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• Is switch-case over enumeration bad practice?

  - by Puckl

  I have an enumeration with the commands Play, Stop and Pause for a media player. In two classes I do a switch-case over the received commands. The player runs in a different thread and I deliver the commands in a command queue to the thread. If I generate class diagrams the enumeration has dependencies all over the place. Is there a nicer way to deal with the commands? If I would change/extend the enumeration, I would have to change several classes. (Its not super important to keep the player extensible, but I try to write nice software.)

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• How do I learn Python from zero to web development? [closed]

  - by Terence Ponce

  I am looking into learning Python for web development. Assuming I already have some basic web development experience with Java (JSP/Servlets), I'm already familiar with web design (HTML, CSS, JS), basic programming concepts and that I am completely new to Python, how do I go about learning Python in a structured manner that will eventually lead me to web development with Python and Django? I'm not in a hurry to make web applications in Python so I really want to learn it thoroughly so as not to leave any gaps in my knowledge of the technologies involving web development in Python. Are there any books, resource or techniques to help me in my endeavor? In what order should I do/read them? UPDATE: When I say learning in a structured manner, I mean starting out from the basics then learning the advanced stuff without leaving some of the important details/features that Python has to offer. I want to know how to apply the things that I already know in programming to Python.

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• Why do I have to choose between "management" and "technical" tracks in my career?

  - by Stephen Gross

  I was recently laid off, and although I found a new gig I'm a bit frustrated with how career tracks work in the land of software development. I really love doing a bit of everything: coding, testing, architect(ing), leadership/management, customer contact, requirements gathering, staff development, etc. Software companies, however, want me to fit into a niche: I'm either a coder, a tester, or a manager. When I try to explain to them that I'm best when I'm doing all of those at once, they seem very confused. I'm sympathetic to their interests, but at the same time frustrated that the industry works this way. Any advice? Do I just need to get with the program, so to speak?

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• Rights and use of developed software

  - by Nils Munch

  I have been working on a piece of software for a company, that they wish to resell. There was an mail-based agreement upon a flat hourly rate for my work, and eager me chose to accept a rather low fee. Due to the stress and tempo of the task, a direct contract was never formed or signed. The software was developed locally on my machine, and I was pretty much alone with it, except by excellent help from StackOverflow when I got stuck. Now, the software is nearing completion, I suddenly hear that they have hired a new developer to make the same piece of software as me, and that I was expected to resign within long. Confused I ask around, and realize that the CEO of the company had informed the rest of the company that I was terminally ill and had cancer, and was expected to leave the company soon. Since I'm perfectly healthy, this confused me even more, until I realized what was going on. When I confronted my boss with this, I was no longer seen as a member of the company, and I left the same day, never to return. Later, I raised the question about my missing pay, since I had been working for quite a bit, and not received any payment for my software. I saw that they had already sold a fair copy of my software, and since it's not exactly sold cheap, the company should have plenty of gold to pay me. The company refused, and said that they owned the software, and everything it contained. That was a lot of drama, but my question is this: Who has the rights to the software ? The source code had my personal watermarks and copyrights inprinted, but they have since simply deleted it. The company claim that they have all the rights, because they have a website made about the product, where they write that they have "All rights reserved" in the bottom. My instinct tells me that if a company buys a service like this, and then refuses to pay their developer, then they should not be allowed to keep, and much less resell the product. I have not signed any agreements about giving the company the use of this product, I have made it in my own time and without help from the rest of the company. This all takes place in Denmark, Europe, but I would guess that the rules about this is somewhat universal. Im not the strongest person to legal-talk, so I might be wrong.

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• Performing user authentication in a CodeIgniter controller constructor?

  - by msanford

  In "The Clean Code Talks -- Unit Testing" (http://youtu.be/wEhu57pih5w), Miško Hevery mentions that "as little work as possible should be done in constructors [to make classes more easily testable]'. It got me thinking about the way I have implemented my user authentication mechanism. Having delved into MVC development through CodeIgniter, I designed my first web application to perform user authentication for protected resources in controllers' constructors in cases where every public function in that controller requires the user to be authenticated. For controllers with public methods having mixed authentication requirements, I would naturally move the authentication from the constructor to each method requiring authentication (though I don't currently have a need for this). I made this choice primarily to keep the controller tight, and to ensure that all resources in the controller are always covered. As for code longevity and maintainability: given the application structure, I can't foresee a situation in which one of the affected controllers would need a public method that didn't require user authentication, but I can see this as a potential drawback in general with this implementation (i.e., requiring future refactoring). Is this a good idea?

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• Is there a language or design pattern that allows the *removal* of object behavior or properties in a class hierarchy?

  - by Sebastien Diot

  A well-know shortcoming of traditional class hierarchies is that they are bad when it comes to model the real world. As an example, trying to represent animals species with classes. There are actually several problems when doing that, but one that I never saw a solution to is when a sub-class "looses" a behavior or properties that was defined in a super-class, like a penguin not being able to fly (there are probably better examples, but that's the first one that comes to my mind, having seen "Madagascar 2" recently). On the one hand, you don't want to define for every property and behavior some flag that specifies if it is at all present, and check it every time before accessing that behavior or property. You would just like to say that birds can fly, simply and clearly, in the Bird class. But then it would be nice if one could define "exceptions" afterward, without having to use some horrible hacks everywhere. This often happens when a system has been productive for a while. You suddenly find an "exception" that doesn't fit in the original design at all, and you don't want to change a large portion of your code to accommodate it. So, is there some language or design patterns that can cleanly handle this problem, without requiring major changes to the "super-class", and all the code that uses it? Even if a solution only handle a specific case, several solutions might together form a complete strategy. [EDIT] Forgot about the Liskov Substitution Principle. That is why you can't do it. Assuming you define "traits/interfaces" for all major "feature groups", you can freely implement traits in different branches of the hierarchy, like the Flying trait could be implemented by Birds, and some special kind of squirrels and fish. So my question could amount to "How could I un-implement a trait?" If your super-class is a Java Serializable, you have to be one too, even if there is no way for you to serialize your state, for example if you contained a "Socket". So one way to do it is to always define all your traits in pair from the start: Flying and NotFlying (which would throw UnsupportedOperationExceiption, if not checked against). The Not-trait would not define any new interface, and could be simply checked for. Sounds like a "cheap" solution, in particular if used from the start.

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• Automatically analyze excel files

  - by dole doug

  I have to replicate a manual generation of a large number of excel files. I started to manually track the relations between cells ( files, formulas, etc). I also had a talk with the person which generates those files. For now I have a general understanding about how the excel files are generated, but "devil is in the details". I assume that I can write a script which will generate the hierarchy between cells and files, but this might require the same effort as manually noticing the relations. Also, I'm afraid that I'm not too experienced and my app is more prone to error approach than a manual analyze. How to handle this problem? Do you know about an open source project which analyze the excel files in a recursive mode following the formulas ?

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• Acceptance tests done first...how can this be accomplished?

  - by Crazy Eddie

  The basic gist of most Agile methods is that a feature is not "done" until it's been developed, tested, and in many cases released. This is supposed to happen in quick turnaround chunks of time such as "Sprints" in the Scrum process. A common part of Agile is also TDD, which states that tests are done first. My team works on a GUI program that does a lot of specific drawing and such. In order to provide tests, the testing team needs to be able to work with something that at least attempts to perform the things they are trying to test. We've found no way around this problem. I can very much see where they are coming from because if I was trying to write software that targeted some basically mysterious interface I'd have a very hard time. Although we have behavior fairly well specified, the exact process of interacting with various UI elements when it comes to automation seems to be too unique to a feature to allow testers to write automated scripts to drive something that does not exist. Even if we could, a lot of things end up turning up later as having been missing from the specification. One thing we considered doing was having the testers write test "scripts" that are more like a set of steps that must be performed, as described from a use-case perspective, so that they can be "automated" by a human being. This can then be performed by the developer(s) writing the feature and/or verified by someone else. When the testers later get an opportunity they automate the "script" for regression purposes mainly. This didn't end up catching on in the team though. The testing part of the team is actually falling behind us by quite a margin. This is one reason why the apparently extra time of developing a "script" for a human being to perform just did not happen....they're under a crunch to keep up with us developers. If we waited for them, we'd get nothing done. It's not their fault really, they're a bottle neck but they're doing what they should be and working as fast as possible. The process itself seems to be set up against them. Very often we end up having to go back a month or more in what we've done to fix bugs that the testers have finally gotten to checking. It's an ugly truth that I'd like to do something about. So what do other teams do to solve this fail cascade? How can we get testers ahead of us and how can we make it so that there's actually time for them to write tests for the features we do in a sprint without making us sit and twiddle our thumbs in the meantime? As it's currently going, in order to get a feature "done", using agile definitions, would be to have developers work for 1 week, then testers work the second week, and developers hopefully being able to fix all the bugs they come up with in the last couple days. That's just not going to happen, even if I agreed it was a reasonable solution. I need better ideas...

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• Should CSS be listed on your resume under Languages?

  - by Sandeepan Nath

  I have some doubts like Whether CSS should be put under Languages or not? Although Wikipedia says Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language ... But do they write CSS under the languages section of the resume, along with PHP, etc? Similarly what about HTML? I have some doubt and I don't want to sound like someone who is not aware of the trends. Just to give an example, currently I have the following languages,frameworks, technologies, etc. listed under the "Technical Expertise" section of my resume - Technical Expertise * Languages - Proficient - PHP 5, Javascript, HTML ?*,CSS ?*,Sass ?*. Beginner - Linux Bash. * Databases - MySQL 5. * Technologies - AJAX. * Frameworks/Libraries - Symfony, jQuery. * CMSes - Wordpress. Although my domain is Web-development/design, I welcome domain-agnostic answers which can provide some generic ideas/reasoning. I have seen, a lot of people messing up these sections (even more serious than my doubts :) ), putting things under wrong sub-headings and thus putting a big question mark on their understanding of those things. I don't know much about XML, Comet Technology etc. Considering those are included too, What things should be put under Languages? E.g. Should CSS be put under Languages? Please give some reasoning to support your views. Where should the others (XML, Comet, cURL etc. ) be put? I welcome some examples of how you put it. Or do you have an additional Keywords section where you write all the unsortables ? Considering a set of standards like W3C standards, etc. do you have a standards sub-heading? I guess I have put the contents of other sections Okay. But do let me know about your ideas and reasoning. After all, I understand there may not be a single answer to this, but let's see what is the trend. Thanks Updates Further, do you mention design patters you have used? Web Services etc.? Where do you mention SOAP, XML etc...

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• Why did Git become so popular?

  - by Jungle Hunter

  Almost every article you read comparing Git and Mercurial it seems like Mercurial has a better command line UX with each command being limited to one idea only (unlike say git checkout). But at some point Git suddenly became super popular and literally exploded. Source: Debian What happened in 2010-01 that things suddenly changed. Looks like GitHub was founded earlier than that - 2008. Edit: Git 1.7.0 seems to be released at the same time: January 2012. Here are the 1.7.0 release notes and the file history with the corresponding dates.

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• Drawing shapes dynamically on an image through web browser

  - by Tom Beech

  We have a scenario where we create floor plans of locations when we visit. The floor plan is finally shown on the web. It's come to the point now where we want to show floor plans but have a key with various items on them, when an item on the key is clicked, the image should highlight all the areas of the floorplan that have that specific item. I guess we're looking for some sort of open standard javascript lib to deal with SVG (has to work pre IE9 so pure SVG wont cut it) and the floor plans have to be able to be created through a .net application to be deployed on the web. I'd rather stay away from flash if at all possible to be honest. Below are a few conceptual images of what we're trying to achieve.

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• Transition from maintenance programming to design

  - by andrew wang

  What to do people do develop a design for a s/w for a given set of requirements? I like many people joined a Semiconductor MNC and got stuck in maintenance for quite a couple of years. My work was usually changing a lines of code for windows drivers supplied by my company or a couple of small script (style like) C programs for validating h/w. As a result I developed the bad habit of 'programming by coincidence'. I have not developed the ability for designing tools/programs from scratch. I was the only s/w member of the local team and thus some grunt work from the well established other site of the company came to be done by me. Now I have moved to a different company and thus finding developing from scratch very difficult. How do I unlearn my bad habit and develop this ability of designing s/w and then coding it ?

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• Is it worth to learn programming for windows?

  - by Herr Kaleun

  as a programmer, i was skeptical about (Microsoft) desktop software back in the early 2000s (i was a kid then) and yet, i was right. So i advanced to PHP in 2004 and began working on Web applications. When i look at the software world today, i really can't understand, how software for Microsoft or call it, "windows" should have a future. Is it still worth, learning it? I have a strong feeling that, in about 3-4 years, mac will have the dominance in the Personal Computer market. If i am wrong, please correct me. Thanks!

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• ASP.NET web-application example for newbies

  - by A-Cube

  I want to learn ASP.NET web-application development by example. I want to learn it from an already developed web-application that is good as a tutorial for newbies. A fully functional web application that is small but powerful enough to teach newbies the development effort required for web-application development. I am looking for some application that is made using software engineering principles and not just a code written haphazardly.

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• As a programmer how do I plan to learn new things in my spare time

  - by priyank patel

  I am a Asp.Net/C# developer, I develop few projects in my spare time. I try to utilize my time as much as I can. I have been working for past 7 months. Suddenly these days I am a bit worried about learning the new stuff that is there for me as a programmer. I develop in my spare time so I don't get enough time to read books or blogs. So my question to some of you guys is how should I plan to learn new things, should I at least dedicate two-three evenings for new stuff, maybe ebooks while travelling is a good option too. How do you people plan to learn,should I also start to develop with whatever I learnt? As far as learning is concerned, should I just pick up the basics and then implement it or I should seek deeper understanding of the subject?

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• Does BizSpark preclude you from accepting funding elsewhere?

  - by Clay Shannon

  I am going to embark very soon on a software venture (have been a consultant and employee up until now). I see advantages in signing up for Microsoft's BizSpark. However, I wonder if doing so would preclude me from accepting funding from some equity-esque arrangements potentially available via crowdfunding. I know BizSpark's legal agreement probably spells this out, but it's about a gazillion pages long, so I'm hoping somebody here has existing knowledge of this so I don't have to spend a lot of time reading legalese.

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• Organizing Git repositories with common nested sub-modules

  - by André Caron

  I'm a big fan of Git sub-modules. I like to be able to track a dependency along with its version, so that you can roll-back to a previous version of your project and have the corresponding version of the dependency to build safely and cleanly. Moreover, it's easier to release our libraries as open source projects as the history for libraries is separate from that of the applications that depend on them (and which are not going to be open sourced). I'm setting up workflow for multiple projects at work, and I was wondering how it would be if we took this approach a bit of an extreme instead of having a single monolithic project. I quickly realized there is a potential can of worms in really using sub-modules. Supposing a pair of applications: studio and player, and dependent libraries core, graph and network, where dependencies are as follows: core is standalone graph depends on core (sub-module at ./libs/core) network depdends on core (sub-module at ./libs/core) studio depends on graph and network (sub-modules at ./libs/graph and ./libs/network) player depends on graph and network (sub-modules at ./libs/graph and ./libs/network) Suppose that we're using CMake and that each of these projects has unit tests and all the works. Each project (including studio and player) must be able to be compiled standalone to perform code metrics, unit testing, etc. The thing is, a recursive git submodule fetch, then you get the following directory structure: studio/ studio/libs/ (sub-module depth: 1) studio/libs/graph/ studio/libs/graph/libs/ (sub-module depth: 2) studio/libs/graph/libs/core/ studio/libs/network/ studio/libs/network/libs/ (sub-module depth: 2) studio/libs/network/libs/core/ Notice that core is cloned twice in the studio project. Aside from this wasting disk space, I have a build system problem because I'm building core twice and I potentially get two different versions of core. Question How do I organize sub-modules so that I get the versioned dependency and standalone build without getting multiple copies of common nested sub-modules? Possible solution If the the library dependency is somewhat of a suggestion (i.e. in a "known to work with version X" or "only version X is officially supported" fashion) and potential dependent applications or libraries are responsible for building with whatever version they like, then I could imagine the following scenario: Have the build system for graph and network tell them where to find core (e.g. via a compiler include path). Define two build targets, "standalone" and "dependency", where "standalone" is based on "dependency" and adds the include path to point to the local core sub-module. Introduce an extra dependency: studio on core. Then, studio builds core, sets the include path to its own copy of the core sub-module, then builds graph and network in "dependency" mode. The resulting folder structure looks like: studio/ studio/libs/ (sub-module depth: 1) studio/libs/core/ studio/libs/graph/ studio/libs/graph/libs/ (empty folder, sub-modules not fetched) studio/libs/network/ studio/libs/network/libs/ (empty folder, sub-modules not fetched) However, this requires some build system magic (I'm pretty confident this can be done with CMake) and a bit of manual work on the part of version updates (updating graph might also require updating core and network to get a compatible version of core in all projects). Any thoughts on this?

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• Professional Developers, may I join you?

  - by Ben

  I currently work in technical support for a software/hardware company and for the most part it's a good job, but it's feeling more and more like I'm getting 'stuck' here. No raises in the 5 years I've been here, and lately there seems to be more hiring from the outside than promotion from within. The work I do is more technical than end-user support, as we deal primarily with our field technicians who have a little more technical skill than the general user base. As a result I get into much more technical support issues... often tracking down bugs in our software, finding performance bottlenecks in our database schema, etc. The work I'm most proud of are the development projects I've come up with on my own, and worked on during lunch breaks and slow periods in Support. Over the years I've written a number of useful utilities for the company. Diagnostic type applications that several departments use and appreciate. These include apps that simulate our various hardware devices, log file analysis, time-saving utilities for our work processes, etc. My best projects have been the hardware simulation programs, which are the type of thing we probably wouldn't have put a full-time developer on had anyone thought to do it, but they've ended up being popular and useful enough to be used by development, QA, R&D, and Support. They allow us to interface our software with simulated hardware, rather than clutter up our work areas with bulky, hard to acquire equipment. Since starting here my life has moved forward (married, kid, one more on the way), but it feels like my career has not. I still earn what I earned walking in the door my first day. Company budget is tight, bonuses have gone down, and no raises or cost of living / inflation adjustments either. As the sole source of income for my family I feel I need to do more, and I'd like to have a more active role in creating something at work, not just cleaning up other people's mistakes. I enjoy technical work, and I think development is the next logical step in my career. I'd like to bring some "legitimacy" to my part-time development work, and make myself a more skilled and valuable employee. Ultimately if this can help me better support my family, that would be ideal. Can I make the jump to professional developer? I have an engineering degree, but no formal education in computer science. I write WinForms apps using the .NET framework, do some freelance web development, have volunteered to write software for a nonprofit, and have started experimenting with programming microcontrollers. I enjoy learning new things in the limited free time I have available. I think I have the aptitude to take on a development role, even in an 'apprentice' capacity if such an option is possible. Have any of you moved into development like this? Do any of you developers have any advice or cautionary tales? Are there better career options I haven't thought of? I welcome any and all related comments and thank you in advance for posting them.

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• What are some of the benefits of a "Micro-ORM"?

  - by Wayne M

  I've been looking into the so-called "Micro ORMs" like Dapper and (to a lesser extent as it relies on .NET 4.0) Massive as these might be easier to implement at work than a full-blown ORM since our current system is highly reliant on stored procedures and would require significant refactoring to work with an ORM like NHibernate or EF. What is the benefit of using one of these over a full-featured ORM? It seems like just a thin layer around a database connection that still forces you to write raw SQL - perhaps I'm wrong but I was always told the reason for ORMs in the first place is so you didn't have to write SQL, it could be automatically generated; especially for multi-table joins and mapping relationships between tables which are a pain to do in pure SQL but trivial with an ORM. For instance, looking at an example of Dapper: var connection = new SqlConnection(); // setup here... var person = connection.Query<Person>("select * from people where PersonId = @personId", new { PersonId = 42 }); How is that any different than using a handrolled ADO.NET data layer, except that you don't have to write the command, set the parameters and I suppose map the entity back using a Builder. It looks like you could even use a stored procedure call as the SQL string. Are there other tangible benefits that I'm missing here where a Micro ORM makes sense to use? I'm not really seeing how it's saving anything over the "old" way of using ADO.NET except maybe a few lines of code - you still have to write to figure out what SQL you need to execute (which can get hairy) and you still have to map relationships between tables (the part that IMHO ORMs help the most with).

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• C library build system dependencies

  - by Ninefingers

  Hello all, This debate has cropped up on a mailing list for a project I'm involved in. Unfortunately we're quite a small bunch at the moment, so I want to ask a wider audience. We're writing a C library (for arbitrary precision arithmetic) and are investigating build systems. Currently we have a bash script in desperate need of work. I believe we can't use autotools etc due to licensing (bsd vs gpl). So I suggested we use a modern scripting language like python or perl. The question is: is having something like perl or python around at build time an unrealistic dependency on Unix-like platforms these days?

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• Are there any resources on how to identify problems that could best be solved with templates?

  - by sap

  I decided to improve my knowledge in template meta-programming. I know the syntax and rules and been playing with counteless examples from online resources. I understand how powerful templates can be and how much compile time optimization they can provide but I still cant "think in templates", I can't seem to know by myself if a certain problem could be best solved with templates and if it can, how to adapt that problem to templates. Is there some kind of online resource or book that teaches how to identify problems that could best be solved with templates and how to adapt that problem?

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• How do you end up with event-sourcing if you use a xDD approach?

  - by Tomas Jansson

  When working in a TDD or BDD manner your unit tests are supposed to drive your design. But how do you end up with event-sourcing using a xDD techniques? As I see it event sourcing is something you need to adopt early on to take full advantage of it. Lets say that you start without event-sourcing and do a release. Later on when you are releasing version 2.0 you realize that it would be great to use event-sourcing, but at that point you alread have missed all the events from version 1.0 so it makes it much harder to implement. Or do you take some kind of backup of your db from before event-sourcing and use that as base line and then add event-sourcing on top of that?

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• test cases for common algorithms [on hold]

  - by Alexey

  I need samples of test inputs and correct outputs for common algorithms for sorting, searching, data structures, graphs, etc. to check for mistakes in my future implementations. Can you advice resources with test cases? Or a website with community that implements algorithms and shares with results? Thanks! Edit: to clarify: I am going to implement forementioned algorithms for studying purposes and need inputs including large ones and correct outputs to better find mistakes in my implementations, since test cases that I can come up with on my own with might not be enough to reveal mistakes.

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• Continual Professional Development - proving new skills to non-technical employers

  - by Tom

  Background I work in a non-IT based company, as a professional software developer, building a large scale internal database system. I am fortunate to have a fairly senior position within the company, and have been working here for around 4 years. Often I get asked by management "how do you learn new things?". To be honest, I don't know how to answer this. Over the last 6 months, I've really gotten my teeth into some new techniques and technologies to make my level of coding far better and hopefully improve the quality of the software. Even if it's just refreshing my skills on things I've learnt already. Like last week I dived into some complex XLinq and TPL code (.net). Nothing revolutionary, but I feel like I am a bit better than before. Question The question is, how do I prove this to my employer? It'd be nice to be able to put this on paper. Possibilities I could: Keep a journal of what I've learnt - keeping the technical bits in (nobody would understand or care, but it's better than them being omitted) ???? (I've run out of ideas already) Any ideas? Thanks, Tom

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• Is there any reason to use C++ instead of C, Perl, Python, etc.?

  - by Ehsan

  As a Linux (server side) developer, I don't know where and why should I use C++. When I'm going to performance, the first and last choice is C. When "performance" isn't the main issue, programming languages like Perl and Python would be good choices. Almost all of open source applications I know in this area has been written in C, Perl and Python, Bash script, AWK and even PHP, but no one goes to use C++. I'm not discussing about some other areas like GUI or web application, I'm just talking about Linux and about CLI and daemons. Is there any satisfiable reason to use C++?

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