Search Results

Search found 41789 results on 1672 pages for 'stci software development'.

Page 137/1672 | < Previous Page | 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144  | Next Page >

• Customizing the NUnit GUI for data-driven testing

  - by rwong

  My test project consists of a set of input data files which is fed into a piece of legacy third-party software. Since the input data files for this software are difficult to construct (not something that can be done intentionally), I am not going to add new input data files. Each input data file will be subject to a set of "test functions". Some of the test functions can be invoked independently. Other test functions represent the stages of a sequential operation - if an earlier stage fails, the subsequent stages do not need to be executed. I have experimented with the NUnit parametrized test case (TestCaseAttribute and TestCaseSourceAttribute), passing in the list of data files as test cases. I am generally satisfied with the the ability to select the input data for testing. However, I would like to see if it is possible to customize its GUI's tree structure, so that the "test functions" become the children of the "input data". For example: File #1 CheckFileTypeTest GetFileTopLevelStructureTest CompleteProcessTest StageOneTest StageTwoTest StageThreeTest File #2 CheckFileTypeTest GetFileTopLevelStructureTest CompleteProcessTest StageOneTest StageTwoTest StageThreeTest This will be useful for identifying the stage that failed during the processing of a particular input file. Is there any tips and tricks that will enable the new tree layout? Do I need to customize NUnit to get this layout?

  Read the article

• Web.NET event coming in October

  - by Chris Massey

  If you’re a web developer in Europe (or would like an excuse to travel to Europe), you should definitely take a look at the Web.NET event coming in October. It’s being organized by two Italian web maestros (Simone Chiaretta and Ugo Lattanzi) and the session list looks fantastic. The event site pretty much speaks for itself, but here’s a quick version: It’s a free one-day event on October 20th, with a huge variety of great sessions by great speakers, all 100% focused on web development. There’s a pizza-fuelled hackathon in the evening; thrills, spills and hot new skills. It’s a great chance to network with the local (in relative terms) web development community. It’s free (although all donations are very greatly appreciated). It’s in Milan, darling. Here’s what you need to do: Go and register on www.webnetconf.eu, and vote on which sessions you think look the most interesting. I know this will be a difficult process – it’s *very* hard to choose – but persevere! Grab your place when the free tickets become available early next month (places are limited). Come to Milan in October, learn some new skills, meet some great people, and maybe build something awesome if you feel like staying up late. I’ll be there, and hopefully I’ll see you on the day.

  Read the article

• Starting an HTML canvas game with no graphics skills

  - by Jacob

  I want to do some hobby game development, but I have some unfortunate handicaps that have me stuck in indecision; I have no artistic talent, and I also have no experience with 3D graphics. But this is just a hobby project that might not go anywhere, so I want to develop the stuff I care about; if the game shows good potential, my graphic "stubs" can be replaced with something more sophisticated. I do, however, want my graphics engine to render something approximate to the end goal. The game is tile-based, with each tile being a square. Each tile also has an elevation. My target platform (subject to modification) is JavaScript rendering to the HTML 5 canvas, either with a 2D or WebGL context. My question to those of you with game development experience is whether it's easier to develop an isometric game using a 2D graphics engine and sprites or a 3D game using rudimentary 3D primitives and basic textures? I realize that there are limitations to isometric projection, but if it makes developing my throwaway graphics engine easier, I'm OK with the visual warts that would be introduced. Or is representing a 3D world with an actual 3D engine easier?

  Read the article

• Creating an expandable, cross-platform compatible program "core".

  - by Thomas Clayson

  Hi there. Basically the brief is relatively simple. We need to create a program core. An engine that will power all sorts of programs with a large number of distinct potential applications and deployments. The core will be an analytics and algorithmic processor which will essentially take user-specific input and output scenarios based on the information it gets, whilst recording this information for reporting. It needs to be cross platform compatible. Something that can have platform specific layers put on top which can interface with the core. It also needs to be able to be expandable, for instance, modular with developers being able to write "add-ons" or "extensions" which can alter the function of the end program and can use the core to its full extent. (For instance, a good example of what I'm looking to create is a browser. It has its main core, the web-kit engine, for instance, and then on top of this is has a platform-specific GUI and can also have add-ons and extensions which can change the behavior of the program.) Our problem is that the extensions need to interface directly with the main core and expand/alter that functionality rather than the platform specific "layer". So, given that I have no experience in this whatsoever (I have a PHP background and recently objective-c), where should I start, and is there any knowledge/wisdom you can impart on me please? Thanks for all the help and advice you can give me. :) If you need any more explanation just ask. At the moment its in the very early stages of development, so we're just researching all possible routes of development. Thanks a lot

  Read the article

• What do you do if you reach a design dead-end in evolutionary methods like Agile or XP?

  - by Dipan Mehta

  As I was reading Martin Fowler's famous blog post Is Design Dead?, one of the striking impressions I got is that given the fact that in Agile Methodology and Extreme Programming, the design as well as programming is evolutionary, there are always points where things need to get refactored. It may be possible that when a programmer's level is good, and they understand design implications and don't make critical mistakes, the code continues to evolve. However, in a normal context, what is the ground reality in this context? In a normal day given some significant development goes into product, and when critical change occurs in requirement isn't it a constraint that how much ever we wish, fundamental design aspects cannot be modified? (without throwing away major part of the code). Is it not quite likely that one reaches dead-end on any further possible improvement on design and requirements? I am not advocating any non-Agile practice here, but I want to know from people who practice agile or iterative or evolutionary development methods, as for their real experiences. Have you ever reached such dead-ends? How have you managed to avoid it or escaped it? Or are there measures to ensure that design remains clean and flexible as it evolves?

  Read the article

• Do you believe it's a good idea for Software Engineers to have to work as Quality Assurance Engineers for some period of time?

  - by Macy Abbey

  I believe it is. Why? I've encountered many Software Engineers who believe they are somehow superior to QA engineers. I think it may help quench this belief if they do the job of a QA engineer for some time, and realize that it is a unique and valuable skill-set of its own. The better a Software Engineer is at testing their own programs, the less cost in time their code incurs when making its way through the rest of the software development life-cycle. The more time a Software Engineer spends thinking about how a program can break, the more often they are to consider these cases as they are developing them, thus reducing bugs in the end product. A Software Engineer's definition of "complete" is always interesting...if they have spent time as a QA engineer maybe this definition will more closely match the designer of the software's. What do you all think?

  Read the article

• How best to keep bumbling, non-technical managers at bay and still deliver good work?

  - by Curious

  This question may be considered subjective (I got a warning) and be closed, but I will risk it, as I need some good advice/experience on this. I read the following at the 'About' page of Fog Creek Software, the company that Joel Spolsky founded and is CEO of: Back in the year 2000, the founders of Fog Creek, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, were having trouble finding a place to work where programmers had decent working conditions and got an opportunity to do great work, without bumbling, non-technical managers getting in the way. Every high tech company claimed they wanted great programmers, but they wouldn’t put their money where their mouth was. It started with the physical environment (with dozens of cubicles jammed into a noisy, dark room, where the salespeople shouting on the phone make it impossible for developers to concentrate). But it went much deeper than that. Managers, terrified of change, treated any new idea as a bizarre virus to be quarantined. Napoleon-complex junior managers insisted that things be done exactly their way or you’re fired. Corporate Furniture Police writhed in agony when anyone taped up a movie poster in their cubicle. Disorganization was so rampant that even if the ideas were good, it would have been impossible to make a product out of them. Inexperienced managers practiced hit-and-run management, issuing stern orders on exactly how to do things without sticking around to see the farcical results of their fiats. And worst of all, the MBA-types in charge thought that coding was a support function, basically a fancy form of typing. A blunt truth about most of today's big software companies! Unfortunately not every developer is as gutsy (or lucky, may I say?) as Joel Spolsky! So my question is: How best to work with such managers, keep them at bay and still deliver great work?

  Read the article

• Who should write the test plan?

  - by Cheng Kiang

  Hi, I am in the in-house development team of my company, and we develop our company's web sites according to the requirements of the marketing team. Before releasing the site to them for acceptance testing, we were requested to give them a test plan to follow. However, the development team feels that since the requirements came from the requestors, they would have the best knowledge of what to test, what to lookout for, how things should behave etc and a test plan is thus not required. We are always in an argument over this, and developers find it a waste of time to write down things like:- Click on button A. Key in XYZ in the form field and click button B. You should see behaviour C. which we have to repeat for each requirement/feature requested. This is basically rephrasing what's already in the requirements document. We are moving towards using an Agile approach for managing our projects and this is also requested at the end of each iteration. Unit and integration testing aside, who should be the one to come up with the end user acceptance test plan? Should it be the reqestors or the developers? Many thanks in advance. Regards CK

  Read the article

• @CodeStock 2012 Review: Leon Gersing ( @Rubybuddha ) - "You"

  "YOU"Speaker: Leon GersingTwitter: @Rubybuddha Site: http://about.me/leongersing I honestly had no idea what I was getting in to when I sat down in to this session. I basically saw the picture of the speaker and knew that it would be a good session. I was completely wrong; it was the BEST SESSION of CodeStock 2012.  In fact it was so good, I texted another coworker attending the conference to get over and listen to Leon. Leon took on the concept of growth in the software development community. He specifically referred David Hansson in his ability to stick to his beliefs when the development community thought that he was crazy for creating Ruby on Rails. If you do not know this story Ruby on Rails is one of the fastest growing web languages today. In addition, he also touched on the flip side of this argument in that we must be open to others ideas and not discard them so quickly because we all come from differing perspectives and can add value to a project/team/community. This session left me with two very profound concepts/quotes: “In order to learn you must do it badly in front of a crowed and fail.” - @Rubybuddha I can look back on my career so far and say that he is correct; I think I have learned the most after failing, especially when I achieved this failure in front of other. “Experts must be able to fail.” - @Rubybuddha I think we can all learn from our own mistakes but we can also learn from others. When respected experts fail it is a great learning opportunity for the entire team as well as the person who failed. When expert admit mistakes and how they worked through them can be great learning tools for other developers so that they know how to avoid specific scenarios and if they do become stuck in the same issue they will know how to properly work their way out of them.

  Read the article

• Which is more important in a web application code promotion hierarchy? production environment to repo equivalence or unidirectional propagation?

  - by ghbarratt

  Lets say you have a code promotion hierarchy consisting of several environments, (the polar end) two of which are development (dev) and production (prod). Lets say you also have a web application where important (but not developer controlled) files are created (and perhaps altered) in the production environment. Lets say that you (or someone above you) decided that the files which are controlled/created/altered/deleted in the production environment needed to go into the repository. Which of the following two sets of practice / approaches do you find best: Committing these non-developed file modifications made in the production environment so that the repository reflects the production environment as closely and as often as possible. Generally ignoring the non-developed production environment alterations, placing confidence in backups to restore the production environment should it be harmed, and keeping a resolution to avoid pushing developments through the promotion hierarchy in the reverse direction (avoiding pushing from prod to dev), only committing the files found in the production environment if they were absolutely necessary in other environments for development. So, 1 or 2, and why? PS - I am currently slightly biased toward maintaining production environment to repository equivalence (option 1), but I keep an open mind and would accept an answer supporting either.

  Read the article

• Unable to remove the lock by normal means

  - by Loki

  I've been installing ubuntu restricted extras via the software center. Everything was going well at first, but then the installation process froze on 'applying changes' stage. I've had this in the past already, and usually just hitting the 'cancel' button helped, but not this time. Obviously, the install process has placed a lock, and I couldn't issue any apt-get commands. then i've tried doing what was suggested here Fixing Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock : sudo fuser -cuk /var/lib/dpkg/lock; sudo rm -f /var/lib/dpkg/lock but it seemed to me that it has only killed my X server. Okay, i've just pressed the power button on my PC, and restarted, hoping that the lock was finally off and i could reinstall the stuff. No dice. when I open the software center, I still have one operation in process, a weird one: " Searching | Cancelling ". The 'cancel' button is either inactive, or it just does nothing. So I've become desperate and decided to write here. How do I fix the problem? Can't install anything on a fresh ubuntu 12.04 :) Thanks in advance

  Read the article

• How do you manage a complexity jump?

  - by glenatron

  It seems an infrequent but common experience that sometimes you're working on a project and suddenly something turns up unexpectedly, throws a massive spanner in the works and ramps up the complexity a whole lot. For example, I was working on an application that talked to SOAP services on various other machines. I whipped up a prototype that worked fine, then went on to develop a regular front end and generally get everything up and running in a nice, fairly simple and easy to follow fashion. It worked great until we started testing across a wider network and suddenly pages started timing out as the latency of the connections and the time required to perform calculations on remote machines resulted in timed out requests to the soap services. It turned out that we needed to change the architecture to spin requests out onto their own threads and cache the returned data so it could be updated progressively in the background rather than performing calculations on a request by request basis. The details of that scenario are not too important - indeed it's not a great example as it was quite forseeable and people who have written a lot of apps of this type for this type of environment might have anticipated it - except that it illustrates a way that one can start with a simple premise and model and suddenly have an escalation of complexity well into the development of the project. What strategies do you have for dealing with these types of functional changes whose need arises - often as a result of environmental factors rather than specification change - later on in the development process or as a result of testing? How do you balance between avoiding the premature optimisation/ YAGNI/ overengineering risks of designing a solution that mitigates against possible but not necessarily probable issues as opposed to developing a simpler and easier solution that is likely to be as effective but doesn't incorporate preparedness for every possible eventuality?

  Read the article

• @CodeStock 2012 Review: Leon Gersing ( @Rubybuddha ) - "You"

  "YOU"Speaker: Leon GersingTwitter: @Rubybuddha Site: http://about.me/leongersing I honestly had no idea what I was getting in to when I sat down in to this session. I basically saw the picture of the speaker and knew that it would be a good session. I was completely wrong; it was the BEST SESSION of CodeStock 2012.  In fact it was so good, I texted another coworker attending the conference to get over and listen to Leon. Leon took on the concept of growth in the software development community. He specifically referred David Hansson in his ability to stick to his beliefs when the development community thought that he was crazy for creating Ruby on Rails. If you do not know this story Ruby on Rails is one of the fastest growing web languages today. In addition, he also touched on the flip side of this argument in that we must be open to others ideas and not discard them so quickly because we all come from differing perspectives and can add value to a project/team/community. This session left me with two very profound concepts/quotes: “In order to learn you must do it badly in front of a crowed and fail.” - @Rubybuddha I can look back on my career so far and say that he is correct; I think I have learned the most after failing, especially when I achieved this failure in front of other. “Experts must be able to fail.” - @Rubybuddha I think we can all learn from our own mistakes but we can also learn from others. When respected experts fail it is a great learning opportunity for the entire team as well as the person who failed. When expert admit mistakes and how they worked through them can be great learning tools for other developers so that they know how to avoid specific scenarios and if they do become stuck in the same issue they will know how to properly work their way out of them.

  Read the article

• Floating point undesireable in highly critical code?

  - by Kirt Undercoffer

  Question 11 in the Software Quality section of "IEEE Computer Society Real-World Software Engineering Problems", Naveda, Seidman, lists fp computation as undesirable because "the accuracy of the computations cannot be guaranteed". This is in the context of computing acceleration for an emergency braking system for a high speed train. This thinking seems to be invoking possible errors in small differences between measurements of a moving object but small differences at slow speeds aren't a problem (or shouldn't be), small differences between two measurements at high speed are irrelevant - can there be a problem with small roundoff errors during deceleration for an emergency braking system? This problem has been observed with airplane braking systems resulting in hydroplaning but could this actually happen in the context of a high speed train? The concern about fp errors seems to not be well-founded in this context. Any insight? The fp is used for acceleration so perhaps the concern is inching over a speed limit? But fp should be just fine if they use a double in whatever implementation language. The actual problem in the text states: During the inspection of the code for the emergency braking system of a new high speed train (a highly critical, real-time application), the review team identifies several characteristics of the code. Which of these characteristics are generally viewed as undesirable? The code contains three recursive functions (well that one is obvious). The computation of acceleration uses floating point arithmetic. All other computations use integer arithmetic. The code contains one linked list that uses dynamic memory allocation (second obvious problem). All inputs are checked to determine that they are within expected bounds before they are used.

  Read the article

• How do you get past the Analysis to Paralysis when working on a new project?

  - by Cape Cod Gunny

  I've been struggling with how to get my project going. I've got an old software package that is in need of desparate rewrite. I haven't compiled the source code since 2004. It still sells, it's stable but does require the “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” on a lot of the newer windows systems. It's also one of those hard coded 640 X 480 screen resolution programs. Yuck! I can't seem to get started with this rewrite. I'm constantly fiddling around with different things. I'll play around with different fluid layouts for a while. Then I start looking around at how the main menu should work/look. I quickly find out that there's this thing called "Cool Bars" and I'll spend hours playing with that. Then I start thinking about stuff like "Oh I need to make sure that the screen sizes are preserved so when the application gets relaunched it remebers how the screens were positioned." Which leads to what happens if they have two monitors? Which leads to what happens if they have a quad screen? Yikes it's got to stop. I have always been a slow starter. I think about stuff long and hard up front. This has always plagued me. Once I get my mind made up then bam... I'm off and running. I'm looking for advice from some other one-person software companies that can help someone like me get off to a quicker start?

  Read the article

• How to decide on a price for the project as a freelancer

  - by Shekhar_Pro

  I have seen similar question on this SE site but none comes close to a sure shot answer and many are rather subjective. So i am taking a website as an example to be more objective for you to decide its development price i should quote for the complete work.I would like to have specific figures. In past I have developed many projects for my classmates (Computer science and few .net) when i was in college and there i just arbitrarily quoted the price i will take depending on my mood and customer's ability to pay.. usually ranging from Rs.500 (about $10 USD) to Rs. 1500 (about $30 USD). I have also developed few websites but that was open-source and free. But this time impressed by my work i have got a client that wants to get a website developed similar to this: [ http://www.jeetle.in/ ]. So taking this website as an example tell me how much should i charge for complete work from designing to payment gateway implementation (Excluding the charge the payment gateway provider will take). Few information you might like to consider. I am the only developer on this project if that makes any difference. And i would be using ASP.Net and MSSQL Express for server side processing and jQuery on client. Time period for development offered is about 4 to 6 Weeks. Its like i know my work but not how much I'm worth

  Read the article

• Relation between developers and clients

  - by guiman

  Hi everyone, i've been facing a situation at work and i would like to share it with you and tell me: Did you had to do it to? Should a developer be in direct contact wit the client? Or there should be an "adapter" guy that translates client needs in pseudo formal requirements understandable to us? I'm currently working in a small company that its taking care of implementing lots of systems, most of them for goverment institutions, in witch it generally means taking software developted 20 years ago and refurbish them so fit up-to-date needs. The clients generally are very used to them and tend to discourage change (they are in their 50s 60s give or take, so not technologie-friendly in general). As you can imagine, dev-team in most cases starts taking care of relation with clients, generating the documentation needed in this cases (CU usually), assisting to weekly meets to see improvements with clients. As for experience, this is a gold mine for me, because gives a nice perspective on all the aspects of software development, but also some problems rise because, if developers come from mars then client are from venus. So there is a fine gap on the vocabulary/experience/capability-to-interpret-needs that generates an noice in the communication, and some times affecting the final product.

  Read the article

• How to adopt scrum agile methodology for a small .Net team

  - by Thabo

  I am working on a small product based company developing .Net applications. There is a small team with 5-6 developers. I am a person responsible for planning everything. But my primary role is Software developer. Now our current project is very unstable because of poor organization. Today my boss called me and told to submit a report about required resources, appropriate methodology, required man power and their salary scales to make the current project success. I know I don’t have enough organization skills and I need to go deep in my programming skills. So I need to focus only in the development. So I can’t manage the project anymore. Now I am searching some other ways to make ongoing development success. My questions are What is the suitable agile methodology to my team? Is Scrum is suitable for above mentioned scenario? If we adopt Scrum, what we have to do next? (I think hiring new one to manage the project is more suitable. So we have to get Scrum master and some other developers.) Are there any resources (books, Blogs and etc) to get some tips and advices to solve this problem? If Scrum is not a suitable methodology for our scenario, what else can be more suitable methodology to adopt? Can anyone give a good solution for my problem?

  Read the article

• How to manage and estimate unstructured requirements received from customers

  - by user20358

  A lot of the times I receive a software system's requirements from our customers in a very unstructured format. It is usually a bunch of "product development" guys from the customer's who come up with these "proposed solutions" to the business problems they have. While they are the experts at the business domain, a lot of the times they don't have the solutions right. This results in multiple versions of the same requirement mixing up of two requirements into one a few versions of the requirement later down the line, the requirements which were combined together get separated out again, each taking with it some of the new additions How do you work with such requirements coming in and sort them out into proper use cases and before development begins? What tools can we use to track a particular requirement's history, from the first time it was conceived till the time it gets crystallized into a proper use case? Estimating work against requirements received in such a fashion is a nightmare which ends up in making mistakes in understanding the requirement correctly and estimating the effort against it correctly. Any tips, tools, tricks to make this activity more manageable? I'm just trying to get some insights from someone more experienced than I am in requirements management and effort estimation.

  Read the article

• Getting started on Large Projects

  - by Mercfh

  So I just graduated from my College with a B.S. in Comp. Science (although it was a good school, we're the only accredited CS department in our state.....for w/e that means lol) I feel like im a decent programmer, not amazing....but not terrible. Anyways I got my first job about 2 weeks ago, it's a pretty entry level job: firmware development/tester (I know I know people look down on testers...but I gotta start somewhere). Anyways there isn't a whole lot of coding to be had right now (mostly simple stuff) but here soon I have the option of helping out with development (which is what I want to do) Thing is....I have NEVER worked on a huge project. I mean in school sure we had "group" projects but nothing really big. So I'm not super familiar with HUGE classes and such (main language was C++)....Is this something I'll just get used to with time? Some fellow students were used to that with internships and such...but I never got that chance. My job was mostly a "one man job" kinda thing. Mostly little things. Plus in class we never did huge projects anyways. So how do you guys I guess "plan" out these things? Do you use a whiteboard and plan out classes and such....or what. Also...another worry of mine is that I have to use google......ALOT for examples of code, because sometimes I just don't get how something works. Is this normal? It makes me feel sorta.....stupid I guess. I mean "technically" i've had 4-5 years coding experience......but it really only feels like I had 2 years of REAL experience. If that makes any sense? Thanks

  Read the article

• suggestions for lonewolf dev setup

  - by d33j

  I'm looking for some suggestions for a better development setup. Background: I'm a crusty old software engineer (mostly java of late) and I have around 50 - 100 incomplete java projects scattered everywhere, usb keys, HDDs, and spanning across 5 or 6 computers etc, which have been put on hold for a few years (ie: family). I have no version control at home. I've been using IntelliJ for around 10 years, so that's the only constant. I'm thinking of nominating one machine as a headless server to put all my projects on, maybe a ubuntu box, that way It won't matter which device I'm on, all my projects can be accessed (and I don't have to waste time actually looking for them). I don't need to access code over the net. These are my own 'happy place' projects so I only work on them when I'm at home, however I can see the benefit of the tasking app being online, that way if I think of something while on public transport lets say, I can add it then & there, but it's not a requirement. I can wait until I get home to create tasks. Summary: So I need some sort of version control so I can rollback mistakes, and some sort of simple tasking software where I can assign tasks for myself later on when I get time. I use Subversion, Sonar, Jira and Crucible at work but I think it's a little bit of an overkill for me though. What do you suggest?

  Read the article

• Floating point undesirable in highly critical code?

  - by Kirt Undercoffer

  Question 11 in the Software Quality section of "IEEE Computer Society Real-World Software Engineering Problems", Naveda, Seidman, lists fp computation as undesirable because "the accuracy of the computations cannot be guaranteed". This is in the context of computing acceleration for an emergency braking system for a high speed train. This thinking seems to be invoking possible errors in small differences between measurements of a moving object but small differences at slow speeds aren't a problem (or shouldn't be), small differences between two measurements at high speed are irrelevant - can there be a problem with small roundoff errors during deceleration for an emergency braking system? This problem has been observed with airplane braking systems resulting in hydroplaning but could this actually happen in the context of a high speed train? The concern about fp errors seems to not be well-founded in this context. Any insight? The fp is used for acceleration so perhaps the concern is inching over a speed limit? But fp should be just fine if they use a double in whatever implementation language. The actual problem in the text states: During the inspection of the code for the emergency braking system of a new high speed train (a highly critical, real-time application), the review team identifies several characteristics of the code. Which of these characteristics are generally viewed as undesirable? The code contains three recursive functions (well that one is obvious). The computation of acceleration uses floating point arithmetic. All other computations use integer arithmetic. The code contains one linked list that uses dynamic memory allocation (second obvious problem). All inputs are checked to determine that they are within expected bounds before they are used.

  Read the article

• Should I avoid or embrace asking questions of other developers on the job?

  - by T.K.

  As a CS undergraduate, the people around me are either learning or are paid to teach me, but as a software developer, the people around me have tasks of their own. They aren't paid to teach me, and conversely, I am paid to contribute. When I first started working as a software developer co-op, I was introduced to a huge code base written in a language I had never used before. I had plenty of questions, but didn't want to bother my co-workers with all of them - it wasted their time and hurt my pride. Instead, I spent a lot of time bouncing between IDE and browser, trying to make sense of what had already been written and differentiate between expected behavior and symptoms of bugs. I'd ask my co-workers when I felt that the root of my lack of understanding was an in-house concept that I wouldn't find on the internet, but aside from that, I tried to confine my questions to lunch hours. Naturally, there were occasions where I wasted time trying to understand something in code on the internet that had, at its heart, an in-house concept, but overall, I felt I was productive enough during my first semester, contributing about as much as one could expect and gaining a pretty decent understanding of large parts of the product. I was wondering what senior developers felt about that mindset. Should new developers ask more questions to get to speed faster, or should they do their own research for themselves? I see benefits to both mindsets, and anticipate a large variety of responses, but I figure new developers might appreciate your answers without thinking to ask this question.

  Read the article

• EE vs Computer Science: Effect on Developers' Approaches, Styles?

  - by DarenW

  Are there any systematic differences between software developers (sw engineers, architect, whatever job title) with an electronics or other engineering background, compared to those who entered the profession through computer science? By electronics background, I mean an EE degree, or a self-taught electronics tinkerer, other types of engineers and experimental physicists. I'm wondering if coming into the software-making professions from a strong knowledge of flip flops, tristate buffers, clock edge rise times and so forth, usually leads to a distinct approach to problems, mindsets, or superior skills at certain specialties and lack of skills at others, when compared to the computer science types who are full of concepts like abstract data types, object orientation, database normalization, who speak of "closures" in programming languages - things that make little sense to the soldering iron crowd until they learn enough programming. The real world, I'm sure, offers a wild range of individual exceptions, but for the most part, can you say there are overall differences? Would these have hiring implications e.g. (to make up something) "never hire an electron wrangler to do database design"? Could knowing about any differences help job seekers find something appropriate more effectively? Or provide enlightenment or some practical advice for those who find themselves misfits in a particular job role? (Btw, I've never taken any computer science classes; my impression of exactly what they cover is fuzzy. I'm an electronics/physics/art type, myself.)

  Read the article

• 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!

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144  | Next Page >