Can anyone point into the right direction here. I want to respond when my application receives memory warning, (i want to know how to respond to this notification). Plus, How much memory can i wire with my application? Any articles or book reference would be great. Thanks. ...
As a manager it is your job I think to remove obstacles so that the development team can keep going. You must also try to keep some level of respect within the team so that when you have to take a tough decision the team respects it. Many people say you should stop coding, others say you should keep your hands in. My question has a sli...
This question got me thinking about the physical health of developers. As programming is definately not a physical excercise, developers are often prone to develop physical complaints like RSI. Should companies do more to stimulate excercise and healthy lifestyle? Does your company stimulate a healthy lifestyle, and if so, how? How ...
When your company is bought out by a competitor what are the most important things for you to know about the software development environment of that competitor? What would help you become integrated as part of the team the fastest? What things would concern you? ...
While it is considered a "good thing" for developers to be given a small chunk of work time to pursue their own projects, 2-3 hours a week is not always going to be enough to service many classes of projects. This is exacerbated by peoples natural propensity to devote their brain to the "interesting" problems which are not usually the st...
I'm working in a startup company where the development team is a small team of three programmers; A project manager, myself and another guy. The issue is that the other guy regularly commits code into SVN that doesn't actually work! The base usually compiles okay, but the references to views/stored procedures in SQL either don't work o...
It's not a secret to anyone that managers can and often will impose the programming language that will be used for a project. Being a programmer myself, I have never been able to understand this. But now I think I do: I've just had a revelation when Joel Spolsky said on the podcast that they should use QuickBooks because 'every account...
This is not a strictly programming question, but for developers working in teams might be a useful one. I bet someone already had similar problem. We have several licenses for VS2005. I have one allotted to me, and the remaining ones are for my colleagues. I have just wiped my PC as a part of routine maintenance and now I am ready to in...
How can you make sure that all developers on your team are unit testing their code? Code coverage metrics are the only way I can think of to objectively measure this. Is there another way? (Of course if you're really following TDD then this shouldn't be an issue. But let's just suppose you've got some developers that don't quite "get" T...
As an sort of extension to my query about questions to ask an interviewer, I was wondering about what sorts of questions can you ask a manager? I mean for the newly appointed manager who'll now be your boss. What can you ask him during the usual familiarisation one-on-one meetings to get a feel for their coding mindset, abilities, etc.?...
What was the background of the best manager you ever worked for as a software engineer ? I'm interested to know if my experience (which mostly matches the stereotypes of managers with a technical background understanding the task at hand but not being very good people managers or motivators, and vice versa for people with a management b...
I've been a development manager for a few years. Even though I spend quite a bit of time coding, I know a lot of managers who do not code at all. Some of them I consider great managers and look up to. While spending a lot of time on "Management" activities, keeping up with coding takes a lot of effort outside of work. So my question is: ...
I have found myself in a team lead position having to manage/guide recent CS grads. I myself do not have a degree in Computer Science, rather I was working as a programmer to put myself through school while studying linguistics. I'm finding that using my own background to set expectations for junior developers quite problematic. I would ...
There are opposing views about whether managers (especially front-line managers) should be expected to actively program or not. Once a manager has 4 or more reports, some say it is negligent for them to code. There is too much other work to be done. Others say that if a manager doesn't code, he or she will lose their understanding of ...
There is a colleague who seriously knows his stuff, he is one of the brightest I've ever worked with, but he: works in his own little area of his home directory rather than in the common CVS repository doesn't document his code doesn't comment his code, e.g. 3,500 SLOC of C with no comments and no blank lines to break things up often o...
Is it possible to use Six Sigma Quality Management with Software Development Processes? What's your experience on that? If you're using an Agile method like Scrum or XP, isn't Six Sigma too bureaucratic? I'm talking about quality management on software development as a whole, since requirements gathering until deployoment and operatio...
Everywhere I've ever worked I consistently run into the same problem with management, they have no idea what is going on in the depths of an engineer's mind. Understandably, they're not developers so a technical explanation just won't do. How do the rest of you relay the complexity of a project to management after giving an honest estima...
Given a situation where you have 2 projects that in total will provide enough work for a month for 6 developers in a ratio of 2:1. Is it better to assign developers to each project and then they work on that project for the whole month or is it preferable for the whole team to work each project in turn? What reasons do you have for yo...
We will probably be moving within a year, so we have to make some decisions regarding office layout. At the moment, our company is basically one big office. When our developers can't bother to be disturbed at all, we all have our own headphones to mute the outside world. Still, it seems a lot of people feel that private offices are n...
I know the basic principles about memory management (retain count, autorelease pools etc) in Cocoa, but once you go past simple retain/release, it's getting a bit more confusing. I couldn't find decent answers for those, as most tutorials cover simple scenarios. I would like to ask about best practices in how to write the code and avoid ...