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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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• Where and how to mention Stackoverflow participation in the résumé?

  - by Sandeepan Nath

  I think I have good enough reputation on SO now - here is my profile - http://stackoverflow.com/users/351903/sandeepan-nath. Well, this may not be that much as compared to so many other users out there but I am happy with mine. So, I was thinking of adding my profile link on my résumé. (Just the profile link and not that "I have this much reputation on SO"). Those who haven't seen, can see this question Would you put your stackoverflow profile link on your CV / Resume?. How would this look like? Forums/Blogs/Miscellaneous others No blogging as yet but active participant in Stackoverflow. My profile link - http://stackoverflow.com/users/351903/sandeepan-nath I think of putting this section after Project Details and Technical Expertise sections. Any tips/advice? Thanks Update MKO has made a very good point - "do you really want a potential employeer to be able to evaluate in detail everything you've ever written on SO". I thought of commenting but it would be too long - In my questions/answers I put a lot of statements like - "AFAIK ...", "following are my assumptions so far ...", "am I correct to conclude that... ?", "I doubt if it is possible to ..." etc. when I am not sure about something and I rarely involve in fights with other users. However I do argue on topics sometimes if I feel it is necessary and if I have a valid point. I do accept my mistakes and apologize for the same. As we all know nobody is perfect. I must have written many things which may be judged as wrong by a potential employer. But what if the same employer notices that I have improved in the quality of content by comparing old content with new one? Isn't that great? I also try to go back to older questions/answers and put corrective comments etc. when I feel I was wrong or if I can improve my post. Of course there are many employers who want you (potential employees) to be correct each and every time. They immediately remove you from consideration when you say a single incorrect thing. I have personally met such an interviewer few months back. He didn't even care to listen to any good thing I had done after he found a single wrong thing. Now the question is do you really care to work with such people? Or do you like those people who give value to the fact that you are striving to improve every day. I personally prefer the latter.

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• Project Codenames - Yea or Nay?

  - by rmx

  Where I work, most of our projects have (or at least attempt) descriptive, useful names. However we have a few with names that make no sense: I found that an assembly named WiFi which actually has nothing whatsoever to do with wi-fi, but is a codename. When I asked why, I was told that it's to protect company secrets incase some intern has few too many at the pub on Friday and starts chatting about the brand new 'WiFi' project he's been working on. Its clear that some people find enjoyment in finding silly / amusing codenames for their projects (like in this question). My question is: is it really a good idea to use codenames for your projects or are you better off spending the time to decide upon a descriptive name? My opinion is that in the long-run its better to give your projects relevant names. My reasoning is that if you can't think of a decent name, perhaps you don't really know the requirements well enough. I think there are better ways to 'protect company secrets' and I find it quite confusing when the name does not correlate at all with the content. It's just common sense, surely?! So do you use codenames and what the your reasons for or against this seemingly common, yet annoying (to me at least) practice?

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• how a pure functional programming language manage without assignment statements?

  - by Gnijuohz

  When reading the famous SICP,I found the authors seem rather reluctant to introduce the assignment statement to Scheme in Chapter 3.I read the text and kind of understand why they feel so. As Scheme is the first functional programming language I ever know something about,I am kind of surprised that there are some functional programming languages(not Scheme of course) can do without assignments. Let use the example the book offers,the bank account example.If there is no assignment statement,how can this be done?How to change the balance variable?I ask so because I know there are some so-called pure functional languages out there and according to the Turing complete theory,this must can be done too. I learned C,Java,Python and use assignments a lot in every program I wrote.So it's really an eye-opening experience.I really hope someone can briefly explain how assignments are avoided in those functional programming languages and what profound impact(if any) it has on these languages. The example mentioned above is here: (define (make-withdraw balance) (lambda (amount) (if (>= balance amount) (begin (set! balance (- balance amount)) balance) "Insufficient funds"))) This changed the balance by set!.To me it looks a lot like a class method to change the class member balance. As I said,I am not familiar with functional programming languages,so if I said something wrong about them,feel free to point out.

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• Who are the outspoken critics of Object-Oriented design?

  - by Xepoch

  Sure, object-oriented techniques are great and have stuck around for a while. I know only less than a handful of critics of the OO principles. It seems as though most non-OO designs and architectures are shunned, yet we continue to write a lot of good software in C and solve a lot of data changes via awk/sed and countless other examples. Correct tool for the correct job, yes? I'm having a hard time finding articles, presentations, or published criticisms of OO (even Fred Brooks has blessed information hiding). Are there any well-known, published and/or outspoken critics of OO?

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• Opensource showcase for MVC in Java Swing

  - by Regular John

  I've allready created small desktop CRUD applications using Java/Swing. In hindsight I'm not quite sure if the overall design of these applications is good. I've also done some reading on MVC and looked at different Swing-tutorials. My problem is, that I've got a very theroatical knowledge of MVC and on the other hand, most Swing-resources don't implement the MVC-pattern. Now I would like to get my hands dirty and see how MVC is implemented in Swing in a real-world-application. Are there any opensource project you could recommend? It would be also interesting to have more than one project, to see different approaches. Best fit would be a software, that uses a relational database in the backend, to see an overall design, that I can compare to my former applications.

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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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• How to measure the right time to bring a new client?

  - by Byron Sommardahl

  My growing company has a team of developers working on a number of separate projects. Our developers depend on us to keep them working, and we depend on them to make our clients happy. Our projects have differing start and end dates, as you can imagine. The company's responsibility to the developers is to make sure we have clients waiting in the wings so that when one project ends, another can start. For now, finding clients is not a problem and not the topic of this question. What I'm trying to think through right now is, how can I best measure/view/evaluate the end dates of projects so that I know when I need to start courting the next client. Is there a tool that does this? If it's just a spreadsheet, what might it look like?

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• What is a recent programming language of choice for the AI?

  - by Eduard Florinescu

  For a few decades the programming language of choice for AI was either Prolog or LISP, and a few more others that are not so well known. Most of them were designed before the 70's. Changes happens a lot on many other domains specific languages, but in the AI domain it hadn't surfaced so much as in the web specific languages or scripting etc. Are there recent programming languages that were intended to change the game in the AI and learn from the insufficiencies of former languages?

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• What to do when projects are slow and you are being held up by others?

  - by antonpug

  Where I work, projects take a significant amount of time because the teams are large, there is a lot of "design and analysis", a lot of documentation, and work always gets pushed off. I work in the middle tier and I always have to wait for the services and client folks to get their work done. Oftentimes there are weeks at a time when I can't get any work done. I feel bored and weird just sitting here scrambling to at least appear like I am busy. Management seems to do little when asked for more work. What do you do in such cases?

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• How to shorten brain context switch delay when need to use new technology\framework?

  - by gasan

  The problem is when I have to deal with a new framework\library\language it completely slows my work process, at first it's kind of shock, you're sitting on your place about a day doing nothing surfing the net, because you simply can't do anything even read docs, then, on the second day I realize that I definitely should do something and starting read about it, then I realize that I don't understand it, then I'm reading until I got feeling that I should show some results immediately and then I'm writing the code quite fast and the job doesn't seem to be difficult. Then job is done and I won't probably return to that technology\framework for a month or a year or never at all. And I will almost certainly forget almost everything about it after a month. To illustrate by checkpoints I experience: shock, long studying times, work with the new tech briefly, never use it afterwards, then I completely forget it. So what would be the solution here?

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• svn usage advice

  - by AngeloBad

  I need an advice about SVN usage. I use Tortoise SVN on my client to deal with a project I am working on. The probjem is that I have two set of bugs top fix on the project. One to deploy till 5 days, and one to deploy till 10 days. I am going to solve all the bugs before the 5fth days but I do not want to deploy the last 5 before the release date (till 10 days). How can I work on two separate codes and the merge all the modification? Is it possible? I have to create a branch?

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• How does it matter if a character is 8 bit or 16 bit or 32 bit

  - by vin

  Well, I am reading Programing Windows with MFC, and I came across Unicode and ASCII code characters. I understood the point of using Unicode over ASCII, but what I do not get is how and why is it important to use 8bit/16bit/32bit character? What good does it do to the system? How does the processing of the operating system differ for different bits of character. My question here is, what does it mean to a character when it is a x-bit character?

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• how to write good programming logic?

  - by user106616

  recently I got job as a java developer, and now I have assigned project too. I want to know what is a good logic? when I check in the code my team lead is saying that its a good code. But when it comes to my project manager he is saying that its a bad code. And he is changing my code, after his changes if I see his code its really very very good and even simple. can you please tell me how to develop the good program, good logic? what is the best way to structure a problem in terms of code?

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• There is any reason for which a delete method/field/function refactoring doesn't exist?

  - by raisercostin

  An operation in an interface is obsolete so I decided to delete it. It seems that there is no automatic support for such a "refactoring". For me is a refactoring operation since the behavior of the code will be preserved since nobody(tests, client apis) will notice that the operation was removed. In eclipse, in java code, on an method in an interface I have the following options: rename, move, change method signature, inline, extract interface, extract superclass, use supertype when possible, pull up, push down, introduce parameter objet, introduce indirection, generate declared type. There is any reason for which a delete method/field/function refactoring doesn't exist?

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• Is throwing an error in unpredictable subclass-specific circumstances a violation of LSP?

  - by Motti Strom

  Say, I wanted to create a Java List<String> (see spec) implementation that uses a complex subsystem, such as a database or file system, for its store so that it becomes a simple persistent collection rather than an basic in-memory one. (We're limiting it specifically to a List of Strings for the purposes of discussion, but it could extended to automatically de-/serialise any object, with some help. We can also provide persistent Sets, Maps and so on in this way too.) So here's a skeleton implementation: class DbBackedList implements List<String> { private DbBackedList() {} /** Returns a list, possibly non-empty */ public static getList() { return new DbBackedList(); } public String get(int index) { return Db.getTable().getRow(i).asString(); // may throw DbExceptions! } // add(String), add(int, String), etc. ... } My problem lies with the fact that the underlying DB API may encounter connection errors that are not specified in the List interface that it should throw. My problem is whether this violates Liskov's Substitution Principle (LSP). Bob Martin actually gives an example of a PersistentSet in his paper on LSP that violates LSP. The difference is that his newly-specified Exception there is determined by the inserted value and so is strengthening the precondition. In my case the connection/read error is unpredictable and due to external factors and so is not technically a new precondition, merely an error of circumstance, perhaps like OutOfMemoryError which can occur even when unspecified. In normal circumstances, the new Error/Exception might never be thrown. (The caller could catch if it is aware of the possibility, just as a memory-restricted Java program might specifically catch OOME.) Is this therefore a valid argument for throwing an extra error and can I still claim to be a valid java.util.List (or pick your SDK/language/collection in general) and not in violation of LSP? If this does indeed violate LSP and thus not practically usable, I have provided two less-palatable alternative solutions as answers that you can comment on, see below. Footnote: Use Cases In the simplest case, the goal is to provide a familiar interface for cases when (say) a database is just being used as a persistent list, and allow regular List operations such as search, subList and iteration. Another, more adventurous, use-case is as a slot-in replacement for libraries that work with basic Lists, e.g if we have a third-party task queue that usually works with a plain List: new TaskWorkQueue(new ArrayList<String>()).start() which is susceptible to losing all it's queue in event of a crash, if we just replace this with: new TaskWorkQueue(new DbBackedList()).start() we get a instant persistence and the ability to share the tasks amongst more than one machine. In either case, we could either handle connection/read exceptions that are thrown, perhaps retrying the connection/read first, or allow them to throw and crash the program (e.g. if we can't change the TaskWorkQueue code).

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• Does the use of mongodb enhance extending/changing database driven applications?

  - by developer10214

  When an application is created which need to store data, an SQL database is used very often. So did I in a lot of asp.net applications. The resulting applications have often an ORM like the entity framework and maybe a business layer. So when such an application needs to be extended(let's say you have to add a comment property to an object), you have to change/extend the database, then the ORM and the business layer and so on. To deploy the changes you have to update the target database and the application. I know that things like code first and fluent can make this approach easier. I tried mongodb, I only used the standard driver and I had to extend some objects and all I had to do was changing the code. So it feels that such approaches are much easier to realize when using mongodb. I don't have much experience with larger applications an mongodb. I know that a SQL database or mongodb doesn't fit for all needs and both have their pros and cons. I want to know if my feeling is right, if yes I would choose rather choose mongodb than SQL database.

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• Is there an appropriate coding style for implementing an algorithm during an interview?

  - by GlenPeterson

  I failed an interview question in C years ago about converting hex to decimal by not exploiting the ASCII table if (inputDigitByte > 9) hex = inputDigitByte - 'a'. The rise of Unicode has made this question pretty silly, but the point was that the interviewer valued raw execution speed above readability and error handling. They tell you to review algorithms textbooks to prepare for these interviews, yet these same textbooks tend to favor the implementation with the fewest lines of code, even if it has to rely on magic numbers (like "infinity") and a slower, more memory-intensive implementation (like a linked list instead of an array) to do that. I don't know what is right. Coding an algorithm within the space of an interview has at least 3 constraints: time to code, elegance/readability, and efficiency of execution. What trade-offs are appropriate for interview code? How much do you follow the textbook definition of an algorithm? Is it better to eliminate recursion, unroll loops, and use arrays for efficiency? Or is it better to use recursion and special values like "infinity" or Integer.MAX_VALUE to reduce the number of lines of code needed to write the algorithm? Interface: Make a very self-contained, bullet-proof interface, or sloppy and fast? On the one extreme, the array to be sorted might be a public static variable. On the other extreme, it might need to be passed to each method, allowing methods to be called individually from different threads for different purposes. Is it appropriate to use a linked-list data structure for items that are traversed in one direction vs. using arrays and doubling the size when the array is full? Implementing a singly-linked list during the interview is often much faster to code and easier remember for recursive algorithms like MergeSort. Thread safety - just document that it's unsafe, or say so verbally? How much should the interviewee be looking for opportunities for parallel processing? Is bit shifting appropriate? x / 2 or x >> 1 Polymorphism, type safety, and generics? Comments? Variable and method names: qs(a, p, q, r) vs: quickSort(theArray, minIdx, partIdx, maxIdx) How much should you use existing APIs? Obviously you can't use a java.util.HashMap to implement a hash-table, but what about using a java.util.List to accumulate your sorted results? Are there any guiding principals that would answer these and other questions, or is the guiding principal to ask the interviewer? Or maybe this should be the basis of a discussion while writing the code? If an interviewer can't or won't answer one of these questions, are there any tips for coaxing the information out of them?

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• Why doesn't Haskell have type-level lambda abstractions?

  - by Petr Pudlák

  Are there some theoretical reasons for that (like that the type checking or type inference would become undecidable), or practical reasons (too difficult to implement properly)? Currently, we can wrap things into newtype like newtype Pair a = Pair (a, a) and then have Pair :: * -> * but we cannot do something like ?(a:*). (a,a). (There are some languages that have them, for example, Scala does.)

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• Which is more maintainable -- boolean assignment via if/else or boolean expression?

  - by Bret Walker

  Which would be considered more maintainable? if (a == b) c = true; else c = false; or c = (a == b); I've tried looking in Code Complete, but can't find an answer. I think the first is more readable (you can literally read it out loud), which I also think makes it more maintainable. The second one certainly makes more sense and reduces code, but I'm not sure it's as maintainable for C# developers (I'd expect to see this idiom more in, for example, Python).

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• Organizing ASP.Net Single Page Application with Nancy

  - by OnesimusUnbound

  As a personal project, I'm creating a single page, asp.net web application using Nancy to provide RESTful services to the single page. Due to the complexity of the single page, particularly the JavaScripts used, I've think creating a dedicated project for the client side of web development and another for service side will organize and simplify the development. solution | +-- web / client side (single html page, js, css) | - contains asp.net project, and nancy library | to host the modules in application project folder | +-- application / service (nancy modules, bootstrap for other layer) | . . . and other layers (three tier, domain driven, etc) . Is this a good way of organizing a complex single page application? Am I over-engineering the web app, incurring too much complexity?

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• Editing service for blogger with terrible English grammar

  - by Josh Moore

  I would like to write a technical blog. However, the biggest things holding me back is my poor spelling, punctuation, and grammar (I have all these problems even though I am a native English speaker). I am thinking about using a professional editing/proofreading service to fix my blog posts before I post them. However, given the content will be technical in nature (some articles will get into details of programming) and I would like to write them in markdown, I am not sure if the general online services will be a good fit. Can you recommend a editor (or company) that you like that can provide this service?

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• Audio Panning using RtAudio

  - by user1801724

  I use the RtAudio library. I would like to implement an audio program where I can control the panning (e.g. shifting the sound from the left channel to the right channel). In my specific case, I use RtAudio in duplex mode (you can find an example here: duplex mode). It means that I link the microphone input to the speaker output. I have searched on the web, but I did not find anything useful. Should I apply a filter on the output buffer? What kind of filter?

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• How should I make searching a relational database more efficient?

  - by Travis J

  This is in the scope of a web application. I have a database which has a few nested relations. There is a feature which depicts the history of a large chain of relations. It is essentially a data analysis feature. The issue is that in order to search, a large object graph must be loaded - the loading time for this object graph is not quick enough to be viable. The problem is that without loading the whole graph it makes searching from a single string nearly impossible. In order to search, explicit fields must be specified and the search data supplied. Is there a design pattern for exposing the data in a way which facilitates a single string search instead of having to explicitly define parameters?

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• Recent programming language for AI?

  - by Eduard Florinescu

  For a few decades the programming language of choice for AI was either Prolog or LISP, and a few more others that are not so well known. Most of them were designed before the 70's. Changes happens a lot on many other domains specific languages, but in the AI domain it hadn't surfaced so much as in the web specific languages or scripting etc. Are there recent programming languages that were intended to change the game in the AI and learn from the insufficiencies of former languages?

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