Gamasutra has a couple of very interesting articles Hiring Game Designers and Building A Great Game Team: Measuring Progress Neither of these talk about the hiring process of building out the team as a whole. I believe that great development teams, no matter what you are building, are like rock bands. You can't have a band with all g...
I work for a mid-sized corporation that is actually doing quite well in this economic morass. Although we have newer workstations, there are several tools/concepts that I'm certain would increase productivity and job satisfaction among our developing workforce. I'm looking for strategies here. My immediate boss isn't willing to take u...
If you were the head of your current company/IT department, what would you change? Would you: introduce SCRUM to all teams or stop using it? hire more software testers? change the policy on IT related courses? change the bonus system? ...? Please mention the reason(s) behind the non-trivial changes you'd make. All ideas for improveme...
Whilst answering “Dealing with awful estimates” posted by Ash I shared a few tips that I learned and personally use to spot weak estimates. But I am certain there must be many more! What heuristics to use in the scenario when one needs to make a quick evaluation of software project estimate that has been compiled by a third-party (a col...
I've worked for a state agency for over 1.5 years (arguably far longer than I should have, but that's another matter). Most of what we do is create & maintain ASP.NET web applications for other agencies. In the time that I've been here, I haven't seen any team projects. It's always 1 project per developer (although projects do tend to mi...
I just found out that my workplace has installed software that analyzes source check-ins for such things as who checks in the most lines, when they mostly do their check-ins, which files have the most changes, etc. I'm a bit concerned that this has something to do with the economic situation, and they are looking for a way to measure "d...
I imagine that anyone who has worked for a small company as a developer has probably encountered this before. I applied for software developer position, I interviewed for a software developer position, and my "title" is Software Developer but after a few months here it seems that the company really wanted a do-it-all-IT-Guy. Anytime som...
Suppose I have a function that allocates memory for the caller: int func(void **mem1, void **mem2) { *mem1 = malloc(SIZE); if (!*mem1) return 1; *mem2 = malloc(SIZE); if (!*mem2) { /* ... */ return 1; } return 0; } I'd like to hear your feedback on the best way to free() the allocated memory i...
We've all had good and bad managers. What's the best trait your manager can have to allow you to be effective in your role and allow you to love your job? For me it's allowing creative freedom to make decisions. ...
I'm trying to find documented (or, undocumented, if that's my only option) APIs on OS X to query a list of windows from the window server and then cause the windows to move and resize. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I guess I'd be starting with something like FindWindowEx and MoveWindow under Win32. Note that I want to do...
The company I work with currently has 10 windows boxes running various in house scripts, however occasionally one goes down and no one notices for periods of up to 24 hours because the data that is manufactured is only gathered on weekly intervals. Does anyone know of a management system that will notify when a box goes down and possibl...
I am in the process of trying to graphically represent all of our server racks. So when we receive a new server we can decide where this should be put and where a specific servers currently resides. Are there any existing software packages that stores this kind of data already? I'd prefer open source ones if there are any but anything w...
I know the question about measuring developer performance has been asked to death, but please bear with me. I know the age old debate about how you cannot measure performance of developers, but the reality is, at our company there is a "need" to do that one way or another. I work for a relatively small company (small in terms of develop...
Is there any way python is natively, or through some code available online (preferably under the GPL), capable of doing process management. The goal is similar to the functionality of ps, but preferably in arrays, lists, and/or dicts. ...
I'm in a bit of a sticky situation and was hoping some of you coders faced something similar. I'm a system administrator for a certain software at a company. Due to stupid arrangement, I'm technically under the Marketing department with no affiliation to the IT help desk. Only reason this is important is that its difficult for me to exp...
Most developers are aware of idea of eating one's own dog food, but at the same time its mathematically proven that its cheaper to have QA staff (or Testers) do QA than having developers do QA. Now of course there is no point in being an extremist in either direction, but I've noticed that depending on the project and developer (or QA s...
I am used to using SQL Management Studio Express on Windows and was wondering if there were any good ones with similar functionality and price (free) for Mac OS X. ...
any GUI Admin / Management tool for SVN repository on windows? please suggest. thanks in advance ...
Innovation seems to be a Buzz word these days. Each organization is giving a lot of emphasis on it and at the same time it is also becoming the most abusive word. Every new thing is not an innovation. In my organization also there is a drive started to promote the innovation culture and some how i got involved in that. I want to know ho...
It seems like it is nearly impossible to get close because you could run into any number of issues and things not first anticipated. How close can we be expected to reasonably estimate? Our PM wants to be able to have things like Gant charts and such mapping out weeks at a time and such... So we say we can get these bugs done, and this i...