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• Functional Languages that compile to Android's Dalvik VM?

  - by Berin Loritsch

  I have a software problem that fits the functional approach to programming, but the target market will be on the Android OS. I ask because there are functional languages that compile to Java's VM, but Dalvik bytecode != Java bytecode. Alternatively, do you know if the dx utility can intelligently convert the .class files generated from functional languages like Scala? Edit: In order to add a bit more helpfulness to the community, and also to help me choose better, can I refine the question a bit? Have you used any alternate languages with Dalvik? Which ones? What are some "gotchas" (problems) that I might run into? Is performance acceptable? By that, I mean the application still feels responsive to the user. I've never done mobile phone development, but I grew up on constrained devices and I'm under no illusion that there is a cost to using non-standard languages with the platform. I just need to know if the cost is such that I should shoe-horn my approach into default language (i.e. apply functional principles in the OOP language).

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• Choosing the right language for the job

  - by Ampt

  I'm currently working for a company on the engineering team of about 5-6 people and have been given the job of heading up the redesign of an embedded system tester. We've decided the general requirements and attributes that would be desirable in the system, and now I have to decide on a language to use for the system, or at the very least come up with a list of languages with pros and cons to present to the team. The general idea of the project is that we currently have a tester written in c++, which was never designed to be a tester, but instead has evolved to be such over the course of 3-4 years due to need. Writing tests for a new product requires modifying the 'framework' and writing code that is completely non-human readable or intuitive due to the way the system was originally designed. Now, we've decided that the time to modify this tester for each new product that we want to test has become too high and want to partially re-write the system so that we can program the actual tests in a scripting language that would then use the modified c++ framework on the back end to test the actual systems. The c++ framework would be responsible for doing all the actual work and the scripting language would just integrate with that to tell the framework what to do. Never having programmed in a scripting language (we program embedded systems), I've run into a wall where I have no experience with any of the languages that we could possibly use, but must somehow give pros and cons of each language so that we can choose the best one for the job. Currently my short list of possibilities includes: Python TCL Lua Perl My question is this: How can a person evaluate a language that he/she has never used before? What criteria are good indicators for a languages potential usability on a project? While helpful suggestions for my particular case are appreciated, I feel that this is a good skill to possess and would like to be able to apply this to many different projects if at all possible

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• How do I find a qualified web designer in my area?

  - by Incognito

  I just sent out emails to five local web design companies to my area asking to take drawings to HTML/CSS/jQuery. None of the ones who accepted the deal seem suitable to myself. Others rejected the offer because they wanted to 'provide an end-to-end solution' or are 'booked till June'. The local companies did not seem suitable to myself because my review process is this: goto their website, do a view-source. I'll see really weird things (contact us forms that go nowhere), really old things (mm_menu.js), and portfolios that are non-existent (aren't on the site, don't link anywhere, or otherwise). The company would like to hire as locally as they can rather than out-source to another country. Answers I'm looking for Processes you use when searching for someone How you qualify their aptitude for the project Anything that you think I'm doing wrong, or should be doing also. Answers I'm not looking for: "Hello sir please contact me we do everything for 10 dolla." My bud's great at this stuff, call him. example.com is the best for this.

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• What are the factors affecting a new programming language?

  - by Saurav Sengupta

  I am developing a new general-purpose programming language of my own design. It's currently my own personal project. I have read of some experts saying that new languages do not usually survive (unfortunately I can't find a reference to that right now). What are the most substantial problems that a new language faces? The language syntax is similar to C/Python families, it does not use S-expressions, and it is an imperative language, but I'm doing first-class functions in it to provide the facilities of currying. In particular, I am concentrating on translating the source language to an intermediate language for execution by an interpreter, but I'm not in a position to translate to native code yet. What would be the issues with that? I've not personally used many non-native code languages, so I'm not well aware of the performance issues on today's machines. I also can't decide upon a lexer and parser generator. What would be the pros and cons of Flex and Yacc vs. hand-made? And what benefits will LLVM provide? I need to get the interpreter ready as quickly as possible. Finally, what factors will affect the language's use post release? I am planning a small library of essentials and full documentation for the first phase.

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• How do you prefer to handle image spriting in your web projects?

  - by Macy Abbey

  It seems like these days it is pretty much mandatory for web applications to sprite images if they want many images on their site AND a fast load time. (Spriting is the process of combining all images referenced from a style sheet into one/few image(s) with each reference containing a different background position.) I was wondering what method of implementing sprites you all prefer in your web applications, given that we are referring to non-dynamic images which are included/designed by the programming team and not images which are dynamically uploaded by a third party. 1. Add new images to an existing sprite by hand, create new css reference by hand. 2. Generate a sprite server-side from your css files which all reference single images set to be background images of an html element that is the same size of the image you are spriting once per build and update all css references programmatically. 3. Use a sprite generating program to generate a sprite image for you once per release and hand insert the new css class / image into your project. 4. Other methods? I prefer two as it requires very little hand-coding and image editing.

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• Bad style programming, am I pretending too much?

  - by Luca

  I realized to work in an office with a quite bad code base. The base library implemented in years and years is quite limited, and most of that code is, honestly, horrible. Projects developed in the office are very large. Fine. I could define me a "perfectionist" (but often I'm not), and I thought to refactor an application (really a portion), which need a new (complex) feature. But, today, I really realized that it's not possible to refactor that application modules with a reasonable time (say, 24/26 hours, respect the avaialable time for the task, which is 160 hours). I'm talking about (I am a bit ashamed to say) name collisions, large and frequent cut & paste code, horrible and misleading naming, makefiles without dependencies (!), application login is spread randomly across many different sources, dead code, variable aliasing, no assertion, no documentation, very long source files, bad/incomplete include file definition, (this is emblematic!) very frequent extern declaration of variables and functions, ... I'm sure to continue ... buffer overflows because sprintf, indentation (!), spacing, non existent const modifier usage. I would say that every source line was written quite randomly when needed, without keeping in mind some design (at least, the obvious one). (Am I in hell?) The problem arises when the application is developed by a colleague of mine. I felt very frustrated. So, I decided to expose the "situation" to my colleague; at the end, that was a bad idea. He is justified in saying that "the application was developed in haste, so it is natural that it is written vaguely; you are wasting time to think and implement an elegant implementation" .... I'm asking too much from my colleague to write readable code, which is managed and documented? I expect too much in not having to read thousands of lines of code to understand how a particular logic?

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• Does a team of developers need a manager?

  - by Amadiere

  Background: I'm currently part of a team of four: 1 manager, 1 senior developer and 2 developers. We do a range of bespoke in-house systems / projects (e.g. 6-8 weeks) for an organisation of around 3500 staff, as well as all the maintenance and support required from the systems that have been created before. There is not enough of us to do all the work that is potentially coming our way - we're understaffed. Management acknowledge this, but budget restraints limit our ability to recruit additional members to the team (even if we make the salary back in savings). The Change This leaves us where we are now. Our manager is due to leave his role for pastures new, leaving a vacancy in the team. Management are using this opportunity to restructure our team which would see the team manager role replaced by another developer and another senior developer. Their logic being that we need more developers, so here's a way of funding it (one of the roles is partially funded from another vacant post). The team would have no direct line manager and the roles and responsibilities would be divided up between the seniors and the (relatively new to post) service manager (a non-technical role with little-to-no development knowledge/experience whose focus is shared amongst a number of other teams and individuals) - who would be our next actual manager up the food chain. I guess the final question is: Is it possible to run a development team without an manager? Have you had experience of this? And what things could go wrong / could be of benefit to us? I'd ideally like to "see the light" and the benefits of doing things this way, or come up with some points for argument against it.

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• Conditional attribute in XML - most concise solution?

  - by Lech Rzedzicki

  I am tasked with setting up conditional profiling - a method of tagging chunks of XML with an attribute, which will then be used as a conditional value to extract subset of that XML. Have a look at another definition/example: DITA profiling The XML is documents that are equivalent to printed books - i.e. documents that are often looked at by a human, even if indirectly. Therefore I am looking at a few requirements here: 1. keeping the value list brief - so it doesn't affect the readability of the document 2. be able to process with standard XML tools - a space-separated list inside an attribute is still probably fine, but I'd rather not use too much regexp for this 3. be obvious for various users, including 3rd parties, which content goes where 4. Be easy to maintain going forward Therefore one easy solution is: The problem with this: 1. As the list grows the value of the attribute can be a bit verbose 2. One needs to explicitly state every value even if it's a scenario of this vs everything else Therefore I am also looking at other approaches such as: 1. Using + and - modifiers, Apache htaccess style to override the default cascading of profiling - by default all content goes everywhere and if we want to exclude a bit we just say "-kindle". It does require parsing the whole tree, is not supported by editing tools and one needs to regexp the attribute value a bit deeper... 2. Using an intermediate file to define groups of values such as "other" or "non-print", example of this in DITA. It allows concise XML as well as different grouping and values for each document but it does create a certain level of abstraction which may make it a little less obvious for a 3rd party? Altogether, if you received such XML and were tasked to process it, which option you'd rather receive? If you have any experiences like that, even in an unrelated areas such a builds, don't hesitate to comment!

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• How advanced are author-recognition methods?

  - by Nick Rtz

  From a written text by an author if a computer program analyses the text, how much can a computer program tell today about the author of some (long enough to be statistically significant) texts? Can the computer program even tell with "certainty" whether a man or a woman wrote this text based solely on the contents of the text and not an investigation such as ip numbers etc? I'm interested to know if there are algorithms in use for instance to automatically know whether an author was male or female or similar characteristics of an author that a computer program can decide based on analyses of the written text by an author. It could be useful to know before you read a message what a computer analyses says about the author, do you agree? If I for instance get a longer message from my wife that she has had an accident in Nigeria and the computer program says that with 99 % probability the message was written by a male author in his sixties of non-caucasian origin or likewise, or by somebody who is not my wife, then the computer program could help me investigate why a certain message differs in characteristics. There can also be other uses for instance just detecting outliers in a geographically or demographically bounded larger data set. Scam detection is the obvious use I'm thinking of but there could also be other uses. Are there already such programs that analyse a written text to tell something about the author based on word choice, use of pronouns, unusual language usage, or likewise?

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• How to deal with colleagues refuse to follow practices?

  - by Adrian Shum

  I was discussing with another colleague about what we should be used when an DB entity is referring to another. I don't think there is any good reason to break the practice of putting the Primary Key in the referring entity. However, one of my colleague says: "You should use a surrogate key in the entity, but it is better to put the human-readable natural key in the referring entity. As long it is unique, it is fine and it is easier when you are doing support or maintenance job" I know it will works, but obviously it is not a good practice you are putting a non-PK unique column as "foreign key", just for gaining a bit of ease in writing SQL during support as we can have less table join. Though I mentioned the his approach is conceptual incorrect, and causing problem too practically etc, he seems rather trade off correctness in data model in exchange of ease of maintenance. And he said: "I know it is not good practice, but good practice is not golden rule" Honestly I feel frustrated when dealing with something like this. I know there are always case that we should break some rule or practice, but doubtless it is not such case now. What will you when you are facing situation like this? Please assume yourself being a senior developer which is expected to contribute in misc development direction and convention.

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• C# - How to store and reuse queries

  - by Jason Holland

  I'm learning C# by programming a real monstrosity of an application for personal use. Part of my application uses several SPARQL queries like so: const string ArtistByRdfsLabel = @" PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> SELECT DISTINCT ?artist WHERE {{ {{ ?artist rdf:type <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/MusicalArtist> . ?artist rdfs:label ?rdfsLabel . }} UNION {{ ?artist rdf:type <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Band> . ?artist rdfs:label ?rdfsLabel . }} FILTER ( str(?rdfsLabel) = '{0}' ) }}"; string Query = String.Format(ArtistByRdfsLabel, Artist); I don't like the idea of keeping all these queries in the same class that I'm using them in so I thought I would just move them into their own dedicated class to remove clutter in my RestClient class. I'm used to working with SQL Server and just wrapping every query in a stored procedure but since this is not SQL Server I'm scratching my head on what would be the best for these SPARQL queries. Are there any better approaches to storing these queries using any special C# language features (or general, non C# specific, approaches) that I may not already know about?

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• Newbie seeking advice on programming in general

  - by user974685

  need some of you to remember back to a time when you might have been bad at programming... Been at my new job (as a software developer) for a couple of months now, passed probation period. Have very little programming experience (C++ only) and am currently working with asp.net MVC and silverlight. So there's a website the company has been working on and I am joining the effort to make it better, iron out bugs etc. The problem is - learning about a system/website which has already been made, via visual studio. I ALWAYS feel HUGELY overwhelmed, never knowing which part of this line should I look up, and generally having lots of trouble getting the big picture. Visual studio itself is something I'm finding it difficult to get to grips with, let alone the asp.net framework. I get the impression that because my coworkers have more experience than me, they are getting all the good jobs, and I am left with crap to do - stuff which is not even vaguely programming. Meaning they are learning/creating more, and I am learning/creating near nothing. I'm getting demoralised, and too scared to say anything. I'm not stupid, I've read and practiced plenty of the fundamental programming concepts...I'm just bloody scared of this damn framework. I look at it and just feel paralyzed. The result is that I keep asking the older veteran guy of questions, and he is getting irritated, and would rather give me easy/mindless/non programming jobs to avoid wasting time with helping me out. Then when I don't understand something, I'm hesitating about whether or not I should ask him yet, and trying to decide if it would be a waste of time. I'm the kind of person who picks things up slowly, but with a lot of attention to detail. The former I think is making me look incompetent though. Anyone get where I'm coming from please say something helpful....I'm scared of losing my job in a few months or something...

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• How can we plan projects realistically while accounting for support issues?

  - by Thomas Clayson

  We're having a problem at work: we're trying to schedule work so that we can assess time scales and get deadline dates. The problem is that it's difficult to plan for a project without knowing everything that's going to happen. For instance, right now we've planned all our projects through the start of December, however in that time we will have various in house and external meetings, teleconferences and extra work. It's all well and good to say that a project will take three weeks, but if there is a week's worth of interruption in that time then the date of completion will be pushed back a week. The problem is 3 fold: When we schedule projects the time scales are taken literally. If we estimate three weeks, the deadline is set for three week's time, the client is told, and there is no room for extension. Interim work and such means that we lose productive time working on the project. Sometimes clients don't have the time that we need to take to do the work, so they'll sometimes come to us and say they need a project done by the end of the month even when we think that the work will take two months - not to mention we already have work to be doing. We have a Gantt chart which we are trying to fill in with all the projects we have and we fill in timesheets, but they're not compared to the Gantt chart at all. This makes it difficult to say "Well, we scheduled 3 weeks for this project, but we've lost a week here so the deadline has to move back a week." It's also not professional to keep missing deadlines we've communicated to the client. How do other people deal with this type of situation? How do you manage the planning of projects? How much "extra" time do you schedule into a project to account for non-project work that occurs during a project? How do you deal with support issues and bugs and stuff? Things you can't account for during planning? UPDATE Lots of good answers thank you.

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• What is the evidence that an API has exceeded its orthogonality in the context of types?

  - by hawkeye

  Wikipedia defines software orthogonality as: orthogonality in a programming language means that a relatively small set of primitive constructs can be combined in a relatively small number of ways to build the control and data structures of the language. The term is most-frequently used regarding assembly instruction sets, as orthogonal instruction set. Jason Coffin has defined software orthogonality as Highly cohesive components that are loosely coupled to each other produce an orthogonal system. C.Ross has defined software orthogonality as: the property that means "Changing A does not change B". An example of an orthogonal system would be a radio, where changing the station does not change the volume and vice-versa. Now there is a hypothesis published in the the ACM Queue by Tim Bray - that some have called the Bánffy Bray Type System Criteria - which he summarises as: Static typings attractiveness is a direct function (and dynamic typings an inverse function) of API surface size. Dynamic typings attractiveness is a direct function (and static typings an inverse function) of unit testing workability. Now Stuart Halloway has reformulated Banfy Bray as: the more your APIs exceed orthogonality, the better you will like static typing My question is: What is the evidence that an API has exceeded its orthogonality in the context of types? Clarification Tim Bray introduces the idea of orthogonality and APIs. Where you have one API and it is mainly dealing with Strings (ie a web server serving requests and responses), then a uni-typed language (python, ruby) is 'aligned' to that API - because the the type system of these languages isn't sophisticated, but it doesn't matter since you're dealing with Strings anyway. He then moves on to Android programming, which has a whole bunch of sensor APIs, which are all 'different' to the web server API that he was working on previously. Because you're not just dealing with Strings, but with different types, the API is non-orthogonal. Tim's point is that there is a empirical relationship between your 'liking' of types and the API you're programming against. (ie a subjective point is actually objective depending on your context).

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• Style bits vs. Separate bool's

  - by peterchen

  My main platform (WinAPI) still heavily uses bits for control styles etc. (example). When introducing custom controls, I'm permanently wondering whether to follow that style or rather use individual bool's. Let's pit them against each other: enum EMyCtrlStyles { mcsUseFileIcon = 1, mcsTruncateFileName = 2, mcsUseShellContextMenu = 4, }; void SetStyle(DWORD mcsStyle); void ModifyStyle(DWORD mcsRemove, DWORD mcsAdd); DWORD GetStyle() const; ... ctrl.SetStyle(mcsUseFileIcon | mcsUseShellContextMenu); vs. CMyCtrl & SetUseFileIcon(bool enable = true); bool GetUseFileIcon() const; CMyCtrl & SetTruncteFileName(bool enable = true); bool GetTruncteFileName() const; CMyCtrl & SetUseShellContextMenu(bool enable = true); bool GetUseShellContextMenu() const; ctrl.SetUseFileIcon().SetUseShellContextMenu(); As I see it, Pro Style Bits Consistent with platform less library code (without gaining complexity), less places to modify for adding a new style less caller code (without losing notable readability) easier to use in some scenarios (e.g. remembering / transferring settings) Binary API remains stable if new style bits are introduced Now, the first and the last are minor in most cases. Pro Individual booleans Intellisense and refactoring tools reduce the "less typing" effort Single Purpose Entities more literate code (as in "flows more like a sentence") No change of paradim for non-bool properties These sound more modern, but also "soft" advantages. I must admit the "platform consistency" is much more enticing than I could justify, the less code without losing much quality is a nice bonus. 1. What do you prefer? Subjectively, for writing the library, or for writing client code? 2. Any (semi-) objective statements, studies, etc.?

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• Understanding branching strategy/workflow correctly

  - by burnersk

  I'm using svn without branches (trunk-only) for a very long time at my workplace. I had discovered most or all of the issues related to projects which do not have any branching strategy. Unlikely this is not going to change at my workplace but for my private projects. For my private projects which most includes coworkers and working together at the same time on different features I like to have an robust branching strategy with supports long-term releases powered by git. I find out that the Atlassian Toolchain (JIRA, Stash and Bamboo) helped me most and it also recommending me an branching strategy which I like to verify for the team needs. The branching strategy was taken directly from Atlassian Stash recommendation with a small modification to the hotfix branch tree. All hotfixes should also merged into mainline. The branching strategy in words mainline (also known as master with git or trunk with svn) contains the "state of the art" developing release. Everything here was successfully checked with various automated tests (through Bamboo) and looks like everything is working. It is not proven as working because of possible missing tests. It is ready to use but not recommended for production. feature covers all new features which are not completely finished. Once a feature is finished it will be merged into mainline. Sample branch: feature/ISSUE-2-A-nice-Feature bugfix fixes non-critical bugs which can wait for the next normal release. Sample branch: bugfix/ISSUE-1-Some-typos production owns the latest release. hotfix fixes critical bugs which have to be release urgent to mainline, production and all affected long-term *release*es. Sample branch: hotfix/ISSUE-3-Check-your-math release is for long-term maintenance. Sample branches: release/1.0, release/1.1 release/1.0-rc1 I am not an expert so please provide me feedback. Which problems might appear? Which parts are missing or slowing down the productivity?

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• How to improve Algorithmic Programming Solving skill? [closed]

  - by gaurav

  Possible Duplicate: How can I improve my problem-solving ability? How do you improve your problem solving skills? Should I learn design patterns or algorithms to improve my logical thinking skills? What to do when you're faced with a problem that you can't solve quickly? Are there non-programming related activities akin to solving programming problems? I am a computer engineering graduate. I have studied programming since three years. I am good in coding and programming. I have been trying to compete in algorithmic competitions on sites such as topcoder,spoj since one and a half year, but I am still unable to solve problems other than too easy problems. I have learned from people that it takes practice to solve such problems. I try to solve those problems but sometimes I am unable to understand and even if I do understand I am unable to think of a good algorithm for solving it. Even if I solve I get Wrong answer and I am unable to figure out what is the problem with my code as it works on samples given on the sites but fails on test cases which they do not provide. I really want to solve those problems and become good in algorithms. I have read books for learning algorithms like Introduction to algorithms by CLRS,practicing programming questions. I have gone through some questions but they don't answer this question. I have seen the questions which are said duplicates but those questions focus on overall programming, but I am asking for algorithm related programming, basically for competing in programming which involve solving a problem statement then online judge will automatically evaluate it, such type of programming is quite different from the type of programming these questions discuss.

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• Handling changes to data types and entries in a database migration

  - by jandjorgensen

  I'm fully redesigning a site that indexes a number of articles with basic search functionality. The previous site was written about a decade ago, and I'm salvaging about 30,000 entries with data stored in less-than-ideal formats. While I'm moving from MSSQL to MySQL, I don't need to make any "live" changes, so this is not a production-level migration issue so much as a redesign. For instance, dates are stored the same as tags/subjects about the articles, but in strings as "YYYYMMDDd" (the lowercase d stands for "date" in the string). Essentially, before or after I move from the previous database format to a new one, I'm going to need to do a lot of replacement of individual entries. While I understand how to do operations with regular expressions in non-database issues, my database experience isn't robust enough to know the best way to handle this. What is the best (or standard) way to handle major changes like this? Is there an SQL operation I should be looking into? Please let me know if the problem isn't clear--I'm not entirely sure what kind of answer I'm looking for.

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• Demonstrate bad code to client?

  - by jtiger

  I have a new client that has asked me to do a redesign of their website, an ASP.NET Webforms application that was developed by another consultant. It seemed straight-forward (it never is) but I took a look at the code to make sure I knew what I was in for. This application was not written well. At all. It is extremely vulnerable to SQL Injection attacks, business logic is spread throughout the entire application, a lot of duplication, and dead end code that does nothing. On top of that, it keeps throwing exceptions that are being smothered, so it all appears to be running smoothly. My job is to simply update the html and css, but much of the html is being generated in business logic and would be a nightmare for me to sort everything out. My estimates on the redesign were longer than the client was aiming for, and they are asking why so long. How can I explain to my client just how bad this code is? In their mind, the application is running great and the redesign should be a quick one-off. It's my word against the previous consultant, so how can I actually give simple, concrete examples that a non-technical client would understand?

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• How do I structure code and builds for continuous delivery of multiple applications in a small team?

  - by kingdango

  Background: 3-5 developers supporting (and building new) internal applications for a non-software company. We use TFS although I don't think that matters much for my question. I want to be able to develop a deployment pipeline and adopt continuous integration / deployment techniques. Here's what our source tree looks like right now. We use a single TFS Team Project. $/MAIN/src/ $/MAIN/src/ApplicationA/VSSOlution.sln $/MAIN/src/ApplicationA/ApplicationAProject1.csproj $/MAIN/src/ApplicationA/ApplicationAProject2.csproj $/MAIN/src/ApplicationB/... $/MAIN/src/ApplicationC $/MAIN/src/SharedInfrastructureA $/MAIN/src/SharedInfrastructureB My Goal (a pretty typical promotion pipeline) When a code change is made to a given application I want to be able to build that application and auto-deploy that change to a DEV server. I may also need to build dependencies on Shared Infrastructure Components. I often also have some database scripts or changes as well If developer testing passes I want to have an manually triggered but automated deploy of that build on a STAGING server where end-users will review new functionality. Once it's approved by end users I want to a manually triggered auto-deploy to production Question: How can I best adopt continuous deployment techniques in a multi-application environment? A lot of the advice I see is more single-application-specific, how is that best applied to multiple applications? For step 1, do I simply setup a separate Team Build for each application? What's the best approach to accomplishing steps 2 and 3 of promoting latest build to new environments? I've seen this work well with web apps but what about database changes

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• Are very short or abbreviated method/function names that don't use full words bad practice or a matter of style.

  - by Alb

  Is there nowadays any case for brevity over clarity with method names? Tonight I came across the Python method repr() which seems like a bad name for a method to me. It's not an English word. It apparently is an abbreviation of 'representation' and even if you can deduce that, it still doesn't tell you what the method does. A good method name is subjective to a certain degree, but I had assumed that modern best practices agreed that names should be at least full words and descriptive enough to reveal enough about the method that you would easily find one when looking for it. Method names made from words help let your code read like English. repr() seems to have no advantages as a name other than being short and IDE auto-complete makes this a non-issue. An additional reason given in an answer is that python names are brief so that you can do many things on one line. Surely the better way is to just extract the many things to their own function, and repeat until lines are not too long. Are these just a hangover from the unix way of doing things? Commands with names like ls, rm, ps and du (if you could call those names) were hard to find and hard to remember. I know that the everyday usage of commands such as these is different than methods in code so the matter of whether those are bad names is a different matter.

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• General questions regarding open-source licensing

  - by ndg

  I'm looking to release an open-source iOS software project but I'm very new to the licensing side of the things. While I'm aware that the majority of answers here will not lawyers, I'd appreciate it if anyone could steer me in the right direction. With the exception of the following requirements I'm happy for developers to largely do whatever they want with the projects source code. I'm not interested in any copyleft licensing schemes, and while I'd like to encourage attribution in derivative works it is not required. As such, my requirements are as follows: Original source can be distributed and re-distributed (verbatim) both commercially and non-commercially as long as the original copyright information, website link and license is maintained. I wish to retain rights to any of the multi-media distributed as part of the project (sound effects, graphics, logo marks, etc). Such assets will be included to allow other developers to easily execute the project, but cannot be re-distributed in any manner. I wish to retain rights to the applications name and branding. Futher to selecting an applicable license, I have the following questions: The project makes use of a number of third-party libraries (all licensed under variants of the MIT license). I've included individual licenses within the source (and application) and believe I've met all requirements expressed in these licenses, but is there anything else that needs to be done before distributing them as part of my open-source project? Also included in my project is a single proprietary, close-sourced library that's used to power a small part of the application. I'm obviously unable to include this in the source release, but what's the best way of handling this? Should I simply weak-link the project and exclude it entirely from the Git project?

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• How to explain a layperson why a developer should not be interrupted while neck-deep in coding?

  - by András Szepesházi

  If you just consider the second part of my question, "Why a developer should not be interrupted while neck-deep in coding", that has been discussed a number of times by smart people. Heck, even the co-founder of SO, Joel Spolsky, wrote a blog post about "getting in the zone" and "being knocked out of the zone" and why it takes an average of 15 minutes to achieve productivity when participating in complex, software development related tasks. So I think the why has been established. What I'm interested in is how to explain all that to somebody who doesn't know beans about Beans (khmm I mean software development). How to tell the wife, or the funny guy from accounting at the workplace, or the long time friend who pings you on Skype every 30 minutes with a "Wazzzzzzup?!", that all the interruptions have a much deeper impact on your work than the obvious 30 seconds they took from your time. Obviously you can't explain it by sentences like "I have to juggle a lot of variable names in my short term memory" unless you want to be the target of blank stares or friendly abuse. I'd like to be able to explain all that to non-developers in a way that will make them clearly understand - without being offensive, elitist or too technical.

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• Dealing with the customer / developer culture mismatch on an agile project

  - by Eric Smith

  One of the tenets of agile is ... Customer collaboration over contract negotiation ... another one is ... Individuals and interactions over processes and tools But the way I see it, at least when it comes to interaction with the customer, there is a fundamental problem: How the customer thinks is fundamentally different to how a software engineer thinks That may be a bit of a generalisation, yes. Arguably, there are business domains where this is not necessarily true---these are few and far between though. In many domains though, the typical customer is: Interested in daily operational concerns--short-range tactics ... not strategy; Only concerned with the immediate solution; Generally one-dimensional, non-abstract thinkers; Primarily interested in "getting the job done" as opposed to coming up with a lasting, quality solution. On the other hand, software engineers who practice agile are: Professionals who value quality; Individuals who understand the notion of "more haste less speed" i.e., spending a little more time to do things properly will save lots of time down the road; Generally, very experienced analytical thinkers. So very clearly, there is a natural culture discrepancy that tends to inhibit "customer collaboration". What's the best way to address this?

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• still about perl vs python but (to me) slightly different from what has been asked [closed]

  - by B Chen

  Being a newbie to coding, I read from this site that Perl is still as viable as it has been, while Python, quoted from someone else's post, is good but just "snake oil" (not sure what this refers to exactly though). So from the responses in that post, I got the gist that Perl is good and worthy to learn. My question is - pardon me for phrasing it in this "non-programmer's" way - Which one should I learn FIRST? (I am actually currently learning R) Here below is the background info - (a) I will be using it mostly for data mining and statistics analysis (b) Will there be this "first" and "later" issue with learning either Perl or Python? That is, after I become competent with one language, would there be a need to learn the second one (for a similar task??) (c) If there should be circumstances where I must learn the second one, would learning Perl FIRST be better than learning Python? I hope to learn as much from exchanging info here, so please help provide with more than just "it depends" type of info. Great many thanks to all who choose to respond to my query.

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