Search Results

Search found 23473 results on 939 pages for 'game programming'.

Page 171/939 | < Previous Page | 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178  | Next Page >

• 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.

  Read the article

• How were some language communities (eg, Ruby and Python) able to prevent fragmentation while others (eg, Lisp or ML) were not?

  - by chrisaycock

  The term "Lisp" (or "Lisp-like") is an umbrella for lots of different languages, such as Common Lisp, Scheme, and Arc. There is similar fragmentation is other language communities, like in ML. However, Ruby and Python have both managed to avoid this fate, where innovation occurred more on the implementation (like PyPy or YARV) instead of making changes to the language itself. Did the Ruby and Python communities do something special to prevent language fragmentation?

  Read the article

• What software do you use to help plan your team work, and why?

  - by Alex Feinman

  Planning is very difficult. We are not naturally good at estimating our own future, and many cognitive biases exacerbate the problem. Group planning is even harder. Incomplete information, inconsistent views of a situation, and communication problems compound the difficulty. Agile methods provide one framework for organizing group planning--making planning visible to everyone (user stories), breaking it into smaller chunks (sprints), and providing retrospective analysis so you get better at planning. But finding good tools to support these practices is proving tricky. What software tools do you use to achieve these goals? Why are you using that tool? What successes have you had with a particular tool?

  Read the article

• What is the career path for a software developer/ programmer? [closed]

  - by Lo Wai Lun

  I've been working as a programmer for a few months and I often study CCNA , CISSP for future. Besides simple coding I was working on specs, designing applications, and all those around-like things. My question is, I want to be a information / system security specialist. what's the career path I should be aiming for? Is it like working on code for the rest of my life? :) Restart my career from the network engineer ? Or do programmers make a good manager-position people ? I know it's very subjective. Thing is, lately I find myself much more into the designing/working on specs part of the development project then the coding itself. How do you see it? Would you like to go from development to information security? Would you like to work on a project with a manager that used to be a coder?

  Read the article

• Sucking Less Every Year ?

  - by AdityaGameProgrammer

  Sucking Less Every Year A trail of thought that had been on my mind for a while Quoting directly from the post I've often thought that sucking less every year is how humble programmers improve. You should be unhappy with code you wrote a year ago. If you aren't, that means either A) you haven't learned anything in a year, B) your code can't be improved, or C) you never revisit old code. All of these are the kiss of death for software developers. How often does this happen or not happen to you? How long before you see an actual improvement in your coding ? month, year? Do you ever revisit Your old code? How often does your old code plague you? or how often do you have to deal with your technical debt. It is definitely very painful to fix old bugs n dirty code that we may have done to quickly meet a deadline and those quick fixes ,some cases we may have to rewrite most of the application/code. No arguments about that. Some of the developers i had come across argued that they were already at the evolved stage where their coding doesn't need improvement or cant get improved anymore. Does this happen? If so how many years into coding on a particular language does one expect this to happen?

  Read the article

• Is Akka a good solution for a concurrent pipeline/workflow problem?

  - by herpylderp

  Disclaimer: I am brand new to Akka and the concept of Actors/Event-Driven Architectures in general. I have to implement a fairly complex problem where users can configure a "concurrent pipeline": Pipeline: consists of 1+ Stages; all Stages execute sequentially Stage: consists of 1+ Tasks; all Tasks execute in parallel Task: essentially a Java Runnable As you can see above, a Task is a Runnable that does some unit of work. Tasks are organized into Stages, which execute their Tasks in parallel. Stages are organized into the Pipeline, which executes its Stages sequentially. Hence if a user specifies the following Pipeline: CrossTheRoadSafelyPipeline Stage 1: Look Left Task 1: Turn your head to the left and look for cars Task 2: Listen for cars Stage 2: Look right Task 1: Turn your head to the right and look for cars Task 2: Listen for cars Then, Stage 1 will execute, and then Stage 2 will execute. However, while each Stage is executing, it's individual Tasks are executing in parallel/at the same time. In reality Pipelines will become very complicated, and with hundreds of Stages, dozens of Tasks per Stage (again, executing at the same time). To implement this Pipeline I can only think of several solutions: ESB/Apache Camel Guava Event Bus Java 5 Concurrency Actors/Akka Camel doesn't seem right because its core competency is integration not synchrony and orchestration across worker threads. Guava is great, but this doesn't really feel like a subscriber/publisher-type of problem. And Java 5 Concurrency (ExecutorService, etc.) just feels too low-level and painful. So I ask: is Akka a strong candidate for this type of problem? If so, how? If not, then why, and what is a good candidate?

  Read the article

• PHP - Auto Code Formatter?

  - by user1179459

  I am just wonedering is there a tool/software (ideally free) to do a auto code formatting in the PHP for batch of files (not one by one which i can use the IDE for that) Ideally something like this where i can set the settings and it will do the auto formatting for all the files in side that folder ...etc http://beta.phpformatter.com/ this is very useful but issue is i have to do this one by one copy pasting .. thats why i am looking for another tool..

  Read the article

• Immutable design with an ORM: How are sessions managed?

  - by Programmin Tool

  If I were to make a site with a mutable language like C# and use NHibernate, I would normally approach sessions with the idea of making them as create only when needed and dispose at request end. This has helped with keeping a session for multiple transactions by a user but keep it from staying open too long where the state might be corrupted. In an immutable system, like F#, I would think I shouldn't do this because it supposes that a single session could be updated constantly by any number of inserts/updates/deletes/ect... I'm not against the "using" solution since I would think that connecting pooling will help cut down on the cost of connecting every time, but I don't know if all database systems do connection pooling. It just seems like there should be a better way that doesn't compromise the immutability goal. Should I just do a simple "using" block per transaction or is there a better pattern for this?

  Read the article

• A more concise example that illustrates that type inference can be very costly?

  - by mrrusof

  It was brought to my attention that the cost of type inference in a functional language like OCaml can be very high. The claim is that there is a sequence of expressions such that for each expression the length of the corresponding type is exponential on the length of the expression. I devised the sequence below. My question is: do you know of a sequence with more concise expressions that achieves the same types? # fun a -> a;; - : 'a -> 'a = <fun> # fun b a -> b a;; - : ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'b = <fun> # fun c b a -> c b (b a);; - : (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'c = <fun> # fun d c b a -> d c b (c b (b a));; - : ((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'd = <fun> # fun e d c b a -> e d c b (d c b (c b (b a)));; - : (((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'd -> 'e) -> ((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'e = <fun> # fun f e d c b a -> f e d c b (e d c b (d c b (c b (b a))));; - : ((((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'd -> 'e) -> ((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'e -> 'f) -> (((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'd -> 'e) -> ((('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'c -> 'd) -> (('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'c) -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'f = <fun>

  Read the article

• Naming convention for iOS

  - by RMDan

  I am learning Objective-C and iOS development and not sure what proper naming convention should be used. I understand how to use the label aspect of Obj-C methods but not the proper way to name each label. What is the best practice for naming methods, properties, objects, outlets, and actions? Also, Should different naming conventions be used between Obj-C code and C code? And if so what differences is there?

  Read the article

• Develop in trunk and then branch off, or in release branch and then merge back?

  - by Torben Gundtofte-Bruun

  Say that we've decided on following a "release-based" branching strategy, so we'll have a branch for each release, and we can add maintenance updates as sub-branches from those. Does it matter whether we: develop and stabilize a new release in the trunk and then "save" that state in a new release branch; or first create that release branch and only merge into the trunk when the branch is stable? I find the former to be easier to deal with (less merging necessary), especially when we don't develop on multiple upcoming releases at the same time. Under normal circumstances we would all be working on the trunk, and only work on released branches if there are bugs to fix. What is the trunk actually used for in the latter approach? It seems to be almost obsolete, because I could create a future release branch based on the most recent released branch rather than from the trunk. Details based on comment below: Our product consists of a base platform and a number of modules on top; each is developed and even distributed separately from each other. Most team members work on several of these areas, so there's partial overlap between people. We generally work only on 1 future release and not at all on existing releases. One or two might work on a bugfix for an existing release for short periods of time. Our work isn't compiled and it's a mix of Unix shell scripts, XML configuration files, SQL packages, and more -- so there's no way to have push-button builds that can be tested. That's done manually, which is a bit laborious. A release cycle is typically half a year or more for the base platform; often 1 month for the modules.

  Read the article

• How do functional languages handle a mocking situation when using Interface based design?

  - by Programmin Tool

  Typically in C# I use dependency injection to help with mocking; public void UserService { public UserService(IUserQuery userQuery, IUserCommunicator userCommunicator, IUserValidator userValidator) { UserQuery = userQuery; UserValidator = userValidator; UserCommunicator = userCommunicator; } ... public UserResponseModel UpdateAUserName(int userId, string userName) { var result = UserValidator.ValidateUserName(userName) if(result.Success) { var user = UserQuery.GetUserById(userId); if(user == null) { throw new ArgumentException(); user.UserName = userName; UserCommunicator.UpdateUser(user); } } ... } ... } public class WhenGettingAUser { public void AndTheUserDoesNotExistThrowAnException() { var userQuery = Substitute.For<IUserQuery>(); userQuery.GetUserById(Arg.Any<int>).Returns(null); var userService = new UserService(userQuery); AssertionExtensions.ShouldThrow<ArgumentException>(() => userService.GetUserById(-121)); } } Now in something like F#: if I don't go down the hybrid path, how would I test workflow situations like above that normally would touch the persistence layer without using Interfaces/Mocks? I realize that every step above would be tested on its own and would be kept as atomic as possible. Problem is that at some point they all have to be called in line, and I'll want to make sure everything is called correctly.

  Read the article

• When should one use "out" parameters?

  - by qegal

  In Objective-C, there are several methods like initWithContentsOfFile:encoding:error: where one passes in a reference to an NSError object for the error: parameter. In this example, the value of the NSError object passed in can change based on what goes on at runtime when the method is being called and whether the body of the method was executed in a certain way successfully. In a way I think of this NSError object as sort of like a second return value from the method, and only differs from an object anObject in the statement return anObject; in that when this statement is called, execution leaves the method. So my question is, not only in the context of error handling in Objective-C, but in general, when should one use an "out" parameter in place of returning said value in a return statement?

  Read the article

• Futures/Monads vs Events

  - by c69

  So, the question is quite simple: in an application framework, when performance impact can be ignored (10-20 events per second at max), what is more maintainable and flexible to use as a preferred medium for communication between modules - Events or Futures/Promices/Monads ? Its often being said, that Events (pub/sub, mediator) allow loose-coupling and thus - more maintainable app... My experience deny this: once you have more that 20+ events - debugging becomes hard, and so is refactoring - because it is very hard to see: who, when and why uses what. Promices (i'm coding in javascript) are much uglier and dumber, than Events. But: you can clearly see connections between function calls, so application logic becomes more straight-forward. What i'm afraid. though, is that Promices will bring more hard-coupling with them... p.s: the answer does not have to be based on JS, experience from other functional languages is much welcome.

  Read the article

• How do I get away from PHP in the web industry?

  - by Kurtis

  I'm just looking for some tips on getting away from using PHP for web development. I'm self-employed but it seems like all of the work I find deals with PHP. I'm not complaining about the work -- just the poor choice of a language that is incredibly popular. I'd love to do my web development in Python, Perl, C#, or even a fun and fancy functional language. There's the old saying that you don't tell a carpenter what kind of a hammer to use. At the same time, you do tell them what kind of material to build your house out of and how much you're willing to spend. The problem I am running in to is that I don't know how to get out of this spiral. I can't just turn down work because then I wouldn't have any. I really don't want to go work for another company -- and even if I did, I'd probably still be stuck using something I don't enjoy. I'm hoping someone has "been there" before and might have some good ideas on how to get out of this situation. Thanks!

  Read the article

• How to stop gold-plating and just be content to release working developments

  - by Andy Bowskill

  The development team that I'm a member of has recently adapted to work according to Agile practices. This has personally highlighted the fact that I can't stop myself gold-plating code (and documentation) and I consequently exceed original estimates, when I could've delivered solutions that meet the requirements much earlier. I think my ethic is bordering on the obsessive in that I become too attached to my code and am rarely content to release before I've refactored and perfected it to the nth degree. I am happy that I have realised this but how can I change my attitude/mentality to be content with my progress and release on-time instead?

  Read the article

• Do any OO languages support a mechanism to guarantee an overriden method will call the base?

  - by Aaron Anodide

  I think this might be a useful language feature and was wondering if any languages already support it. The idea is if you have: class C virtual F statement1 statement2 and class D inherits C override F statement1 statement2 C.F() There would be a keyword applied to C.F() such that removing the last line of code above would cause a compiler error because it's saying "This method can be overridden but the implementation here needs to run no matter what".

  Read the article

• Is perfectionism a newbie's friend or enemy? [closed]

  - by Akromyk

  Possible Duplicate: Where do you draw the line for your perfectionism? I see that the development community is very focused on doing things the right way and personally I would like to do the same too, however, is it a good or bad idea for a newbie to focus on design principles, design patterns, and commenting code when getting started, or is it better to let creativity run wild and potentially write sloppy code. Where should a newbie draw the line?

  Read the article

• Which parallel pattern to use?

  - by Wim Van Houts

  I need to write a server application that fetches mails from different mail servers/mailboxes and then needs to process/analyze these mails. Traditionally, I would do this multi-threaded, launching a thread for fetching mails (or maybe one per mailbox) and then process the mails. We are moving more and more to servers where we have 8+ cores, so I would like to make use of these cores as much as possible (and not use 1 at 100% and leave the seven others untouched). So conceptually, as an example, it would be nice that I could write the application in such a way that two cores are "continuously" fetching emails and four cores are "continuously" processing/analyzing the emails (since processing and analyzing mails is more CPU intensive than fetching mails). This seems like a good concept, but after studying some parallel patterns, I'm not really sure how this is best implemented. None of the patterns really fit. I'm working in VS2012, native C++, but I guess from a design point of view this does not really matter and just some pointers on how to organize this would be great!

  Read the article

• Is it bad practise to call a controller action from a view that was rendered by another controller?

  - by marco-fiset

  Let's say I have an OrderController which handles orders. The user adds products to it through the view, and then the final price gets calculated through an AJAX call to a controller action. The price calculation logic is implemented in a seperate class and used in a controller action. What happens is that I have many views from different controllers that need to use that particular action. I'd like to have some kind of a PriceController that I could call an action on. But then the view would have to know about that PriceController and call an action on it. Is it bad practice for a view to call an action on a different controller from which it was rendered?

  Read the article

• What am I missing about PHP?

  - by Aerovistae

  It's like this mythical thing that a dominating portion of developers say is just the best option for back-end development, a part of development about which I know virtually nothing beyond the absolute basics. So I've looked up PHP tutorials a bunch of times, trying to figure out why it's so powerful and common, but it's annoying as hell-- all the tutorials treat you like a new programmer. You know, this is how you make an If Else statement, here's a for loop, etc. The "Advanced Topics" show you how to make POST and GET statements and whatnot. But there must be more to it! I don't get it! That's practically no different from JavaScript. What am I missing about this language? What else can it do? Where's the power and versatility? I've heard it called a function soup; where are all the functions? Please chide me. I'm clearly missing something.

  Read the article

• Storing a looong lookup table

  - by inquisitive

  Background The product i am working on has a very long lookup-table. the table contains static data and cannot be auto generated. there are about 500 rows and 10 columns. columns have mostly integers and strings. to complicate the matters, there are actually two such tables. every row in table-1 maps to zero-or-more rows in table-2. we use an SQLite database with two tables. the product installer places the SQLite file in the installation directory. the application is written in dot-net and we use ADO to load the data once on startup. now, the lookup table grows. in each release a month, we add about 10 new entries existing entries are adjusted. every release we fine tune existing entries. The problem a team of (10) developers work on the lookup table. Code goes in the SVN, but the little devil the SQLite does not. this prevents multiple developers to work on it. we do take regular backups of the file, but proper versioning is not possible. we never know who did the breaking change. the worse thing is we dont know if there is any change at all. diff'ing databases is tedious if not impossible. the tables are expected to grow quite large in years to come and we would need developers to work in parallel on it. the data is business critical. we need to be able to audit changes made to it. Question What would be a solution for the problems outlines above? one idea was to transform the whole thing to XML and treat it like just another source file. that way SVN can do the versioning and we can work in parallel. but the data shows relational behavior. with XML we loose the unique and foreign-key constraints. also we cant query it with sql like ease. any help here will be appreciated.

  Read the article

• The advantages & disadvantages to be had from using a Web Framework?

  - by JHarley1

  Hello, This question is focused on extracting the advantages and disadvantages of using Web based Frameworks: such as Cake PHP, Zend, jQuery, ASP.NET). This question is completely language agnostic. Let me start with the notion of "Standing on the shoulders of Giants". Advantages: Empowers Developers - by taking features that would have previously have taken 100's of lines of code and compressing them into one simple function call empowers developers to integrate more complex features into their Web Sites. Allow for Quicker development of applications - this is very relevant for people that need websites created in a very small window (has anyone any examples of this?) Lower Costs - allows programmers to pass cost savings onto the customer, a whole new range of customers generated that wanted a website but previously could not afford the higher development costs. Disadvantages: Lost Understanding - by relying on the features of a framework a developer is in danger of loosing understanding on how things work (underneath the hood). The configuration cliff - once you go further than the configuration of your framework your productivity drops right off, it can be difficult to implement features outside of a frameworks configuration. Developer tramlines - you (the developer) has to do things the way that the developer want you to do things. Security issues - giving people these tools to develop professional looking websites fast is a potential risk, people can quickly create professional looking websites for fraudulent companies. I wonder what people make of my points, and whether any body disagrees with them? Also if people have additional points I would be grateful. Many Thanks, J

  Read the article

• Callbacks: when to return value, and when to modify parameter?

  - by MarkN

  When writing a callback, when is best to have the callback return a value, and when is it best to have the callback modify a parameter? Is there a difference? For example, if we wanted to grab a list of dependencies, when would you do this: function GetDependencies(){ return [{"Dep1" : 1.1}, {"Dept2": 1.2}, {"Dep3" : 1.3}]; } And when would you do this? function RegisterDependencies(register){ register.add("Dep1", 1.1); register.add("Dep2", 1.2); register.add("Dep3", 1.3); }

  Read the article

• What is a good way to test demand for a new game platform?

  - by user15256

  I'm working on a game platform that turns your iPhone, android or iPad into a steering wheel, for racing games (like need for speed and dirt 3) and flight simulators for example. I'd love to figure out smart ways to figure out whether gamers would like something like this. I originally asked this question over on the gaming SE and it was for getflypad.com. A lot of the tech is built and most of it is doable - the question here is how to test demand and know whether gamers actually want this.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178  | Next Page >