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Structuring database for multi-object "activity" and "following" functionalities

- by romaninsh

I am working on a web application which operate with different types of objects such as user, profiles, pages etc. All objects have unique object_id. When objects interact it may produce "activity", such as user posting on the page or profile. Activity may be related to multiple objects through their object_id. Users may also follow "objects" and they need to be able to see stream of relevant activity. Could you provide me with some data structure suggestions which would be efficient and scalable? My goal is to show activity limited to the objects which user is following I am not limited by relational databases. Update As I'm getting advices on ORM and how index things, I'd like to again, stress my question. According to my current design model the database structure looks like this: As you can see - it's quite easy to implement database like that. Activity and Follower tables do contain much larger amount of records than the upper level but it's tolerable. But when it comes for me to create a "timeline" table, it becomes a nightmare. For every user I need to reference all the object activities which he follows. In terms of records it easily gets out of control. Please suggest me how to change this structure to avoid timeline creation and also be abel to quickly retrieve activity for any given user. Thanks.

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What is the origin of the name string? [closed]

- by Andrej M.

Possible Duplicate: Etymology of “String” Every programmer knows the meaning of the name string. In programming, it is traditionally a sequence of characters. But historically, who has decided that a sequence of characters will be called a string? Has there ever been an attempt to name a sequence of characters differently, but was ultimately abandoned due to the rising popularity of the name string?

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What should I quote for a project I hope to get a job at the end of?

- by thesunneversets

Long story short: I applied for a (CakePHP, MySQL, etc) development job in London, UK. I grew up in Britain but am currently based quite a few thousand miles away in Canada, so I wasn't really expecting success. But quite a few emails and phone interviews later it seems that they really like me. At least to a point. Because such a major relocation would be a horrible thing to go wrong, they've sensibly suggested a trial run of getting me to build a website at a distance. I have the spec for this and it's quite a substantial amount of work. My problem is that I now need to suggest both a fee and a timescale for the job, and I haven't got any significant experience of working as a contractor. Looking at the spec, which is 1500 words of many concisely stated features, some fairly trivial and some moderately involved, I can easily imagine there being 2 weeks of intensive work there. (If everything went really well it might be closer to one week, but even though I want to impress, I definitely don't want to fall into the inexperienced-contractor trap of massively underestimating the amount of time a project will run to.) As an extra complication, there is no expectation that I should give up my day job to get this trial project done, so the hours will have to be clawed from evenings and weekends. I don't want to overcommit to a quick delivery date, only to find myself swiftly burning out due to an unrealistic workload. So, any advice for me? My main question is, what is a realistic hourly figure to demand of a stable but not excessively wealthy London-based company in the current market, bearing in mind that I'd like them to hire me afterwards? But any more general recommendations based on my circumstances above would be much appreciated too. Many thanks!

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Can resizing images with css be good?

- by Echo

After reading Is CSS resizing of images still a bad idea?, I thought of a similar question. (too similar? should this be closed?) Lets say you need to use 10 different product image sizes throughout your website and you have 20k-30k different product images, should you use 10 different files for each image size? or maybe 5 different files and use css to resize the other 5? Would there ever be combination that would be good? Or should you always make separate image files? If you use css to resize them, you will save on storage (in GBs) but you will have slight increase in bandwidth and slower loading images(but if images are cached, and you show both sizes of the image would you use less bandwidth and have faster loads?) (But of course you wouldn't want to use css to resize images for mobile sites.)

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What could be my path? Networking, programming, or something else?

- by momong

Well first and foremost, I would like to give my brief description: I was an aviation student but I didn't pursue that path because I lost my interest. Now I'm an I.T. student and currently stopped schooling because of confusion. I don't know which path I should choose: could it be programming or networking? Someone told me that on networking the money is easy, the job is easy. Others told me that programming is best suited for me because I'm very skilled and excellent at figures. I want to chose networking, but I can't find my passion for it, my mind tells me but my heart doesn't... and on programming, I don't know which language I should pick or if I like it or not. A good mentor, even if only online, would be a very big plus to me, but I don't think if there are many who could spent their time on teaching a nobody... but I'm very eager to learn. My real passion is gaming! I want to work in the gaming industry, I want to be a man behind those games! I've been a gamer freak since birth. But I don't know how to get in to that industry. I don't know what to do. I don't know which path would really suit me. Sorry if some of you find this a pointless question, but please bear with me, this could be the turn of my life.

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How should I start with Lisp?

- by Gary Rowe

I've been programming for years now, working my way through various iterations of Blub (BASIC, Assembler, C, C++, Visual Basic, Java, Ruby in no particular order of "Blub-ness") and I'd like to learn Lisp. However, I have a lot of intertia what with limited time (family, full time job etc) and a comfortable happiness with my current Blub (Java). So my question is this, given that I'm someone who would really like to learn Lisp, what would be the initial steps to get a good result that demonstrates the superiority of Lisp in web development? Maybe I'm missing the point, but that's how I would initially see the application of my Lisp knowledge. I'm thinking "use dialect A, use IDE B, follow instructions on page C, question your sanity after monads using counsellor D". I'd just like to know what people here consider to be an optimal set of values for A, B, C and perhaps D. Also some discussion on the relative merit of learning such a powerful language as opposed to, say, becoming a Rails expert. Just to add some more detail, I'll be developing on MacOS (or a Linux VM) - no Windows based approaches will be necessary, thanks. Notes for those just browsing by I'm going to keep this question open for a while so that I can offer feedback on the suggestions after I've been able to explore them. If you happen to be browsing by and feel you have something to add, please do. I would really welcome your feedback. Interesting links Assuming you're coming at Lisp from a Java background, this set of links will get you started quickly. Using Intellij's La Clojure plugin to integrate Lisp (videocast) Lisp for the Web Online version of Practical Common Lisp (c/o Frank Shearar) Land of Lisp a (+ (+ very quirky) game based) way in but makes it all so straightforward

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Low coupling processing big quantities of data

- by vitalik

Usually I achieve low coupling by creating classes that exchange lists, sets, and maps between them. Now I am developing a batch application and I can't put all the data inside a data structure because there isn't enough memory. I have to read and process one chunk of data and then going to the next one. So having low coupling is much more difficult because I have to check somewhere if there is still data to read, etc. What I am using now is: Source - Process - Persist The classes that process have to ask to the Source classes if there are more rows to read. What are the best practices and or useful patterns in such situations? I hope I am explaining myself, if not tell me.

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Does TDD really work for complex projects?

- by Amir Rezaei

I’m asking this question regarding problems I have experienced during TDD projects. I have noticed the following challenges when creating unit tests. Generating and maintaining mock data It’s hard and unrealistic to maintain large mock data. It’s is even harder when database structure undergoes changes. Testing GUI Even with MVVM and ability to test GUI, it takes a lot of code to reproduce the GUI scenario. Testing the business I have experience that TDD works well if you limit it to simple business logic. However complex business logic is hard to test since the number of combinations of tests (test space) is very large. Contradiction in requirements In reality it’s hard to capture all requirements under analysis and design. Many times one note requirements lead to contradiction because the project is complex. The contradiction is found late under implementation phase. TDD requires that requirements are 100% correct. In such cases one could expect that conflicting requirements would be captured during creating of tests. But the problem is that this isn’t the case in complex scenarios. I have read this question: Why does TDD work? Does TDD really work for complex enterprise projects, or is it practically limit to project type?

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Small projects using the cathedral model: does open-source lower security?

- by Anto

We know of Linus' law: With enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow In general, people seem to say that open-source software is more secure because of that very thing, but... There are many small OSS projects with just 1 or 2 developers (the cathedral model, as described by ESR). For these projects, does releasing the source-code actually lower the security? For projects like the Linux kernel there are thousands of developers and security vulnerabilities are quite likely going to be found, but when just some few people look through the source code, while allowing crackers (black hat hackers) to see the source as well, is the security lowered instead of increased? I know that the security advantage closed-source software has over OSS is security through obscurity, which isn't good (at all), but it could help to some degree, at least by giving those few devs some more time (security through obscurity doesn't help with the if but with the when). EDIT: The question isn't whether OSS is more secure than non-OSS software but if the advantages for crackers are greater than the advantages for the developers who want to prevent security vulnerabilities from being exploited.

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Are Language Comparisons Meaningful?

- by Prasoon Saurav

Dr Bjarne Stroustrup in his book D&E says Several reviewers asked me to compare C++ to other languages. This I have decided against doing. Thereby, I have reaffirmed a long-standing and strongly held view: "Language comparisons are rarely meaningful and even less often fair" . A good comparison of major programming languages requires more effort than most people are willing to spend, experience in a wide range of application areas, a rigid maintenance of a detached and impartial point of view, and a sense of fairness. I do not have the time, and as the designer of C++, my impartiality would never be fully credible. -- The Design and Evolution of C++(Bjarne Stroustrup) Do you people agree with his this statement "Language comparisons are rarely meaningful and even less often fair"? Personally I think that comparing a language X with Y makes sense because it gives many more reasons to love/despise X/Y :-P What do you people think?

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Do licenses matter if there's nobody around to enforce them?

- by Corey

Suppose that the original creators can't (or won't) enforce a license on their software/code, but that work is still popular. I guess if you want to visualize it, I'll throw out a convoluted hypothetical: Imagine a very small group of developers that released a code project under an open-source license. The repository was hosted on their servers. However, the everybody on the immediate development team passed away in a tragic accident or something. Their servers shut down after this happened. The project had a fairly large user base, and so others began to host the last revision on their own servers for others to download. (Yes, I have an active imagination) Does abiding by the license simply become a matter of morality by its users, or can there still exist a legal penalty when there is no one user or group to enforce it? Could anything be done if an unscrupulous user decided to branch off the project and use it under a different license? I am not looking for legal advice -- I am simply curious about how software licenses work. I tend to think of strange situations and wonder what would happen in those scenarios.

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Rails/Node.js interaction

- by lpvn

I and my co-worker are developing a web application with rails and node.js and we can't reach a consensus regarding a particular architectural decision. Our setup is basically a rails server working with node.js and redis, when a client makes a http request to our rails API in some cases our rails application posts the response to a redis database and then node.js transmits the response via websocket. Our disagreement occurs in the following point: my co-worker thinks that using node.js to send data to clients is somewhat business logic and should be inside the model, so in the first code he wrote he used commands of broadcast in callbacks and other places of the model, he's convinced that the models are the best place for the interaction between rails and node. I on the other hand think that using node.js belongs to the runtime realm, my take is that the broadcast commands and other node.js interactions should be in the controller and should only be used in a model if passed through a well defined interface, just like the situation when a model needs to access the current user of a session. At this point we're tired of arguing over this same thing and our discussion consists in us repeating to ourselves our same opinions over and over. Could anyone, preferably with experience in the same setup, give us an unambiguous response saying which solution is more adequate and why it is?

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How to communicate within a company what is being Continually Deployed

- by Francis Spor

I work for a small development company, 20 people total in the entire company, 3 in actual development, and we've adopted CD for our commits to trunk, and it works great, from a code management and up-time side. However - we're getting flak from our support staff and marketing department that they don't feel that they're getting enough lead time on new features and notifications on bug fixes that could change behavior. Part of why we love the CD system is for us in development, it's fast, we fix the bug, add the quick feature, close the Bugz and move on with our day to the next item. All members of our company are now on HipChat at all times, and when a deployment occurs, a message is sent to a room that all company members are in, letting them know what was just deployed (it just shows the commit messages from tip back to the last recorded deployment). We in development are also attempting to make sure that when we're making a change that modifies the UI or a public facing behavior, we post a screenshot to the All Company room and explain what the behavior change is, seeking pushback or concerns. Often, the response is silence. Sometimes, it's a few minor questions, but nothing that need stop the deployment from happening. What I'm wondering is how do other users of the CD method deal with notifications of new features and changes to areas of the company that are not development - and eventually on to customers in the world? Thanks, Francis

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What can Haskell's type system do that Java's can't?

- by Matt Fenwick

I was talking to a friend about the differences between the type systems of Haskell and Java. He asked me what Haskell's could do that Java's couldn't, and I realized that I didn't know. After thinking for a while, I came up with a very short list of minor differences. Not being heavy into type theory, I'm left wondering whether they're formally equivalent. To try and keep this from becoming a subjective question, I'm asking: what are the major, non-syntactical differences between their type systems? I realize some things are easier/harder in one than in the other, and I'm not interested in talking about those. And to make it more specific, let's ignore Haskell type extensions since there's so many out there that do all kinds of crazy/cool stuff.

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Learning curve regarding the transition from Windows to Linux from a Java developer perspective [closed]

- by Geek

I am a Java developer who has worked on windows platform all through . Now I have shifted job and my new job requires me to do the development work in Red Hat Linux environment . The IDE they use is JDeveloper . I do not have any prior experience in Linux and JDeveloper . So what suggestion would you guys give me so that I can have a smooth and incremental transition from Windows to Linux ? I do not want to short circuit my learning curve . I want to learn it the correct way . Any suggestions regrading any good books,links etc that will help to get started is welcome .

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A design pattern for data binding an object (with subclasses) to asp.net user control

- by Rohith Nair

I have an abstract class called Address and I am deriving three classes ; HomeAddress, Work Address, NextOfKin address. My idea is to bind this to a usercontrol and based on the type of Address it should bind properly to the ASP.NET user control. My idea is the user control doesn't know which address it is going to present and based on the type it will parse accordingly. How can I design such a setup, based on the fact that, the user control can take any type of address and bind accordingly. I know of one method like :- Declare class objects for all the three types (Home,Work,NextOfKin). Declare an enum to hold these types and based on the type of this enum passed to user control, instantiate the appropriate object based on setter injection. As a part of my generic design, I just created a class structure like this :- I know I am missing a lot of pieces in design. Can anybody give me an idea of how to approach this in proper way.

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Browser-based GUI for a python application

- by ack__

I want to create a web/browser-based GUI for a command-line python application. The goal is to make use of HTML/JS technologies to create this GUI. As the application itself, it needs to run on Linux and Windows, and the interface will be accessible only from localhost (not exposed to internet). The GUI will contain 5 to 10 pages. I don't want a traditional desktop GUI that includes HTML/JS, but just a bunch of html files and some kind of controller between those and the application. I also want to make use of asynchronous programming (ajax like) so I can load and print data in the GUI without refreshing the whole page. I'd probably use jQuery for that and a couple other things. How would you recommend to design this? Performance is not the key here, I'm rather looking at reliability, portability and simplicity. I'm thinking of using a lightweight python HTTP server / framework (like CherryPy) and maybe later a Python templating system (at the begining it will just be a couple pages). EDIT: I'm looking for ideas/recommendations how to build this, not for alternatives to browser/web-based GUI.

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Does Open Source lead to bad coding?

- by David Conde

I have a thought that I tried asking at SO, but didnt seem like the appropriate place. I think that source sites like Google Code, GitHub, SourceForge... have played a major role in the history of programming. However, I found that there is another bad thing to these kind of sites and that is you may just "copy" code from almost anyone, not knowing if it is good(tested) source or not. This line of thought has taken me to believe that source code websites tend to lead many developers (most likely unexperienced) to copy/paste massive amounts of code, which I find just wrong. I really dont know how to focus the question well, but basic thought would be: Is this ok? Is Open Source contributing to that or I'm just seeing ghosts... Hope people get interested because I think this is an important theme.

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What have you learnt that has a steep learning curve?

- by Jonathan Khoo

Recently, I've invested time in learning the intricacies of Git and it has got me thinking about time and learning. (My previous experience with version control systems was only limited use of CVS and SVN.) It took me a whole day's worth of reading to be able to understand the concepts and differences of Git. There are an infinite number of things available for us to learn. Some, more useful than others. I don't know Fortran - I'm relatively young. But looking back at the preceding years of my life, I notice that I'm busier and busier as time goes on. The amount of things I have to get through in a day is increasingly out of my control. It doesn't take a genius to extrapolate that information and realise I'll have even less time in the future - unless I get fired, but I have no strong plans relating to that idea for now. So, given that I have much more time and energy now than I will have in the future: what have you learnt, that has a steep learning curve, that you would possibly recommend to a fellow programmer? Edit: I've stumbled upon the excellent question What programming skills have provided you the best return on investment? and hav realised that my way of approaching how to spend learning time was naive - it doesn't matter if ten useful concepts can be learnt in the time of one if they're worth it.

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How to determine if a programming language is verbose or terse?

- by sunpech

Programming languages can often be described as verbose or terse. From my understanding, a verbose language is easy to read and understand, while a terse language is concise and neat, but more difficult to read. Should there be other things to consider in the definitions? It seems much of the popular programming languages of today are verbose, and these terms two terms are only used to describe a language as being more or less, relative to than another language. How do we determine if a programming language is more verbose/terse over another? Example: Is C# more verbose than Java?

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How do you keep code with continuations/callbacks readable?

- by Heinzi

Summary: Are there some well-established best-practice patterns that I can follow to keep my code readable in spite of using asynchronous code and callbacks? I'm using a JavaScript library that does a lot of stuff asynchronously and heavily relies on callbacks. It seems that writing a simple "load A, load B, ..." method becomes quite complicated and hard to follow using this pattern. Let me give a (contrived) example. Let's say I want to load a bunch of images (asynchronously) from a remote web server. In C#/async, I'd write something like this: disableStartButton(); foreach (myData in myRepository) { var result = await LoadImageAsync("http://my/server/GetImage?" + myData.Id); if (result.Success) { myData.Image = result.Data; } else { write("error loading Image " + myData.Id); return; } } write("success"); enableStartButton(); The code layout follows the "flow of events": First, the start button is disabled, then the images are loaded (await ensures that the UI stays responsive) and then the start button is enabled again. In JavaScript, using callbacks, I came up with this: disableStartButton(); var count = myRepository.length; function loadImage(i) { if (i >= count) { write("success"); enableStartButton(); return; } myData = myRepository[i]; LoadImageAsync("http://my/server/GetImage?" + myData.Id, function(success, data) { if (success) { myData.Image = data; } else { write("error loading image " + myData.Id); return; } loadImage(i+1); } ); } loadImage(0); I think the drawbacks are obvious: I had to rework the loop into a recursive call, the code that's supposed to be executed in the end is somewhere in the middle of the function, the code starting the download (loadImage(0)) is at the very bottom, and it's generally much harder to read and follow. It's ugly and I don't like it. I'm sure that I'm not the first one to encounter this problem, so my question is: Are there some well-established best-practice patterns that I can follow to keep my code readable in spite of using asynchronous code and callbacks?

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When to use shared libraries for a web framework?

- by CamelBlues

tl;dr: I've found myself hosting a bunch of sites running on the same web framework (symfony 1.4). Would it be helpful if I moved all of the shared library code into the same directory and shared it across the sites? more I see some advantages to this: Each site takes up less disk space Library updates (an unlikely scenario) can take place across all sites I also see some disadvantages, mostly in terms of a single point of failure and the inability to have sites using different versions of the framework. My real concern, though, is performance. I hypothesize that I will see a performance increase, since the PHP code will already be cached for all sites when they call the framework. Is this a correct hypothesis?

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Modified Strategy Design Pattern

- by Samuel Walker

I've started looking into Design Patterns recently, and one thing I'm coding would suit the Strategy pattern perfectly, except for one small difference. Essentially, some (but not all) of my algorithms, need an extra parameter or two passed to them. So I'll either need to pass them an extra parameter when I invoke their calculate method or store them as variables inside the ConcreteAlgorithm class, and be able to update them before I call the algorithm. Is there a design pattern for this need / How could I implement this while sticking to the Strategy Pattern? I've considered passing the client object to all the algorithms, and storing the variables in there, then using that only when the particular algorithm needs it. However, I think this is both unwieldy, and defeats the point of the strategy pattern. Just to be clear I'm implementing in Java, and so don't have the luxury of optional parameters (which would solve this nicely).

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Why is Software Engineering not the typical major for future software developers?

- by FarmBoy

While most agree that a certain level of Computer Science is essential to being a good programmer, it seems to me that the principles of good software development is even more important, though not as fundamental. Just like mechanical engineers take physics classes, but far more engineering classes, I would expect, now that software is over a half century old, that software development would begin to dominate the undergraduate curriculum. But I don't see much evidence of this. Is there a reason that Software Engineering hasn't taken hold as an academic discipline?

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What do you think of a performance engineer should have?

- by Vance

I believe performance tuning (or even testing) is one the most challenging for an engineer. Well, in lots of company, this is the lowest priority than others "important" thing. My purpose of opening this post is to know what do you think*good* performance engineer should have. I can list some things like: Solid database,programming knowledge. Do single thread performance testing. Good knowledge of using the load generator tools to simulate the concurrent loads. Use different tools to monitor/measure the app/db server performance status Understand and can debug the codes. Even tune the codes. Any more ideas are always appreciated!

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