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• Do you ever worry that you're more concerned with how something is built rather than what you are actually building?

  - by Rob Stevenson-Leggett

  As a programmer I have an inherent nagging annoyance at my tools, other peoples code, my code, the world in general. I always want to improve it. So I refactor, I stay on top of the latest techniques. I try and learn patterns, I try to use frameworks so as not to reinvent the wheel. I can write a tech spec that will blow your socks off with the amount of patterns I can squeeze in. However, lately I feel I actually know more about the tools I use than how to actually implement successful software. I feel like I'm lacking in the human factors skill set and I believe that to be a successful software engineer takes more than knowing the coolest framework. I think it needs some of the following skillsets too. Interaction design User experience Marketing I've got a bit of this that I've learned from people I've worked with and great projects I've worked on but I don't feel like I "own" these skills. Am I right? Should I be trying to develop these skills further, or should these be left to the people who do these for a career? How do you make sure you don't get too tied up in how you're doing something and make sure you "make your users awesome"? Does anyone know of good resources for learning these skills from a programming point of view?

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• What is the way to understand someone else's giant uncommented spaghetti code? [closed]

  - by Anisha Kaul

  Possible Duplicate: I’ve inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code — what now? I have been recently handled a giant multithreaded program with no comments and have been asked to understand what it does, and then to improve it (if possible). Are there some techniques which should be followed when we need to understand someone else's code? OR do we straightaway start from the first function call and go on tracking next function calls? C++ (with multi-threading) on Linux

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• Given the presentation model pattern, is the view, presentation model, or model responsible for adding child views to an existing view at runtime?

  - by Ryan Taylor

  I am building a Flex 4 based application using the presentation model design pattern. This application will have several different components to it as shown in the image below. The MainView and DashboardView will always be visible and they each have corresponding presentation models and models as necessary. These views are easily created by declaring their MXML in the application root. <s:HGroup width="100%" height="100%"> <MainView width="75% height="100%"/> <DashboardView width="25%" height="100%"/> </s:HGroup> There will also be many WidgetViewN views that can be added to the DashboardView by the user at runtime through a simple drop down list. This will need to be accomplished via ActionScript. The drop down list should always show what WidgetViewN has already been added to the DashboardView. Therefore some state about which WidgetViewN's have been created needs to be stored. Since the list of available WidgetViewN and which ones are added to the DashboardView also need to be accessible from other components in the system I think this needs to be stored in a Model object. My understanding of the presentation model design pattern is that the view is very lean. It contains as close to zero logic as is practical. The view communicates/binds to the presentation model which contains all the necessary view logic. The presentation model is effectively an abstract representation of the view which supports low coupling and eases testability. The presentation model may have one or more models injected in in order to display the necessary information. The models themselves contain no view logic whatsoever. So I have a several questions around this design. Who should be responsible for creating the WidgetViewN components and adding these to the DashboardView? Is this the responsibility of the DashboardView, DashboardPresentationModel, DashboardModel or something else entirely? It seems like the DashboardPresentationModel would be responsible for creating/adding/removing any child views from it's display but how do you do this without passing in the DashboardView to the DashboardPresentationModel? The list of available and visible WidgetViewN components needs to be accessible to a few other components as well. Is it okay for a reference to a WidgetViewN to be stored/referenced in a model? Are there any good examples of the presentation model pattern online in Flex that also include creating child views at runtime?

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• How can we distribute a client app to other non-US businesses?

  - by Simon

  I'm working on an app which acts as a client for our web service. We sell this service to businesses, and we want to distribute the app to their employees for free. The app will be customised for each client. If we were in the US, my understanding is that we'd ask them to enrol in the volume purchasing program, and submit a version of our app for each business, for enterprise distribution at the free price point However, the businesses aren't all in the US, so they can't enrol in the VPP. They have thousands of employees, so promo codes won't be sufficient. What are our alternatives?

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• How Facebook's Ad Bid System Works

  - by pnongrata

  When you are creating an ad on Facebook, you are provided with a "suggested bid" range (e.g., $0.90 - $2.15 USD). According to this page: The suggested bid range is there to help you pick a maximum bid so your ad will be successful. It’s based on how many other advertisers are competing to show their ad to the same audience as you are. I'm interested in understanding what's actually going on (technically) under the hood here. Say a user logs into Facebook. On the server-side, it the HTTP request that the user's browser sent (as part of the login) is handled, and the server needs to figure out which ad to display back to the user. I assume this is where the "bidding" system comes into play? Say that, based on this user's demographics, and based on the audience targeting that several competing advertisers designed their campaign with, let's pretend that Facebook sees a pool of 20 different ads it could return. How does this bidding system help Facebook determine which of the 20 ads it returns to the client-side? I'm guessing that advertisers who "bid more" get prioritized over those who "bid less". But when does this bidding take place? How often does an advertiser need to re-bid? How long is a bid binding for? Once I understand these usage-related concepts behind ads, it will probably be obvious between which of the following "selection strategies" the backend is using: Round robin Prioritized round robin Randomized (doubtful) History-based MVP-based Thanks to anyone who can help point me in the right direction and explain what these suggested bid systems are and how they work.

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• Is creating a full application in Silverlight advisable?

  - by Anthony

  Is creating a huge public site fully in Silverlight really advisable? for eg. an ecommerce site. I don't want to start any debate but actually I feel Silverlight shouldn't be used for full website because the biggest loss you incur is of SEO. No search engines till today can parse the xap file and index it based on it's content. You can get around it by doing ifs and thens like if Silverlight is not supported then make an Asp.Net equivalent page for it but that only doubles our effort of making application, more than anything else. Why write double code in 2 applications meant for the same purpose. If that is the only option why not create Asp.Net application only. What are your views? Thanks in advance :)

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• What is meant by Scope of a variable?

  - by Appy

  I think of the scope of a variable as - "The scope of a particular variable is the range within a program's source code in which that variable is recognized by the compiler". That statement is from "Scope and Lifetime of Variables in C++", which I read many months ago. Recently I came across this in LeMoyne-Owen College courses: What exactly is the difference between the scope of variables in C# and (C99, C++, Java) when However a variable still must be declared before it can be used

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• Productivity vs Security [closed]

  - by nerijus

  Really do not know is this right place to ask such a questions. But it is about programming in a different light. So, currently contracting with company witch pretends to be big corporation. Everyone is so important that all small issues like developers are ignored. Give you a sample: company VPN is configured so that if you have VPN then HTTP traffic is banned. Bearing this in mind can you imagine my workflow: Morning. Ok time to get latest source. Ups, no VPN. Let’s connect. Click-click. 3 sec. wait time. Ok getting source. Do I have emails? Ups. VPN is on, can’t check my emails. Need to wait for source to come up. Finally here it is! Ok Click-click VPN is gone. What is in my email. Someone reported a bug. Good, let’s track it down. It is in TFS already. Oh, dam, I need VPN. Click-click. Ok, there is description. Yea, I have seen this issue in stachoverflow.com. Let’s go there. Ups, no internet. Click-click. No internet. What? IPconfig… DHCP server kicked me out. Dam. Renew ip. 1..2..3. Ok internet is back. Google: site: stachoverflow.com 3 min. I have solution. Great I love stackoverflow.com. Don’t want to remember days where there was no stackoveflow.com. Ok. Copy paste this like to studio. Dam, studio is stalled, can’t reach files on TFS. Click-click. VPN is back. Get source out, paste my code. Grand. Let’s see what other comments about an issue in stackoverflow.com tells. Hmm.. There is a link. Click. Dammit! No internet. Click-click. No internet. DHCP kicked me out. Dammit. Now it is even worse: this happens 3-4 times a day. After certain amount of VPN connections open\closed my internet goes down solid. Only way to get internet back is reboot. All my browser tabs/SQL windows/studio will be gone. This happened just now when I am typing this. Back to issue I am solving right now: I am getting frustrated - I do not care about better solution for this issue. Let’s do it somehow and forget. This Click-click barrier between internet and TFS kills me… Sounds familiar? You could say there are VPN settings to change. No! This is company laptop, not allowed to do changes. I am very very lucky to have admin privileges on my machine. Most of developers don’t. So just learned to live with this frustration. It takes away 40-60 minutes daily. Tried to email company support, admins. They are too important ant too busy with something that just ignored my little man’s problem. Politely ignored. Question is: Is this normal in corporate world? (Have been in States, Canada, Germany. Never seen this.)

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• How does TDD address interaction between objects?

  - by Gigi

  TDD proponents claim that it results in better design and decoupled objects. I can understand that writing tests first enforces the use of things like dependency injection, resulting in loosely coupled objects. However, TDD is based on unit tests - which test individual methods and not the integration between objects. And yet, TDD expects design to evolve from the tests themselves. So how can TDD possibly result in a better design at the integration (i.e. inter-object) level when the granularity it addresses is finer than that (individual methods)?

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• What is the best way to go about testing that we handle failures appropriately?

  - by Earlz

  we're working on error handling in an application. We try to have fairly good automated test coverage. One big problem though is that we don't really know of a way to test some of our error handling. For instance, we need to test that whenever there is an uncaught exception, a message is sent to our server with exception information. The big problem with this is that we strive to never have an uncaught exception(and instead have descriptive error messages). So, how do we test something what we never want to actually happen?

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• Why has C prevailed over Pascal?

  - by Konrad Morawski

  My understanding is that in the 1980s and perhaps in the 1990s, too - Pascal and C were pretty much head-to-head as production languages. Is the ultimate demise of Pascal only due to Borland's neglection of Delphi? Or was there more of such bad luck; or perhaps something inherently wrong with Pascal (any hopes for its revival?). I hope it's not an open, unanswerable question. I'm interested in historical facts and observations one can back up, rather than likes and dislikes. I also failed to find a duplicate question, which actually surprised me somewhat.

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• .NET Properties - Use Private Set or ReadOnly Property?

  - by tgxiii

  In what situation should I use a Private Set on a property versus making it a ReadOnly property? Take into consideration the two very simplistic examples below. First example: Public Class Person Private _name As String Public Property Name As String Get Return _name End Get Private Set(ByVal value As String) _name = value End Set End Property Public Sub WorkOnName() Dim txtInfo As TextInfo = _ Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.TextInfo Me.Name = txtInfo.ToTitleCase(Me.Name) End Sub End Class // ---------- public class Person { private string _name; public string Name { get { return _name; } private set { _name = value; } } public void WorkOnName() { TextInfo txtInfo = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.TextInfo; this.Name = txtInfo.ToTitleCase(this.Name); } } Second example: Public Class AnotherPerson Private _name As String Public ReadOnly Property Name As String Get Return _name End Get End Property Public Sub WorkOnName() Dim txtInfo As TextInfo = _ Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.TextInfo _name = txtInfo.ToTitleCase(_name) End Sub End Class // --------------- public class AnotherPerson { private string _name; public string Name { get { return _name; } } public void WorkOnName() { TextInfo txtInfo = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.TextInfo; _name = txtInfo.ToTitleCase(_name); } } They both yield the same results. Is this a situation where there's no right and wrong, and it's just a matter of preference?

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• What tasks should an Architect NOT do or limit to be effective?

  - by GBH

  There are plenty of questions/answers about what an architect does, but what should someone in an Architect role NOT do? What are the boundaries/limits to maintain to be an effective Architect? I'm thinking here of Architect vs Developer and Architect vs Project Manager For example, I'm finding myself in a role where my title is Architect but I am also the coding/development lead and project manager on multiple small enterprise projects. I'm struggling with all the task switching and now I want to limit task switching. Trying to wear every hat just isn't working. What tasks should an Architect not do at all? What tasks should an Architect limit? I do think an Architect needs to keep coding, but how to define an appropriate limit for coding work?

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• How should I pitch moving to an agile/iterative development cycle with mandated 3-week deployments?

  - by Wayne M

  I'm part of a small team of four, and I'm the unofficial team lead (I'm lead in all but title, basically). We've largely been a "cowboy" environment, with no architecture or structure and everyone doing their own thing. Previously, our production deployments would be every few months without being on a set schedule, as things were added/removed to the task list of each developer. Recently, our CIO (semi-technical but not really a programmer) decided we will do deployments every three weeks; because of this I instantly thought that adopting an iterative development process (not necessarily full-blown Agile/XP, which would be a huge thing to convince everyone else to do) would go a long way towards helping manage expectations properly so there isn't this far-fetched idea that any new feature will be done in three weeks. IMO the biggest hurdle is that we don't have ANY kind of development approach in place right now (among other things like no CI or automated tests whatsoever). We don't even use Waterfall, we use "Tell Developer X to do a task, expect him to do everything and get it done". Are there any pointers that would help me start to ease us towards an iterative approach and A) Get the other developers on board with it and B) Get management to understand how iterative works? So far my idea involves trying to set up a CI server and get our build process automated (it takes about 10-20 minutes right now to simply build the application to put it on our development server), since pushing tests and/or TDD will be met with a LOT of resistance at this point, and constantly force us to break larger projects into smaller chunks that could be done iteratively in a three-week cycle; my only concern is that, unless I'm misunderstanding, an agile/iterative process may or may not release the software (depending on the project scope you might have "working" software after three weeks, but there isn't enough of it that works to let users make use of it), while I think the expectation here from management is that there will always be something "ready to go" in three weeks, and that disconnect could cause problems. On that note, is there any literature or references that explains the agile/iterative approach from a business standpoint? Everything I've seen only focuses on the developers, how to do it, but nothing seems to describe it from the perspective of actually getting the buy-in from the businesspeople.

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• Does the type of prior employers matter when applying for a new job?

  - by Peter Smith

  Is there a bias in industry regarding the kind of previous employers an applicant has had (Government contractors, researchers, small business, large corporations)? I'm currently working for a University as a generalist programmer and I like my job here. But I'm worried that if I had to switch jobs down the road and apply for a corporate job that my resume would be dismissed based on the fact that I'm working in academia.

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• Terminology: .NET C++ vs. traditional C++

  - by Mike Clark

  Hello. I've recently been working with a team that's using both .NET C++ and pre-.NET C++. I fully understand the technical differences between the two technologies. However, I sometimes feel like I'm floundering when it comes to the terminology used to differentiate the two. Example: Say we have two projects: ProjectA contains "C++" code that builds a .NET assembly DLL. ProjectB contains Visual C++ code that builds a traditional native Windows DLL. What is the best way to succinctly and terminologically draw a distinction between the two projects? Again, I'm not asking for an in-depth technical description of the differences between the two technologies. I'm just looking for names and labels. This is how I might try to make the distinction when talking to someone about Project A and Project B: "ProjectA is a managed .NET C++ project" and ProjectB is an unmanaged Visual C++ DLL project." However I am not at all certain that this terminology is ideal, or even correct. Please describe what you feel the ideal language to use in this situation (or similar situations) might be. Feel free to motivate your answer.

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• Am I copy/paste programmer ?

  - by Searock

  When ever I am stuck with a particular problem, I search for a solution in Google. And then I try to understand the code and tweak it according to my requirement. For example recently I had asked a question Reading xml document in firefox in stack overflow. Soufiane Hassou gave me a link to w3schools, where I found a example on parsing xml document, I understood how the example works, but I copied the code and tweaked it according to my requirement, since I don't like typing much. So does this make me a copy/paste programmer? How do you say if a person is a copy/paste programmer ? Thanks.

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• What are some small, but extendable game ideas to use for inspiration?

  - by Earlz

  I recently came across the game Dopewars(or more generically, Drugwars). Now this is an extremely simple game to implement. A trivial basic implementation could be done in a couple of days, at the most. And it's extremely extendable. Now, my question is what other games are out there that follow this same kind of "difficulty level" for implementation? A game that is actually entertaining, yet trivial to implement, and can easily be extended?

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• Is Information Technology really Engineering?

  - by RPK

  While travelling I met a mathematician who was sitting near me. In a discussion he said: "...there is nothing like engineering in IT or rather programming". A true engineering is what Architecture is, what Electrical and Mechanical is. It made me think and I was puzzled. A percent of my brain agreed also because in Indian Army, there is no subject like Computer Engineering in the Engineering Corps. They don't consider programming as engineering. This is what I heard few years back, I don't know what Indian Army thinks now. What are your views?

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• Programming and Ubiquitous Language (DDD) in a non-English domain

  - by Sandor Drieënhuizen

  I know there are some questions already here that are closely related to this subject but none of them take Ubiquitous Language as the starting point so I think that justifies this question. For those who don't know: Ubiquitous Language is the concept of defining a (both spoken and written) language that is equally used across developers and domain experts to avoid inconsistencies and miscommunication due to translation problems and misunderstanding. You will see the same terminology show up in code, conversations between any team member, functional specs and whatnot. So, what I was wondering about is how to deal with Ubiquitous Language in non-English domains. Personally, I strongly favor writing programming code in English completely, including comments but ofcourse excluding constants and resources. However, in a non-English domain, I'm forced to make a decision either to: Write code reflecting the Ubiquitous Language in the natural language of the domain. Translate the Ubiquitous Language to English and stop communicating in the natural language of the domain. Define a table that defines how the Ubiquitous Language translates to English. Here are some of my thoughts based on these options: 1) I have a strong aversion against mixed-language code, that is coding using type/member/variable names etc. that are non-English. Most programming languages 'breathe' English to a large extent and most of the technical literature, design pattern names etc. are in English as well. Therefore, in most cases there's just no way of writing code entirely in a non-English language so you end up with mixed languages anyway. 2) This will force the domain experts to start thinking and talking in the English equivalent of the UL, something that will probably not come naturally to them and therefore hinders communication significantly. 3) In this case, the developers communicate with the domain experts in their native language while the developers communicate with each other in English and most importantly, they write code using the English translation of the UL. I'm sure I don't want to go for the first option and I think option 3 is much better than option 2. What do you think? Am I missing other options? UPDATE Today, about year later, having dealt with this issue on a daily basis, I have to say that option 3 has worked out pretty well for me. It wasn't as tedious as I initially feared and translating in real time while talking to the client wasn't a problem either. I also found the following advantages to be true, based on my experience. Translating the UL makes you pay more attention to defining the UL and even the domain itself, especially when you don't know how to translate a term and you have to start looking through dictionaries etc. This has even caused me to reconsider domain modeling decisions a few times. It helps you make your knowledge of the English language more profound. Obviously, your code is much more pleasant to look at instead of being a mind boggling obscenity.

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• Single database, multiple system dependency

  - by davenewza

  Consider an environment where we have a single, core database, with many separate systems using this one database. This leads to all of these systems have a common dependency, which ultimately introduces coupling between them. This means that we cannot always evolve systems independently of each other. Structural changes to the database (even if only intended for one, particular system), requires a full sweep test of ALL systems, and may require that other systems be 'patched' and subsequently released. This is especially tricky when you want to have separate teams working on different projects. What is a good 'pattern' to help in avoiding such coupling? I would imagine that a database should be exclusively depended on by one system. If other systems require data for whatever reason, they should request such from an API service of some kind. A drawback of this approach which comes to mind is performance: routing data between high-throughput systems through service calls is much slower than through a database connection.

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• Using XML as data storage

  - by Kian Mayne

  I was thinking about the XML format and the following quote: “XML is not a database. It was never meant to be a database. It is never going to be a database. Relational databases are proven technology with more than 20 years of implementation experience. They are solid, stable, useful products. They are not going away. XML is a very useful technology for moving data between different databases or between databases and other programs. However, it is not itself a database. Don't use it like one.“ -Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML by Elliotte Rusty Harold (page 230, Part 4, Item 41, 2nd paragraph) This seems to really stress that XML should not be used for data storage and should only be used for program to program interoperability. Personally, I disagree and .NET's app.config file that's used to store a program's settings is an example of data storage in an XML file. However for databases rather than configurations etc XML should not be used. To develop my point, I will use two examples: A) Data about customers with fields that are all on one level i.e. there are a number of fields all relating to one customer with no children B) Data about configuration of an application where nested fields and properties make a lot of sense So my question is, Is this still a valid statement and is it now acceptable to store data using XML? EDIT: I've sent an email to the author of that quote to ask for his input/extra context.

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• mysql join with multiple values in one column

  - by CYREX

  I need to make a query that creates 3 columns that come from 2 tables which have the following relations: TABLE 1 has Column ID that relates to TABLE 2 with column ID2 In TABLE 1 there is a column called user In TABLE 2 there is a column called names There can be 1 unique user but there can be many names associated to that user. If i do the following i get all data BUT the user column repeats itself for each name it has associated. What i want is for use to appear unique but the names columns appear with all the names associated to the user column but separated by commas, like the following: select user,names from TABLE1 left join TABLE2 on TABLE1.id = TABLE2.id This will show the users repeated everytime a name appears for that user. what i want is to appear like this: USER - NAMES cyrex - pedrox, rambo, zelda homeboy - carmen, carlos, tom, sandra jerry - seinfeld, christine ninja - soloboy etc....

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• Shuffling algorithm with no "self-mapping"?

  - by OregonTrail

  To randomly shuffle an array, with no bias towards any particular permutation, there is the Knuth Fischer-Yeats algorithm. In Python: #!/usr/bin/env python import sys from random import randrange def KFYShuffle(items): i = len(items) - 1 while i > 0: j = randrange(i+1) # 0 <= j <= i items[j], items[i] = items[i], items[j] i = i - 1 return items print KFYShuffle(range(int(sys.argv[1]))) There is also Sattolo's algorithm, which produces random cycles. In Python: #!/usr/bin/env python import sys from random import randrange def SattoloShuffle(items): i = len(items) while i > 1: i = i - 1 j = randrange(i) # 0 <= j <= i-1 items[j], items[i] = items[i], items[j] return items print SattoloShuffle(range(int(sys.argv[1]))) I'm currently writing a simulation with the following specifications for a shuffling algorithm: The algorithm is unbiased. If a true random number generator was used, no permutation would be more likely than any other. No number ends up at its original index. The input to the shuffle will always be A[i] = i for i from 0 to N-1 Permutations are produced that are not cycles, but still meet specification 2. The cycles produced by Sattolo's algorithm meet specification 2, but not specification 1 or 3. I've been working at creating an algorithm that meets these specifications, what I came up with was equivalent to Sattolo's algorithm. Does anyone have an algorithm for this problem?

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• How to attach WAR file in email from jenkins

  - by birdy

  We have a case where a developer needs to access the last successfully built WAR file from jenkins. However, they can't access the jenkins server. I'd like to configure jenkins such that on every successful build, jenkins sends the WAR file to this user. I've installed the ext-email plugin and it seems to be working fine. Emails are being received along with the build.log. However, the WAR file isn't being received. The WAR file lives on this path in the server: /var/lib/jenkins/workspace/Ourproject/dist/our.war So I configured it under Post build actions like this: The problem is that emails are sent but the WAR file isn't being attached. Do I need to do something else?

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