year+. Given the variety of scripts and languages as well as the number of browsers used in web development, what sort of checklist or pre-launch procedure do you use to ensure nothing gets misse...
I'm talking about a forum/message board where people just talk about the Ruby language - quite aside from its use in terms of Ruby-on-Rails. It seems most languages have favorite forums outside of Stackoverflow - just wondering what that would be for Ruby. I've had a look on Google but what comes up seems to be mostly personal blogs ab...
I've been reading recently about Stackless Python and it seems to have many advantages compared with vanilla cPython. It has all those cool features like infinite recursion, microthreads, continuations, etc. and at the same time is faster than cPython (around 10%, if the Python wiki is to be believed) and compatible with it (at least ver...