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• Should Developers Perform All Tasks or Should They Specialize?

  - by Bob Horn

  Disclaimer: The intent of this question isn't to discern what is better for the individual developer, but for the system as a whole. I've worked in environments where small teams managed certain areas. For example, there would be a small team for every one of these functions: UI Framework code Business/application logic Database I've also worked on teams where the developers were responsible for all of these areas and more (QA, analsyt, etc...). My current environment promotes agile development (specifically scrum) and everyone has their hands in every area mentioned above. While there are pros and cons to each approach, I'd be curious to know if there are more pros and cons than I list below, and also what the generally feeling is about which approach is better. Devs Do It All Pros 1. Developers may be more well-rounded 2. Developers know more of the system Cons 1. Everyone has their hands in all areas, increasing the probability of creating less-than-optimal results in that area 2. It can take longer to do something with which you are unfamiliar (jack of all trades, master of none) Devs Specialize Pros 1. Developers can create policies and procedures for their area of expertise and more easily enforce them 2. Developers have more of a chance to become deeply knowledgeable about their specific area and make it the best it can be 3. Other developers don't cross boundaries and degrade another area Cons 1. As one colleague put it: "Why would you want to pigeon-hole yourself like that?" (Meaning some developers won't get a chance to work in certain areas.) It's easy to say how wonderful agile is, and that we should do it all, but I'm somewhat of a fan of having areas of expertise. Without that expertise, I've seen code degrade, database schemas become difficult to manage, hack UI code, etc... Let's face it, some people make careers out of doing just UI work, or just database work. It's not that easy to just fill in and do as good of a job as an expert in that area.

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• functional requirements - use wording based on verbs?

  - by yas

  Question: Should the functional requirements in a requirements doc use wording based on verbs? Context: School assignment, working in a team, working through the SDLC. The requirements doc has been done and we are now into design. Problem: The requirements doc has an enumerated list of what I'd call features of the app - the functional requirements. In that list are things that I'd think of as "how's" rather than "what's" and now, trying to work on design, I feel like a part of design has been prematurely dictated. I've not done this before! To me, I should be dealing strictly with things that describe "what." Example of current: Pretend that the job is to make an omelet. Listing: crack the egg, break into bowl, scramble, etc.; crosses over the line into the territory of how. Along that track, so does wording like: create, generate, list, calculate, determine, validate, etc. - verbs, basically. Right now, I have a list of requirements that are partially rooted in verbs. My idea of a requirements doc for an omelet would be more like: has two eggs, x ounces of ham, x ounces of bacon, x ounces of montery-jack cheese, x ounces of cilantro, etc. - nothing but what (nouns). I might have, and could have, spoken up before finalizing the requirements doc if I'd had any experience.

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• Attributes of an Ethical Programmer?

  - by ahmed

  Software that we write has ramifications in the real world. If not, it wouldn't be very useful. Thus, it has the potential to sweep across the world faster than a deadly manmade virus or to affect society every bit as much as genetic manipulation. Maybe we can't see how right now, but in the future our code will have ever-greater potential for harm or good. Of course, there's the issue of hacking. That's clearly a crime. Or is it that clear? Isn't hacking acceptable for our government in the event of national security? What about for other governments? Cases of life-and-death emergency? Tracking down deadbeat parents? Screening the genetic profile of job candidates? Where is the line drawn? Who decides? Do programmers have responsibility for how their code is used? What if a programmer writes code to pry into confidential information or copy-protected material? Does he bear responsibility along with the person who used the program? What about a programmer who knowingly or unknowingly writes code to "fix the books?" Should he be liable?

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• Picking Core Language For Large Scale Web Platform

  - by ryanzec

  Now I have work with PHP and ASP.NET quite a bit and also played around few other language for web development. I am now at a point where need to start building a backend platform that will have the ability to support a large set of applications and I am trying to figure out which language I want to choose as my core language. When I say core language I mean the language that the majority of the backend code is going to be in. This is not to say that other languages won't be used because my guess is that they will but I want a large majority of the code (90%-98%) to be in 1 language. While I see to benefit of using the language that is best for the job, having 15% in php, 15% in ASP.NET, 5% in perl, 10% in python, 15% in ruby, etc… seems like a very bad idea to me (not to mention integrating everything seamlessly would probably add a bit of overhead). If you were going to be building a large scale web platform that need to support multiple applications from scratch, what would you choose as your core language and why?

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• FOSS Development: Who develops the OS-specific packages?

  - by achristi

  I have a couple of FOSS projects. They can be a bit of a pain to get running unless you've got dependencies in place already, which I figure is par for the course for FOSS projects. We know that each free operating system out there has its own package management systems. A few of them, such as homebrew on Mac OS or AUR on Arch linux are very friendly to community contributions. What I am wondering is, who exactly is expected to contribute packages? Primarily I am concerned with the case of small or developing projects, since it's pretty standard for the big projects to be put in there by the OS maintainers. From my perspective, it is something of a chicken-egg problem, because your software will not make its way into a package system if it does not have users, and it is less likely to gain users if it is not easy to install and use. For the sake of discussion, let's assume that the software in question is actually legitimately useful. I can see where people could create crapware or spam and that should obviously be kept out of any package system. So, in summary, whose job is this? Is it spammy for a FOSS software dev to put his own work into various OS package repositories?

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• I'm applying for a position at a startup. To whom should I address my cover letter?

  - by sapphiremirage

  One of the co-founders answered questions about the company when the job was posted, but I feel like I shouldn't assume that he's the one who is in charge of hiring. Since it's relatively new and has a lot of name overlap with other things already on the web, it's hard to find any information about the company online, much less the name of their hiring manager. I'm not even certain that they do have a hiring manager, since I seem to remember that they are just an 8 person team. I've heard that "To whom it may concern" is tacky, and normally I would say something along the lines of "Dear Head of Human Resources", but that clearly doesn't work in this case. Any idea what my salutation should be? Later Edits: Final Version: To Joe Programmer and/or the AwesomeStartup.com hiring team, (+ a few words in first paragraph explaining why I am addressing Joe Programmer) I've already sent the email, so nothing you say here will save me. However, feel free to comment on my decision if you think your words be useful to future generations. Old Version (left here because some people responded to it): To the hiring manager for internships at Awesomestartup.com, Additionally, because so many people made comments about the content of my letter: I did spent several hours writing the cover letter itself and making sure that it was awesome. After spending such a long time working on the important part, I asked this question because I wanted to make sure that it wouldn't get passed over by some human who was having a bad day and decided that my salutation was inappropriate. Not likely when the most likely reader of that email is a programmer type, I know, but I figured that it wouldn't hurt not to be sloppy.

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• Learning a new concept - write from scratch or use frameworks?

  - by Stu

  I have recently been trying to learn about MVVM and all of the associated concepts such as repositories, mediators, data access. I made a decision that I would not use any frameworks for this so that I could gain a better understanding of how everything worked. I’m beginning to wonder if that was the best idea because I have hit some problems which I am not able to solve, even with the help of Stack Overflow! Writing from scratch I still feel that you have a much better understanding of something when you have been in the guts of it than if you were at a higher level. The other side of that coin is that you are in the guts of something that you don't fully understand which will lead to bad design decisions. This then makes it hard to get help because you will create unusual scenarios which are less likely to occur when you working within the confines of a framework. I have found that there are plenty of tutorials on the basics of a concept but very few that take you all the way from novice to expert. Maybe I should be looking at a book for this? Using frameworks The biggest motivation for me to use frameworks is that they are much more likely to be used in the workplace than a custom rolled solution. This can be quite a benefit when starting a new job if it's one less thing you have to learn. I feel that there is much better support for a framework than a custom solution which makes sense; many more people are using the framework than the solution that you created. The level of help is much wider as well, from basic questions to really specific, detailed questions. I would be interested to hear other people's views on this. When you are learning something new, should you/do you use frameworks or not? Why? If it's a combination of both, when do you stop one and move on to the other?

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• Employers and intellectual property 2

  - by Rick

  I have a question about intellectual property, I am currently a manager in a small manufacturing firm. The owners are driven by greed and don't appreciate the development process of complex machinery and are happy just to send things out half done. I on the other hand think that it should be done properly as breakdown in the field can be costly, embarrassing. They seem to have all of us running around doing most of the work out of hours using the attitude of "Be grateful to have a job" yet no one has a contract or any security or any agreement in place. For a couple of the projects i am using PLC's and doing the code in my own time and the testing during company time, and i am aware that they cannot support their own machines if i left, but as i created the code in my own time who owns it? The have asked my to put in a shutdown code for a maintenance request after a given length of time, could this be classed as criminal damage or anything illegal apart from immoral? (we sell the machines with 12 month warrantee, shut down after) But as time goes on I'm getting rather fed up of the companies attitude toward the client. I am considering keeping the clients as my own and get them to contact me directly In the shutdown code. By doing something like this is a trial version contact me for a full license? I wouldn't feel bad for my current employer as he is not afraid to S***t on people as he has been evolved in numerous law suits and has over 30 failed companies leaving people and customers high and dry, we have took the company this far on the reputation of the workers and and i can see things heading like all the other companies he has owned and taking our reputations with him. So i suppose now i have set the scene, if i code into it to contact me directly in the shutdown could there be any legal impact on me, as i rightly or wrongly think i own the code and designs? Cheers R

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• Synchronizing 3 servers over IP

  - by user93078

  I'm setting up a medical server for a hospital that has doctors located in 3 different locations, meaning there would be 3 servers (1 in each location). All 3 servers would just have the following software: Ubuntu Server 12.04 minimal MySQL, PHP 5, Apache The medical software which would read/write to the MySQL database Remote admin apps like Nagios & Webmin Rsync for backup (rsync-over-ssh) as a cron job and the doctors at each location would access patient & billing data from their respective servers. What I'd like is, that each of these servers all have synchronized info (especially the mySQL database's) - let's say on an hourly basis each of these servers synchronize data to a common remote server and the data is then brought down to each of the servers. I know an easier way would be to have the medical app running on a remote web server, but since this is medical that we're talking about and knowing how common it is in our area for the net to go gown, I wouldn't like a web based scenatio. Is such a setup possible? Would this be the right way to do things or is there a better way to this? Would really appreciate views and comments (or how to set this up) on this.

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• The Talent Behind Customer Experience

  - by Christina McKeon

  Earlier, I wrote about Powerful Data Lessons from the Presidential Election. A key component of the Obama team’s data analysis deserves its own discussion—the people. Recruiters are probably scrambling to find out who those Obama data crunchers are and lure them into corporations. For the Obama team, these data scientists became a secret ingredient that the competition didn’t have. This team of analysts knew how to hear the signal and ignore the noise, how to segment and target its base, and how to model scenarios and revise plans based on what the data told them. The talent was the difference. As you work to transform your organization to be more customer-centric, don’t forget that talent is a critical element. Journey mapping is a good start to understanding how your talent impacts your customer experiences. Part of journey mapping includes documenting the “on-stage” and “back-stage” systems and touchpoints. When mapping this part of your customers’ journey, include the roles and talent behind the employee actions—both customer facing and further upstream from that customer touchpoint. Know what each of these roles does, how well you are retaining people in these areas, and your plans to fill these open positions in the future. To use data scientists as an example, this job will be in high demand over the next 10 years. The workforce is shrinking, and higher education institutions may not be able to turn out trained data scientists as fast as you need them. You don’t want to be caught with a skills deficit, so consider how you can best plan for the future talent you will need. Have your existing employees make their career aspirations known to you now. You may find you already have employees willing to take on roles that drive better customer experiences. Then develop customer experience talent from within your organization through targeted learning programs. If you know that you will need to go outside the organization, build those candidate relationships now. Nurture the candidates you want to hire and partner with universities, colleges, and trade associations so you can increase the number of qualified candidates in your talent pool.

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• I can't program because the code I am using uses old coding styles. Is this normal to programmers? [closed]

  - by Renato Dinhani Conceição

  I'm in my first real job as programmer, but I can't solve any problems because of the coding style used. The code here: Does not have comments Does not have functions (50, 100, 200, 300 or more lines executed in sequence) Uses a lot of if statements with a lot of paths Has variables that make no sense (eg.: cf_cfop, CF_Natop, lnom, r_procod) Uses an old language (Visual FoxPro 8 from 2002), but there are new releases from 2007. I feel like I have gone back to 1970. Is it normal for a programmer familiar with OOP, clean-code, design patterns, etc. to have trouble with coding in this old-fashion way? EDIT: All the answers are very good. For my (un)hope, appears that there are a lot of this kind of code bases around the world. A point mentioned to all answers is refactor the code. Yeah, I really like to do it. In my personal project, I always do this, but... I can't refactor the code. Programmers are only allowed to change the files in the task that they are designed for. Every change in old code must be keep commented in the code (even with Subversion as version control), plus meta informations (date, programmer, task) related to that change (this became a mess, there are code with 3 used lines and 50 old lines commented). I'm thinking that is not only a code problem, but a management of software development problem.

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• How to avoid to be employed by companies which are candidates to DailyWTF stories?

  - by MainMa

  I'm reading The Daily WTF archives and especially those stories about IT-related companies which have a completely wrong approach of software development, the job of a developer, etc. Some stories are totally horrible: a company don't have a local network for security reasons, another one has a source control server which can only be accessed by the manager, etc. Add to it all those stories about managers who don't know anything about their work and make stupid decisions without listening to anybody. The thing is that I don't see how to know if you will be employed by such company during an interview. Of course, sometimes, an interviewer tells weird things which gives you an idea that something goes very wrong with the company (in my case, the last manager said I should work 100% of my time through Remote Desktop, connected to on an old and slooooow machine, because "it avoids several people to modify the same source code"; maybe I should explain him what SVN is). But in most cases, you will be unable to get enough information during the interview to get the exact image of a company. So how to avoid being employed by this sort of companies? I thought about asking to see some documents like documentation guide or code style guidelines. The problem is that I live in France, and here, most of the companies don't have those documents at all, and in the rare cases where those documents exist, they are outdated, poorly written, never used, or do force you to make things that don't make any sense. I also thought about asking to see how programmers actually work. But seeing that they have dual screens or "late-modern-artsy-fartsy furnishings" doesn't mean that they don't have people making weird decisions, making it impossible to work there. Have you been in such situations? What have you tried? Have it worked?

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• How to deal this situation

  - by user198725878

  I would like to ask you some guidance here. Once I finished my graduation I join a company for Ruby On Rails. They trained me and put into project for ROR. I have spent 1 year of ROR development. I have done basic things in the given project. Then my company got a project for QT, learned and worked for nearly 7 months. Then my company put into me in iOS development. For the past 1 1/2 years, I have been working in the iOS development till date. Also my main worry is, changing the technology I am working makes me not having in depth knowledge on anything. I mean I can't make myself as expert in any language. What is your opinion? Now my company is going to put me into the cross-platform mobile application development. I am worried now, will this affect my growth path by leaving native development? I am ready to learn Android. As I left web development before 2 year ago, I am finding some odds with me. Should look for iOS job change now? Please let me know your advices.

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• Is it worth moving from Microsoft tech to Linux, NodeJS & other open source frameworks to save money for a start-up?

  - by dormisher

  I am currently getting involved in a startup, I am the only developer involved at the moment, and the other guys are leaving all the tech decisions up to me at the moment. For my day job I work at a software house that uses Microsoft tech on a day to day basis, we utilise .NET, SqlServer, Windows Server etc. However, I realise that as a startup we need to keep costs down, and after having a brief look at the cost of hosting for Windows I was shocked to see some of the prices for a dedicated server. The cheapest I found was £100 a month. Also if the business needs to scale in the future and we end up needing multiple servers, we could end up shelling out £10's of £000's a year in SQL Server / Windows Server licenses etc. I then had a quick look at the price of Linux hosting for a dedicated server and saw the price was waaaaaay lower than windows hosting. One place was offering a machine with 2 cores for less than £20 a month. This got me thinking maybe the way to go is open source on Linux. As I write a lot of Javascript at work (I'm working on a single page backbone app at the moment), I thought maybe NodeJS and a web framework like Express would be cool to use. I then thought that instead of using SQL why not use an open source NoSQL database like MongoDB, which has great support on NodeJS? My only concern is that some of the work the application is going to do is going to be dynamically building images and various other image related stuff, i.e. stuff that is quite CPU heavy - so I'm thinking of maybe writing anything CPU heavy in C++ and consuming it as a module in Node. That's the background - but basically is Linux a good match for: Hosting a NodeJS/Express site? Compiling C++ node modules? Using a NoSQL DB like MongoDB? And is it a good idea to move to these unfamiliar technologies to save money?

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• Joining a company to get experience vs. going alone [closed]

  - by daniels

  My goal is to build a successful web startup, say the next Digg or Twitter, and I am in doubt regarding what is the best route to follow as a programmer. I see basically two options: Get an internship/job with an established online company, so that I could get a mentor and learn from more experienced programmers, learn their processes, methodology and so on. I could do this for 1-2 years, and then quit to start working on my own stuff. Start working on my own projects right away, starting with small ones and moving up gradually. This would give me more control on the things I would be working with, but I would lack contact with more experienced people, so I would need to figure basic things on my own. Doing both is not an option in my opinion, cause I would need to put a lot of effort/time into each if I was to learn/improve as a programmer. So is one route definitely better than the other? Is there a third one I am not considering? Background: I already work by myself developing content-based websites and doing SEO, and I am decent at it so money is not a problem. Last year I started learning to program, first by myself and now I enrolled in a CS degree on a good university.

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• In what fields do programming and Business Sciences intersect? [on hold]

  - by Alainus

  One note of clarification: I'm getting a lot of comments saying that this question is too personal, too relative, subjective, and that career-path questions get quickly deleted. This is not a question about me or my career. This question is just what the title says: What fields exist that converge programming and business. Now the question: I read this answer regarding off-topic questions, and I was afraid this might be, so I'll try to keep it general and helpful for others. Also, this one has a similar background but formulates a different question from it. I have a Business Administration degree, but I've programmed since I can remember, and it's been my only job for years. However, my problem is the same that the majority of "amateuressional" programmers have: - Incomplete knowledge of the fundamentals. - Anxiety to keep up. - Feeling of not making anything useful of "the other degree". - Afraid of finally becoming a jack of all trades (master of none). Which further studies (specific degrees or fields) exist that allow a person with a BS degree converge into a programming career, without having to sacrifice coding, allowing to further expand the knowledge of C.S. fundamentals, and also without completely sacrificing the first?

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• How should an undergraduate programmer organize his time learning the maximum possible?

  - by nischayn22

  I started programming lately(pre-final year of a CS degree) and now feel like there's a sea of uncovered treasure for me out there. So, I decided to cover as much as is possible before I look out for a job after graduation. So, I started to read books (The C++ Programming Language, Introduction to Algorithms, Cracking the Coding Interview, Programming Pearls,etc ) participate in StackExchange sites, solving problems (InterviewStreet and ProjectEuler), coding for open source, chatting to fellow programmers/mentors and try to learn more and more. Good,then what's the problem?? The problem is I am trying to do many things, but I am doubtful that I am still utilizing my time properly. I am reading many books and sometimes I just leave a book halfway (jumping from one book to another), sometimes I spend way too much time on chatting and also in getting lost somewhere in the huge internet world, and lastly the wasteful burden of attending classes (I don't think my teachers know good enough or I prefer learning on my own) May be some of you had similar situation. How did you organize your time? Or what do you think is the best way to organize it for an undergraduate? Also what mistakes am I making that you can warn me of

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• Why does Android make good coding so difficult?

  - by metacircle

  my daily work is writing tools in C#/WPF. After over more than 1 year on the job now, I came to love MVVM, IoC Containers, XAML (and more). It's pure fun to write code, since simple, maintainable and extendable code just comes naturally when you follow a few basic patterns. In my free time I really want to write some apps, mainly for my own personal use. I want to write apps for fun and not to make money or anything, that being said, paying an annual fee to be allowed to use my own apps on my own device is a total no-go for me. So I am not able to code for Windows Phone and am also not able to use Xamarin on Android (which is sad since Visual Studio + Resharper is programmers heaven). So I am stuck with Android "classic" Java development. Everytime I sit down at home to create an app, or improve some of the code I have already written I get annoyed very quick because getting good, decoupled code is just so hard to accomplish. It feels like everything you have to do in Android to create a good architecture is a workaround instead of being the way things are meant to be. Writing the UI in xml is fine, but everything else is one big code mess. Even all the tutorials do all their coding in the code behind. For 'hello world' this is fine, but for anything bigger this gets messy very very quick. This is where the fun for me ends. It's just no fun anymore because I just spend 90% of my time refactoring and thinking of workarounds how to make my code more maintainable with all the restrictions Android puts on me. Am I missing a crucial part or is this just the way Android is meant to be? Do you have any suggestions how to learn 'the fun way' of Android programming.

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• International Pricing of Software [closed]

  - by arachnode.net

  I operate a small company that charges $99 for a piece of software. I'd like to know what would be a fair price for non-US customers. Today I sold a license to a party in South Africa. He told me he had been watching the project for two years while business justification could be made for the purchase as SA's currency is nine times weaker than the US dollar. I found this resource detailing how much a Big Mac costs in various countries: http://howmuchatyourplace.com/how_much_does/Big%20Mac_cost.php I realize that the cost of producing a Big Mac varies from locale to locale as does the demand for one. I am aware that many software companies charge prices in local currencies that equate to the price in US dollars. I am aware that my costs remain fixed, and I obviously I cannot discount the rate at which my time costs me. I'm OK with earning less per sale as I would rather get my software onto the desktops of those that need it rather than having them try to write it themselves. Support is light and I can usually point a user to an existing blog or forum post. Being a resident of Hawaii, I am aware that certain goods and services cost more here. Power is up to six times as much per KWH as it is in, say, Seattle, and wages are approximately 60% of what they are for my profession (programmer). I'd like to offer my software at a price that would be fair for everyone around the globe. If a currency is 2 foreign units to 1 US dollar, and goods and services cost 50% more and pay for an equivalent job is 50% of what it is here, should I charge, say, $50 instead of $99? Is there a resource which would allow me to input a price in US dollars and adjust for a list of international locations?

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• How can I tell if I am overusing multi-threading?

  - by exhuma

  NOTE: This is a complete re-write of the question. The text before was way too lengthy and did not get to the point! If you're interested in the original question, you can look it up in the edit history. I currently feel like I am over-using multi-threading. I have 3 types of data, A, B and C. Each A can be converted to multiple Bs and each B can be converted to multiple Cs. I am only interested in treating Cs. I could write this fairly easily with a couple of conversion functions. But I caught myself implementing it with threads, three queues (queue_a, queue_b and queue_c). There are two threads doing the different conversions, and one worker: ConverterA reads from queue_a and writes to queue_b ConverterB reads from queue_b and writes to queue_c Worker handles each element from queue_c The conversions are fairly mundane, and I don't know if this model is too convoluted. But it seems extremely robust to me. Each "converter" can start working even before data has arrived on the queues, and at any time in the code I can just "submit" new As or Bs and it will trigger the conversion pipeline which in turn will trigger a job by the worker thread. Even the resulting code looks simpler. But I still am unsure if I am abusing threads for something simple.

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• Performance impact of Zones.

  - by nospam(at)example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp)

  I was really astonished when i saw this question. Because this question was a old acquaintance from years ago, that i didn't heard for a long time. However there was it again. The question: "What's the overhead of Zones?". Sun was and Oracle is not saying "zero". We saying saying minimal. However during all the performance analysis gigs on customer systems i made since the introduction of Zones i failed to measure any overhead caused by zones. What i saw however, was additional load intoduced by processes that wouldn't be there when you would use only one zone Like additional monitoring daemons, like additional daemons having a controlling or supervising job for the application that resulted in slighly longer runtimes of processes, because such additional daemons wanted some cycles on the CPU as well. So i ask when someone wants to tell me that he measured a slight slowdown, if he or she has really measured the impact of the virtualization layer or of a side effect described above. It seems to be a little bit hard to believe, that a virtualisation technology has no overhead, however keep in mind that there is no hypervisor and just one kernel running that looks and behaves like many operating system instances to apps and users. While this imposes some limits to the technology (because there is just one kernel running you can't have zones with different kernels versions running ... obvious even to the cursory observer), but that is key to it's lightweightness and thus to the low overhead. Continue reading "Performance impact of Zones."

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• Shoring up deficiencies in a "home grown" programmer?

  - by JohnP

  I started out by teaching myself BASIC on a Vic 20, and in college (mid 80's) I had Fortran, Pascal, limited C, machine and assembler (With a smattering of COBOL). I didn't touch programming from approx 1989 to 1999. At that point, I was lucky enough to get hired as a Clipper programmer. Took me about 6 months to learn most of it, and by now (13 yrs) I'm pretty expert in it. I have also picked up Cold Fusion, some C#, some ASP, SQL, etc. I know programming structures, but in most languages I'm missing the esoterics, and I know my code could be much tighter. The problem is that I've learned what I needed to, to get the job done. This results in a lot of gaps in practical knowledge. I am also missing out on a TON of theory. Things like SRP, Refactoring, etc are alien terms. (Although I grok the intent after a short read). In addition, I am in the position now of teaching junior programmers the company and our software, and I don't want to pass on the knowledge gaps. I know this is somewhat of a subjective question and may be closed, but how do you go back and pick up what you've missed?

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• What are some good tips for a developer trying to design a scalable MySQL database?

  - by CFL_Jeff

  As the question states, I am a developer, not a DBA. I have experience with designing good ER schemas and am fairly knowledgeable about normalization and good schema design. I have also worked with data warehouses that use dimensional modeling with fact tables and dim tables. However, all of the database-driven applications I've developed at previous jobs have been internal applications on the company's intranet, never receiving "real-world traffic". Furthermore, at previous jobs, I have always had a DBA or someone who knew much more than me about these things. At this new job I just started, I've been asked to develop a public-facing application with a MySQL backend and the data stored by this application is expected to grow very rapidly. Oh, and we don't have a DBA. Well, I guess I am the DBA. ;) As far as designing a database to be scalable, I don't even know where to start. Does anyone have any good tips or know of any good educational materials for a developer who has been sort of shoved into a DBA/database designer role and has been tasked with designing a scalable database to support an application like this? Have any other developers been through this sort of thing? What did you do to quickly become good at this role? I've found some good slides on the subject here but it's hard to glean details from slides. Wish I could've attended that guy's talk. I also found a good blog entry called 5 Ways to Boost MySQL Scalability which had some good information, though some of it was over my head. tl;dr I just want to make sure the database doesn't have to be completely redesigned when it scales up, and I'm looking for tips to get it right the first time. The answer I'm looking for is a "list of things every developer should know about making a scalable MySQL database so your application doesn't perform like crap when the data gets huge".

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• Resume on 30 Days of SharePoint

  Dear readers, as you might have noticed... It was an organisational desaster on my end! Even though I continued my studies and research on Microsoft SharePoint 2013 during the last 30 days, I wasn't able to write an article a day to keep you posted on my progress. Nonetheless, I gathered a good number of additional blogs, mainly SharePoint MVP sites, and online forums which will be helpful in the next couple of weeks while I'm actually going to develop a C#-based client which will enable an existing 'legacy' application to SharePoint as a document management system (DMS) besides other already existing solutions. Finding excuses Well, no. Not really. I simply didn't block any or enough time every day to write down my progress during my own challenge. My log book on learning about SharePoint stands at 41 hours and 15 minutes during this month. Which means that I spent an average of more than 1 hour per day on getting into SharePoint. I know that might sound a little bit low but also keep in mind that I went for the challenge on top of my daily job and private responsibilities. During the same period there had been two priority 0 incidents from clients - external root cause - which took presedence over this leisure project. More to come Anyway, it was a first trial and despite the low level of reporting on my blog, I'm confident about what I learned during the last 30 days, and I'm ready to implement the client's requirements. At least, I would say that I have a better understanding about the road map or the path to walk during the next month. As time and secrecy allows I'm going to note down some bits and pieces... During the process of development, I'm going to 'cheat' on the challenge summary article and add links to those new entries. Just for the sake of completeness. Next challenge? Hmm, there had been ideas during the last meetup of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) regarding certifications in IT and eventually we might organise some kind of a study group for specific exams, most probably Microsoft exams towards MCSD Web Developer or Windows Developer.

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• Diving into a computer science career [closed]

  - by Willis

  Well first I would like to say thank you for taking the time to read my question. I'll give you some background. I graduated two years ago from a local UC in my state with a degree in cognitive psychology and worked in a neuroscience lab. During this time I was exposed to some light Matlab programming and other programming tidbits, but before this I had some basic understanding of programming. My father worked IT for a company when I was younger so I picked up his books and took learned things along the way growing up. Naturally I'm an inquisitive person, constantly learning, love challenges, and have had exposure to some languages. Yet at this point I was fully pursue it as a career and always had this in the back of my head. Where do I start? I'm 25 and feel like I still have time to make a switch. I've immersed myself in the terminal/command prompt to start, but which language do I focus on? I've read the A+ book and planning to take on the exam, then the networking exam, but I want to deal with more programming, development, and troubleshooting. I understand to get involved in open source, but where? I took the next step and got a small IT assistant job, but doesn't really deal with programming, development, just troubling shooting and small network issues. Thank you!

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