There are at least 4 YAML implementations listed at yaml.org. Which one of these (or another) would you recommend, and why? There are two ways you could answer this question, either by voting for one of the 4, or by giving a good answer that compares them or strongly justifies one of them. I'll add the 4 mentioned so people can vote, b...
I am just curious. ...
What's the highest-level math you've used in the real world? What did you need it for? Where did you learn it (in school, by yourself)? (Incidentally, I do mean in a programming context, as this is a programming website.) Note: I'm not wondering if mathematics is necessary for programming or the relationship between math and programm...
My biggest issue is noise-distractions. I am in a cube farm, and there are usually 5-6 conversations going on at the same time. I use my shooting muffs a lot of time, and listen to music. I also permission to do coding at home, in a more quiet environment when necessary. What do you do? What does your employer do? ...
A recent chat with some ex-colleagues (who had gone on to bigger and better things) went something like this: Coll 1 (an admin): "If my app goes down, I'll have to rebuild the databases" Coll 2 (IT manager in a cosmetic company): "If my app goes down we have to scrap the production run and restart" Coll 3 (IT manager for high street b...
This is a poll of sorts about common concurrency problems in Java. An example might be the classic deadlock or race condition or perhaps EDT threading bugs in Swing. I'm interested both in a breadth of possible issues but also in what issues are most common. So, please leave one specific answer of a Java concurrency bug per comment an...
It's the Office app everyone loves to hate ;) I admit that it's often abused or misused, but it does come in handy on occasion. So what do you think? Are there appropriate uses for Access, or should MS jetison it from the Office suite? ...
For years I have visited the UVa Online Judge site to practice programming skills and just recently ( thanks to this site ) discovered the Sphere Online Judge site. I am interested to know which challenges from these sites folks here found the most interesting, difficult, satisfying, perplexing, or amusing. ...
We have a large amount of legacy C++ code in shared libraries that are used on dozens of products. Ignoring the pros and cons of automatically generating tests (that's a discussion for another day), does anyone have any recommendations for a tool that would analyse the source and generate a set of tests to exercise that code? Ideally it...
For some reason I find that I am at my best, in terms of programming, late at night. I'm not sure if it's because I lose my inhibition that keeps me from pushing forward or if there is something else to it but either way I get the most done after the sun goes down. What time of day do you find yourself the most proficient in terms of pr...
I'm interested to know which programming-related areas of technology people are most interested in. If you could work on any technology/field which would it be? Feel free to go all futuristic on me. :) For example, some areas I'd love to work on if I could would be artificial inteligence, real-world simulations, robotics, nano-technolo...
What's your preferred programming font? There's an existing question like this. However, there are over 100 answers, most of which are just, "+1 MyFontOfChoice, blah, blah, blah". No offense to others involved in that post, but I was hoping we could get a more organized set of responses. Rules ONE post per font. If there is alread...
I write software for users with multiple monitors and I make design desicions based on the assumption that typically users will maximize windows to each monitor instead of "hand sizing" them. Recently I have noticed though that there seems to be two "schools" in terms of using multiple monitors. There is the "maximize" school and then t...
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 just starting to use Django for a personal project. What are the pros and cons of using the built-in Admin application versus integrating my administrative functions into the app itself (by checking request.user.is_staff)? This is a community wiki because it could be considered a poll. ...
For desktop programmers, do you avoid deploying .NET 3.5 framework on client machines for its big footprint? If so, is LINQBridge feature-complete? [EDIT] .NET 3.5 Framework evokes a feeling of OLE 2.0 (aka COM). When 2.0 newly came out, some users then are asking if there will be OLE version 3.0. But there will be none. OLE 2.0 is...
Lion's Commentary on Unix Sixth Edition with Source Code is a wonderful book to learn how to read code. Reading code is important -- how does one learn how to write excellent code without having read excellent code? But, sadly, while great writers, of fiction and non-fiction, all spend a great deal of time reading stuff, we, programmers...
Most decent programmers know that unit testing is important, but may not know where to begin. For a long time I knew the benefits of unit testing, but could never seem to figure out where a good starting point was. Most articles I read on the subject dealt with the high level theoretical, rather than the down-and-dirty practical. I've...
So what are your favorite Ruby or Ruby on Rails blogs? One link per post please and short description would be nice. ...
What weather services have APIs? Out of the handful or so, which ones are easiest to tie into? Do they use "raw" HTTP requests or web services? Are there wrapper APIs for Python, .NET, Java, etc. Which have you had the best experience with? ...