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  • Which Language Next? Python? Ruby? [closed]

    - by Ryan Craig
    I am a beginning Webmaster (relatively), with 2+ years of php experience. I also have some java training and a bit of .net. My company is now close to redeveloping the website that I work on, which is coded primarily in php, but has some poorly-written .net in part as well (it's confusing and ill-planned, but I didn't make any of those decisions. Can anyone say action-oriented .net and JScript?). So, I'm trying to decide which language I should learn next to quickly develop a new site. I will probably just redevelop it at first in php because I'm very comfortable with it. However, I'd like to migrate in the next year to something newer and more forward-thinking. This being said, .net is out of the question a little bit. We need cheap developers who are fast and can get pages up quickly. In this part of the country, part-time .net developers are hard to find. So, we need something that will be pretty standard in the next few years, but we have some .net SOAP 1.1 APIs that we use on our actual service (separate from the corporate website), that we will need to integrate part of the site with. Developing with php and SOAP is much more difficult than doing the same thing. So, I may have to develop the API collaborative part in .net just to be easy, and then I'd like to use something else that is fast, flexible, forward thinking, and will be relatively standard and easy to find developers for. So, any ideas? Python and Django? Ruby on Rails? Another framework? Thanks for your thoughts. Sorry, I know this was long, but it's all very convoluted and confusing so I needed to be slightly long-winded.

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  • Efficient path-finding in free space

    - by DeadMG
    I've got a game situated in space, and I'd like to issue movement orders, which requires pathfinding. Now, it's my understanding that A* and such mostly apply to trees, and not empty space which does not have pathfinding nodes. I have some obstacles, which are currently expressed as fixed AABBs- that is, there is no unbounded "terrain" obstacle. In addition, I expect most obstacles to be reasonably approximable as cubes or spheres. So I've been thinking of applying a much simpler pathfinding algorithm- that is, simply cast a ray from the current position to the target position, and then I can get a list of obstacles using spatial partitioning relatively quickly. What I'm not so sure about is how to determine the part where the ordered unit manoeuvres around the obstacles. What I've been thinking so far is that I will simply use potential fields- that is, all units will feel a strong repulsive force away from each other and a moderate force towards the desired point. This also has the advantage that to issue group orders, I can simply order a mid-level force towards another entity. But this obviously won't achieve the optimal solution. Will potential fields achieve a reasonable approximation given my parameters, or do I need another solution?

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  • O'reilly certification in PHP worth it?

    - by editzombie
    I asked this question over on stack overflow but I didn't realise it wasn't really the place for not so technical questions. I've seen quite a few related threads on this forum so I thought I'd try and get some feedback here: This is my first time asking a question on this forum, though I´ve read it a lot. I apologise if this is repeating a thread. I´m interested in getting into web development. I am a video editor by trade but living in Spain the way things are at the moment its very difficult to find work. I have some very basic knowledge of HTML and CSS and a little bit of flash and have designed a few little personal websites myself. I also worked for a online marketing production company where I worked a little on blog design in Blogger amongst other social media. So thats my background, but I´m trying to expand my skills and get into web development as a career or in general part of my skill base, I was thinking particularly about PHP/MySQL. I have worked a little on some of the Lynda.com tutorials and have invested in a book (Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache). I´m still finding it very difficult to progress. I know I should really try some practice projects (any reccomendations would be welcome). But I was also thinking about doing one of the O´Reilly certification courses and was wondering whether it would be worthwhile for a noob like me. I hear that the courses are associated with an American University which I guess gives it more clout. Any other thoughts you guys have about how to make progress in learning web development would be fantasic. Thanks in advance.

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  • How should I start refactoring my mostly-procedural C++ application?

    - by oob
    We have a program written in C++ that is mostly procedural, but we do use some C++ containers from the standard library (vector, map, list, etc). We are constantly making changes to this code, so I wouldn't call it a stagnant piece of legacy code that we can just wrap up. There are a lot of issues with this code making it harder and harder for us to make changes, but I see the three biggest issues being: Many of the functions do more (way more) than one thing We violate the DRY principle left and right We have global variables and global state up the wazoo. I was thinking we should attack areas 1 and 2 first. Along the way, we can "de-globalize" our smaller functions from the bottom up by passing in information that is currently global as parameters to the lower level functions from the higher level functions and then concentrate on figuring out how to removing the need for global variables as much as possible. I just finished reading Code Complete 2 and The Pragmatic Programmer, and I learned a lot, but I am feeling overwhelmed. I would like to implement unit testing, change from a procedural to OO approach, automate testing, use a better logging system, fully validate all input, implement better error handling and many other things, but I know if we start all this at once, we would screw ourselves. I am thinking the three I listed are the most important to start with. Any suggestions are welcome. We are a team of two programmers mostly with experience with in-house scripting. It is going to be hard to justify taking the time to refactor, especially if we can't bill the time to a client. Believe it or not, this project has been successful enough to keep us busy full time and also keep several consultants busy using it for client work.

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  • Modular Architecture for Processing Pipeline

    - by anjruu
    I am trying to design the architecture of a system that I will be implementing in C++, and I was wondering if people could think of a good approach, or critique the approach that I have designed so far. First of all, the general problem is an image processing pipeline. It contains several stages, and the goal is to design a highly modular solution, so that any of the stages can be easily swapped out and replaced with a piece of custom code (so that the user can have a speed increase if s/he knows that a certain stage is constrained in a certain way in his or her problem). The current thinking is something like this: struct output; /*Contains the output values from the pipeline.*/ class input_routines{ public: virtual foo stage1(...){...} virtual bar stage2(...){...} virtual qux stage3(...){...} ... } output pipeline(input_routines stages); This would allow people to subclass input_routines and override whichever stage they wanted. That said, I've worked in systems like this before, and I find the subclassing and the default stuff tends to get messy, and can be difficult to use, so I'm not giddy about writing one myself. I was also thinking about a more STLish approach, where the different stages (there are 6 or 7) would be defaulted template parameters. Can anyone offer a critique of the pattern above, thoughts on the template approach, or any other architecture that comes to mind?

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  • Two views of Federation: inside out, and outside in

    - by Darin Pendergraft
    IDM customers that I speak to have spent a lot of time thinking about enterprise SSO - asking your employees to log in to multiple systems, each with distinct hard to guess (translation: hard to remember) passwords that fit the corporate security policy for length and complexity is a strategy that is just begging for a lot of help-desk password reset calls. So forward thinking organizations have implemented SSO for as many systems as possible. With the mix of Enterprise Apps moving to the cloud, it makes sense to continue this SSO strategy by Federating with those cloud apps and services.  Organizations maintain control, since employee access to the externally hosted apps is provided via the enterprise account.  If the employee leaves, their access to the cloud app is terminated when their enterprise account is disabled.  The employees don't have to remember another username and password - so life is good. From the outside in - I am excited about the increasing use of Social Sign-on - or BYOI (Bring your own Identity).  The convenience of single-sign on is extended to customers/users/prospects when organizations enable access to business services using a social ID.  The last thing I want when visiting a website or blog is to create another account.  So using my Google or Twitter ID is a very nice quick way to get access without having to go through a registration process that creates another username/password that I have to try to remember. The convenience of not having to maintain multiple passwords is obvious, whether you are an employee or customer - and the security benefit of not having lots of passwords to lose or forget is there as well. Are enterprises allowing employees to use their personal (social) IDs for enterprise apps?  Not yet, but we are moving in the right direction, and we will get there some day.

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  • Is it worth moving from Microsoft tech to Linux, NodeJS & other open source frameworks to save money for a start-up?

    - by dormisher
    I am currently getting involved in a startup, I am the only developer involved at the moment, and the other guys are leaving all the tech decisions up to me at the moment. For my day job I work at a software house that uses Microsoft tech on a day to day basis, we utilise .NET, SqlServer, Windows Server etc. However, I realise that as a startup we need to keep costs down, and after having a brief look at the cost of hosting for Windows I was shocked to see some of the prices for a dedicated server. The cheapest I found was £100 a month. Also if the business needs to scale in the future and we end up needing multiple servers, we could end up shelling out £10's of £000's a year in SQL Server / Windows Server licenses etc. I then had a quick look at the price of Linux hosting for a dedicated server and saw the price was waaaaaay lower than windows hosting. One place was offering a machine with 2 cores for less than £20 a month. This got me thinking maybe the way to go is open source on Linux. As I write a lot of Javascript at work (I'm working on a single page backbone app at the moment), I thought maybe NodeJS and a web framework like Express would be cool to use. I then thought that instead of using SQL why not use an open source NoSQL database like MongoDB, which has great support on NodeJS? My only concern is that some of the work the application is going to do is going to be dynamically building images and various other image related stuff, i.e. stuff that is quite CPU heavy - so I'm thinking of maybe writing anything CPU heavy in C++ and consuming it as a module in Node. That's the background - but basically is Linux a good match for: Hosting a NodeJS/Express site? Compiling C++ node modules? Using a NoSQL DB like MongoDB? And is it a good idea to move to these unfamiliar technologies to save money?

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  • Windows 8.1 - unfixable grub

    - by Nick
    I have a Gigabyte laptop that came with secure boot and windows 8. After a bit of battling, I managed to get my dual boot with Ubuntu 13.10.. Anyway, I upgraded zindows to 8.1, now grub is gone. I restarted from a live CD and chrooted to my drive. I used boot-repair multiple times (with successful output) both in default and with some advanced options; also reinstalled grub manually... Each time it tries once to boot to grub but gives a message for a very short amount of time. I recorded it and it is a regular bios message "Rebbot and Select proper Boot device of Insert Boot media in selected boot device and press a key" I even tried something called EasyBCD under winblows, it shows the correct boot options, but same there, it is unable to make the linux partition fire up. Anyway, no way to boot my linux box. Does anyone have an idea how to fix this? No need to redirect me to another post with grub reinstall or boot-repair, seen them all... I am thinking of trying this other boot loader, refind, to see if it works http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/index.html Also re-reading this bios message, I'm thinking my partition might not have a boot flag anymore... I'll try that too with parted. Although both grub and win 8 are supposed to fire up from the same boot partition (the EFI one) Please help! thx

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  • How to avoid jumping to a solution when under pressure? [closed]

    - by GlenPeterson
    When under a particularly strict programming deadline (like an hour), if I panic at all, my tendency is to jump into coding without a real plan and hope I figure it out as I go along. Given enough time, this can work, but in an interview it's been pretty unsuccessful, if not downright counter-productive. I'm not always comfortable sitting there thinking while the clock ticks away. Is there a checklist or are there techniques to recognize when you understand the problem well enough to start coding? Maybe don't touch the keyboard for the first 5-10 minutes of the problem? At what point do you give up and code a brute-force solution with the hope of reasoning out a better solution later? When is it most productive to think and design more vs. code some experiments to and figure out the design later? Here is a list of techniques for taking a math test and another for taking an oral exam. Is there is a similar list of techniques for handling a programming problem under pressure? ANSWERS: I think this is a valid answer: How To Solve It. I found the link as an answer to Steps to solve or approach towards a solution. There were also some really good tips at Is thinking out loud during an interview really the best strategy?. A great and concise argument for TDD is the first answer to TDD Writing code vs Figuring out the answer to a problem?. My question may be a near-duplicate of that one.

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  • How do you proactively guard against errors of omission?

    - by Gabriel
    I'll preface this with I don't know if anyone else who's been programming as long as I have actually has this problem, but at the very least, the answer might help someone with less xp. I just stared at this code for 5 minutes, thinking I was losing my mind that it didn't work: var usedNames = new HashSet<string>(); Func<string, string> l = (s) => { for (int i = 0; ; i++) { var next = (s + i).TrimEnd('0'); if (!usedNames.Contains(next)) { return next; } } }; Finally I noticed I forgot to add the used name to the hash set. Similarly, I've spent minutes upon minutes over omitting context.SaveChanges(). I think I get so distracted by the details that I'm thinking about that some really small details become invisible to me - it's almost at the level of mental block. Are there tactics to prevent this? update: a side effect of asking this was fixing the error it would have for i 9 (Thanks!) var usedNames = new HashSet<string>(); Func<string, string> name = (s) => { string result = s; if(usedNames.Contains(s)) for (int i = 1; ; result = s + i++) if (!usedNames.Contains(result)) break; usedNames.Add(result); return result; };

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  • As a programmer, what's the most valuable non-English (human) language to learn?

    - by Andrew M
    I was thinking that with my developer skills, learning new languages like French, German etc. might be easier for me now. I could setup the verbs as objects in Python and use dir(verb) to find its methods, tenses and stuff ;-) But seriously, if you're a professional developer, in my case in the UK, what's the best foreign language to learn from an employment perspective? I'm thinking, like Hindi - if all our programming jobs are getting outsourced to India, might as well position yourself to be the on-site, go-between guy. Mandarin - if the Chinese become the pre-eminent economy, the new USA, in ten or twenty years, then speaking their language would open up a huge market to you. Russian - maybe another major up-and-comer, but already closer to Western standards. More IT-sector growth here than anywhere else in the coming years? Japanese - drivers of global technology, being able to speak their language could give you a big competitive advantage over other Westerners But I'm just guessing/musing with all these points. If you have an opinion, or even better, some evidence, I'd like to hear it. If the programming things falls through then at least it'll make for more interesting holidays.

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  • can I achieve my dreams without a degree? [closed]

    - by Dhananjay
    It's really giving me a lot stress as my parents saying me to join college but I don't want. I know I can learn all programming by self studying but they keep saying join college otherwise no one will give you job. I always think positive but sometimes I also start thinking like them (what if my life will be spoiled if I do not go to college) There are so much things on internet. I can learn c++, objective c, java, AI, html, php all through internet (at least I think that I can learn whole by self studying and I can give 10 hour/day easily for studying) and I will keep practicing and become a good programmer in 2 years and then try to do some job for experience so no need to waste 4 years just for studying things which I can learn in 2 years and no need to waste money on college because they teach physics, chemistry all in first 2 years and I only want to study comp. Science. But now again I am thinking negative that what will happen if I do not get degree and what will I do after learning programming if I don't get job? Please suggest what should I do? Should I join college? or self study? Can I achieve my dreams without a degree if I study hard and learn many things? I have full confidence that I can self teach myself better than they will teach in college. I will open my app company and many more. But maybe I am over confident because I don't know what happens in real world. How they treat a person without degree, etc. Anyone of you had gone through this condition? What did you do?

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  • design an extendible and pluggable business logic flow handler in php

    - by Broncha
    I am working on a project where I need to allow a pluggable way to inject business processes in the normal data flow. eg There is an ordering system. The standard flow of the application is A consumer orders an item. Pays for it and card is authorized. Admin captures the payment. Order is marked as complete and item is shipped. But this process may vary (extra steps in between) for different clients. Say a client would need to validate the location of the consumer before he is presented with a credit card form, OR his policies might require some other processes in between. I am thinking of using State Pattern for processing orders, saving the current state of the order in database, and initializing the state of order from the saved state. I would also need some mechanism, where a small plugin would be able to inject business specific states in the state machine. Am I thinking the right way? Are there already implemented patterns for this kind of situation? I am working with Codeigniter and basically this would mean for me, to redirect to proper controller according to the current state of the order. Like, if the state of the order is unconfirmed then redirect the user to details page and then change the state to pending. If some client would need to do some validation, then register an intermediate state between unconfirmed and pending Please suggest.

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  • Majoring in computer science, but i'm not to sure I'm in the right field [closed]

    - by user74340
    Throught out my high school years and first year in college, I never thought of studying computer science. I studied biology and chemistry during my first year, and I didn't like the research, nor any type of medical professionals. So I took an introductory CS course, and loved the diverse roles this field can have. So I declare CS as my major. I finished first, and second year CS courses. Then now, I'm doing my co-op(intern) as a web developer. During my first and second year, I was always just an average student. My grades is around low B. But I put so much effort to understand my course' materials. I see many brilliants peers who not only excel at what they do, but have the passion. So I always doubt myself if I don't belong in this field. I'm not good at math, I usually get Cs on my math courses. My internship (a corporate developer job) is okay. But doesn't want to work like this after my graduation). Some aspects of CS that I like is HCI. In my experience in programming, and group projects, I enjoyed designing User interface, and thinking of user experience. I'm also thinking of taking some psychology courses.. I would appreciate any criticism, or advices.

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  • Ternary and Artificial Intelligence

    - by user2957844
    Not much of a programmer myself, however I have been thinking about the future of AI. If a fully functional AI is programmed in a binary environment as is used in current computing, would that create a bit of a black and white personality? As in just yes/no, on/off, 1/0? I will use the Skynet computer from the Terminator series as a bad analogy; it is brought online and comes to the conclusion that humanity should just be destroyed so the problem is resolved, basically its only options were; fire the missiles or not. (The films do not really go into what its moves would be after doing such a thing, but that goes into the realms of AI evolution so does not really fit with this question.) It may also have been badly programmed. Now, the human mind has been akin to a ternary system which allows our "out of the box" thinking along with all the other wonderful things our minds can do. So, would it not be more prudent to create a functional ternary system and program an AI using it so the resulting personality would be able to benefit from the third "maybe" (so to speak) option? I understand that in binary there are ways to get around the whole yes/no etc. way of things, however the basic operations are still just 1's and 0's. Again with using the above bad Skynet analogy; if it could have had that third "maybe" option as part of its core system, it may have decided to not launch due to being able to make sense of the intricacies of human nature and the politics of such a move etc. In effect, my question is; Would an AI benefit more from ternary computing as opposed to binary due to the inclusion of -1, or 2, dependent on the system ("maybe," as I call it)?

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  • Search multiple tables

    - by gilden
    I have developed a web application that is used mainly for archiving all sorts of textual material (documents, references to articles, books, magazines etc.). There can be any given number of archive tables in my system, each with its own schema. The schema can be changed by a moderator through the application (imagine something similar to a really dumbed down version of phpMyAdmin). Users can search for anything from all of the tables. By using FULLTEXT indexes together with substring searching (fields which do not support FULLTEXT indexing) the script inserts the results of a search to a single table and by ordering these results by the similarity measure I can fairly easily return the paginated results. However, this approach has a few problems: substring searching can only count exact results the 50% rule applies to all tables separately and thus, mysql may not return important matches or too naively discards common words. is quite expensive in terms of query numbers and execution time (not an issue right now as there's not a lot of data yet in the tables). normalized data is not even searched for (I have different tables for categories, languages and file attatchments). My planned solution Create a single table having columns similar to id, table_id, row_id, data Every time a new row is created/modified/deleted in any of the data tables this central table also gets updated with the data column containing a concatenation of all the fields in a row. I could then create a single index for Sphinx and use it for doing searches instead. Are there any more efficient solutions or best practises how to approach this? Thanks.

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  • 25 years old and considering a career change...possible? practical?

    - by mq330
    Hi all, I'm new to this site and new to programming as well. I've spent some time going through an intro cs book that uses python as the language of choice. I find the exercises interesting and engaging and I generally have had a favorable experience programming so far. I've gone through some of the basics with python like writing simple programs, basics of GUIs, manipulating strings, lists, defining functions, etc. And I've always loved technology. Although I've never done any real hardcore programming yet, I was inclined to building websites from a very young age but I never really developed my skills. Now, the thing is I'm 25, I have my bacholors in environmental studies and two masters degrees in urban planning and landscape architecture respectively. I know, it would be quite a departure to pursue a career in programming at this point. Currently, I'm working as a geographic information systems intern. I've taken some GIS classes and have a lot of experience with making maps, doing spatial analysis etc. So what I'm thinking is maybe I can learn some solid programming skills and apply these skills in the field of GIS. From what I've seen, .net languages are the norm in this arena. Could you perhaps provide some guidance to me in terms of what languages I should focus on or courses I should take at this point? What about for building web mapping applications? Also, I was thinking about getting a certificate in programming from a university extension program. Do you think it would be worth it? And furthermore, do you think potential employers would be interested in hiring someone like me (once I get a couple of languages down pretty well) as an intern or in an entry level position? I'll be living in the bay area so I feel that there should be decent opportunities even though I don't have a b.s. in cs.

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  • Can I make a business in teaching home users Ubuntu [on hold]

    - by Dorgaldir
    I was thinking about a way to bring Ubuntu to the bigger public, since it has great advantages for people in the lower income class that only use a PC for basic usage. They pay for a windows licence without actually needing windows because 95% of what they do is in a browser and the other 5% is typing a word document or making a simpel Excel sheet. So for these people something like Ubuntu is ideal, they can prolong the life of their old PC or laptop with Ubuntu and thus saving extra money. And as we all know, saving money is not only interesting for the lowest of income but for most of us. But when I talk to people they don't want to use Ubuntu because they know Windows and they don't know this, they'll complain about having to adapt to windows 8 but adapting to Ubuntu seems a bridge too far. But what if someone in the neighborhood gave simple Ubuntu courses. Teaching people about Ubuntu, stuff like: What is an OS What is Ubuntu How do I obtain Ubuntu How do I install Ubuntu How do I set up my email in Ubuntu How do I make a text document in Ubuntu How do I update my facebook wall in Ubuntu ... Simple basic PC usage, but within Ubuntu. But as much as I would like to work for free all day, I can't do this for free for people outside of my social circle. So I was wondering if it is possible to make a business and make money with giving Ubuntu courses, or are their steps to be taken before this is possible. However... Do I need an Ubuntu or Canonical license? Do I need to get a certificate? Do I have to make some kind of deal or contract with Canonical? Just to be clear this is all just an idea in my head at this point, I'm just gathering information. I'm not a teacher at a school, just a programmer that is thinking about options in life. Thanks in advance!

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  • There's Not an App for That (Yet)

    - by Mark Hesse
    With an earlier-than-normal departure this morning to avoid the stalemate known as traffic congestion, I suddenly realized what I had failed to grab on my way out the door...  my company ID badge.  Unfortunately, at the time of my epiphany, I was far enough into commuter no-man's land where turning back would completely negate my early departure and increase my overall drive time exponentially.  Not being one to retrace my steps, I decided to press on. Upon arrival at the office and with an hour to go before a security guard would be on duty, I started thinking about the number of times I had forgotten my ID vs. the number of times I had forgotten my phone.  While rare on both accounts, my ID was most likely the missing artifact. I then wondered why there isn't an app for my smartphone that allows me to verify my credentials with my employer and then, provided with a secure token for the day, have the ability to access my building's card entry system.  On many levels, this seems much more secure than an ID card which can be lost, stolen or even forged and then used simply by tailgating into and around buildings at facilities where card scanning can generally be avoided.   As it turns out, another building on the campus has 24 x 7 guard coverage, so I was able to gain access in a relatively short time and secure a temporary ID badge.  Once inside and online, a quick internet search on the subject of smartphone badge access shows that efforts are underway to do exactly what I was thinking needed to be done. Having not spent any time studying about the technology, I discovered that it relies on Near Field Communications (NFC) enabled smartphones (of which, mine does not provide).  The only other option would require modifications to the security infrastructure to support alternative authentication technologies, such as barcode readers, which would be extremely costly to implement. For now, my best option is to put my corporate ID under my car keys... 

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  • Do you have a data roadmap?

    - by BuckWoody
    I often visit companies where they asked me “What is SQL Server’s Roadmap?” What they mean is that they want to know where Microsoft is going with our database products. I explain that we’re expanding not only the capacities in SQL Server but the capabilities – we’re trying to make an “information platform”, rather than just a data store. But it’s interesting when I ask the same question back. “What is your data roadmap?” Most folks are surprised by the question, thinking only about storage and archival. To them, data is data. Ah, not so. Your data is one of the most valuable, if not the most valuable asset in your organization. And you should be thinking about how you’ll acquire it, how it will be distributed, how you’ll archive it (which includes more than just backing it up) and most importantly, how you’ll leverage it. Because it’s only when data becomes information that it is truly useful. to be sure, the folks on the web that collect lots of data have a strategy for it – do you? Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Learning project Custom c# Cms [closed]

    - by user313378
    I want to start new project customCms, cause I think it's a good starting point to implement my collected knowledge from c#, ddd, nhibernate, mvc3, js. It will be great if I hear some guidlines from expirienced users here. I will use C# ASP.NET MVC3 razor view engine. Also I was thinking of NHibernate ORM, I dont know if using Nhibernate will cause performanse down. Initially MSSQL 2008 will be used, but using ORM layer cause that I can switch to some other db with no pain. I was thinking to create News entity which will have properties Id Name Created Updated IntroText Content Title Author ListPhotos Every input will be validated with untroub. java script on the view, and it will be validated on db level as well. Maybe it is best approach to create some interface which will be implemented by my cmsClient entity like NewsEntity. In this interface will be included everything it should be requested from my client in future. At least some stuff which are not included in entity right now, consumed data by rss feed, wcf, etc. So basically everything you think its good idea from documentating project, to coding. Everyone is welcomed to brainstorm for custom cms.

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  • Developer’s Life – Summary of Superhero Articles

    - by Pinal Dave
    Earlier this year, I wrote an article series where I talked about developer’s life and compared it with Superhero. I have got amazing response to this series and I have been receiving quite a lots of email suggesting that I should write more blog post about them. Currently I am not planning to write more blog post but I will soon continue another series. In this blog post, I have summarized the entire series. Let me know if you want me to write about any superhero. I will see what I can do about that hero. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Captain America Captain America was first created as a comic book character in the 1940’s as a way to boost morale during World War II.  Aimed at a children’s audience, his legacy faded away when the war ended.  However, he has recently has a major reboot to become a popular movie character that deals with modern issues. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is the Incredible Hulk The Incredible Hulk is possibly one of the scariest superheroes out there.  All superheroes are meant to be “out of this world” and awe-inspiring, but I think most people will agree with I say The Hulk takes this to the next level.  He is the result of an industrial accident, which is scary enough in it’s own right.  Plus, when mild-mannered Bruce Banner is angered, he goes completely out-of-control and transforms into a destructive monster that he cannot control and has no memories of. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Wonder Woman We have focused a lot lately on this “superhero series.”  I love fantasy books and movies, and I feel like there is a lot to be learned from them.  As I am writing this series, though, I have noticed that every super hero I write about is a man.  So today, I would like to talk about the major female super hero – Wonder Woman. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Harry Potter Harry Potter might not be a superhero in the traditional sense, but I believe he still has a lot to teach us and show us about life as a developer.  If you have been living under a rock for the last 17 years, you might not know that Harry Potter is the main character in an extremely popular series of books and movies documenting the education and tribulation of a young wizard (and his friends). Developer’s Life – Every Developer is Like Transformers Transformers may not be superheroes – they don’t wear capes, they don’t have amazing powers outside of their size and folding ability, they’re not even human (technically).  Part of their enduring popularity is that while we are enjoying over-the-top movies, we are learning about good leadership and strong personal skills. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Iron Man Iron Man is another superhero who is not naturally “super,” but relies on his brain (and money) to turn him into a fighting machine.  While traditional superheroes are still popular, a three-movie franchise and incorporation into the new Avengers series shows that Iron Man is popular enough on his own. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Sherlock Holmes I have been thinking a lot about how developers are like super heroes, and I have written two blog posts now comparing them to Spiderman and Superman.  I have a lot of love and respect for developers, and I hope that they are enjoying these articles, and others are learning a little bit about the profession.  There is another fictional character who, while not technically asuper hero, is very powerful, and I also think stands as a good example of a developer. That character is Sherlock Holmes.  Sherlock Holmes is a British detective, first made popular at the turn of the 19thcentury by author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  The original Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective who could solve the most mind-boggling crime through simple observations and deduction. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Chhota Bheem Chhota Bheem is a cartoon character that is extremely popular where I live.  He is my daughter’s favorite characters.  I like to say that children love Chhota Bheem more than their parents – it is lucky for us he is not real!  Children love Chhota Bheem because he is the absolute “good guy.”  He is smart, loyal, and strong.  He and his friends live in Dholakpur and fight off their many enemies – and always win – in every episode.  In each episode, they learn something about friendship, bravery, and being kind to others.  Chhota Bheem is a good role model for children, and I think that he is a good role model for developers are well. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Batman Batman is one of the darkest superheroes in the fantasy canon.  He does not come to his powers through any sort of magical coincidence or radioactive insect, but through a lot of psychological scarring caused by witnessing the death of his parents.  Despite his dark back story, he possesses a lot of admirable abilities that I feel bear comparison to developers. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Superman I enjoyed comparing developers to Spiderman so much, that I have decided to continue the trend and encourage some of my favorite people (developers) with another favorite superhero – Superman.  Superman is probably the most famous superhero – and one of the most inspiring. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Spiderman I have to admit, Spiderman is my favorite superhero.  The most recent movie recently was released in theaters, so it has been at the front of my mind for some time. Spiderman was my favorite superhero even before the latest movie came out, but of course I took my whole family to see the movie as soon as I could!  Every one of us loved it, including my daughter.  We all left the movie thinking how great it would be to be Spiderman.  So, with that in mind, I started thinking about how we are like Spiderman in our everyday lives, especially developers. I would like to know which Superhero is your favorite hero! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Developer, Superhero

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  • The Incremental Architect&rsquo;s Napkin - #5 - Design functions for extensibility and readability

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/08/24/the-incremental-architectrsquos-napkin---5---design-functions-for.aspx The functionality of programs is entered via Entry Points. So what we´re talking about when designing software is a bunch of functions handling the requests represented by and flowing in through those Entry Points. Designing software thus consists of at least three phases: Analyzing the requirements to find the Entry Points and their signatures Designing the functionality to be executed when those Entry Points get triggered Implementing the functionality according to the design aka coding I presume, you´re familiar with phase 1 in some way. And I guess you´re proficient in implementing functionality in some programming language. But in my experience developers in general are not experienced in going through an explicit phase 2. “Designing functionality? What´s that supposed to mean?” you might already have thought. Here´s my definition: To design functionality (or functional design for short) means thinking about… well, functions. You find a solution for what´s supposed to happen when an Entry Point gets triggered in terms of functions. A conceptual solution that is, because those functions only exist in your head (or on paper) during this phase. But you may have guess that, because it´s “design” not “coding”. And here is, what functional design is not: It´s not about logic. Logic is expressions (e.g. +, -, && etc.) and control statements (e.g. if, switch, for, while etc.). Also I consider calling external APIs as logic. It´s equally basic. It´s what code needs to do in order to deliver some functionality or quality. Logic is what´s doing that needs to be done by software. Transformations are either done through expressions or API-calls. And then there is alternative control flow depending on the result of some expression. Basically it´s just jumps in Assembler, sometimes to go forward (if, switch), sometimes to go backward (for, while, do). But calling your own function is not logic. It´s not necessary to produce any outcome. Functionality is not enhanced by adding functions (subroutine calls) to your code. Nor is quality increased by adding functions. No performance gain, no higher scalability etc. through functions. Functions are not relevant to functionality. Strange, isn´t it. What they are important for is security of investment. By introducing functions into our code we can become more productive (re-use) and can increase evolvability (higher unterstandability, easier to keep code consistent). That´s no small feat, however. Evolvable code can hardly be overestimated. That´s why to me functional design is so important. It´s at the core of software development. To sum this up: Functional design is on a level of abstraction above (!) logical design or algorithmic design. Functional design is only done until you get to a point where each function is so simple you are very confident you can easily code it. Functional design an logical design (which mostly is coding, but can also be done using pseudo code or flow charts) are complementary. Software needs both. If you start coding right away you end up in a tangled mess very quickly. Then you need back out through refactoring. Functional design on the other hand is bloodless without actual code. It´s just a theory with no experiments to prove it. But how to do functional design? An example of functional design Let´s assume a program to de-duplicate strings. The user enters a number of strings separated by commas, e.g. a, b, a, c, d, b, e, c, a. And the program is supposed to clear this list of all doubles, e.g. a, b, c, d, e. There is only one Entry Point to this program: the user triggers the de-duplication by starting the program with the string list on the command line C:\>deduplicate "a, b, a, c, d, b, e, c, a" a, b, c, d, e …or by clicking on a GUI button. This leads to the Entry Point function to get called. It´s the program´s main function in case of the batch version or a button click event handler in the GUI version. That´s the physical Entry Point so to speak. It´s inevitable. What then happens is a three step process: Transform the input data from the user into a request. Call the request handler. Transform the output of the request handler into a tangible result for the user. Or to phrase it a bit more generally: Accept input. Transform input into output. Present output. This does not mean any of these steps requires a lot of effort. Maybe it´s just one line of code to accomplish it. Nevertheless it´s a distinct step in doing the processing behind an Entry Point. Call it an aspect or a responsibility - and you will realize it most likely deserves a function of its own to satisfy the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). Interestingly the above list of steps is already functional design. There is no logic, but nevertheless the solution is described - albeit on a higher level of abstraction than you might have done yourself. But it´s still on a meta-level. The application to the domain at hand is easy, though: Accept string list from command line De-duplicate Present de-duplicated strings on standard output And this concrete list of processing steps can easily be transformed into code:static void Main(string[] args) { var input = Accept_string_list(args); var output = Deduplicate(input); Present_deduplicated_string_list(output); } Instead of a big problem there are three much smaller problems now. If you think each of those is trivial to implement, then go for it. You can stop the functional design at this point. But maybe, just maybe, you´re not so sure how to go about with the de-duplication for example. Then just implement what´s easy right now, e.g.private static string Accept_string_list(string[] args) { return args[0]; } private static void Present_deduplicated_string_list( string[] output) { var line = string.Join(", ", output); Console.WriteLine(line); } Accept_string_list() contains logic in the form of an API-call. Present_deduplicated_string_list() contains logic in the form of an expression and an API-call. And then repeat the functional design for the remaining processing step. What´s left is the domain logic: de-duplicating a list of strings. How should that be done? Without any logic at our disposal during functional design you´re left with just functions. So which functions could make up the de-duplication? Here´s a suggestion: De-duplicate Parse the input string into a true list of strings. Register each string in a dictionary/map/set. That way duplicates get cast away. Transform the data structure into a list of unique strings. Processing step 2 obviously was the core of the solution. That´s where real creativity was needed. That´s the core of the domain. But now after this refinement the implementation of each step is easy again:private static string[] Parse_string_list(string input) { return input.Split(',') .Select(s => s.Trim()) .ToArray(); } private static Dictionary<string,object> Compile_unique_strings(string[] strings) { return strings.Aggregate( new Dictionary<string, object>(), (agg, s) => { agg[s] = null; return agg; }); } private static string[] Serialize_unique_strings( Dictionary<string,object> dict) { return dict.Keys.ToArray(); } With these three additional functions Main() now looks like this:static void Main(string[] args) { var input = Accept_string_list(args); var strings = Parse_string_list(input); var dict = Compile_unique_strings(strings); var output = Serialize_unique_strings(dict); Present_deduplicated_string_list(output); } I think that´s very understandable code: just read it from top to bottom and you know how the solution to the problem works. It´s a mirror image of the initial design: Accept string list from command line Parse the input string into a true list of strings. Register each string in a dictionary/map/set. That way duplicates get cast away. Transform the data structure into a list of unique strings. Present de-duplicated strings on standard output You can even re-generate the design by just looking at the code. Code and functional design thus are always in sync - if you follow some simple rules. But about that later. And as a bonus: all the functions making up the process are small - which means easy to understand, too. So much for an initial concrete example. Now it´s time for some theory. Because there is method to this madness ;-) The above has only scratched the surface. Introducing Flow Design Functional design starts with a given function, the Entry Point. Its goal is to describe the behavior of the program when the Entry Point is triggered using a process, not an algorithm. An algorithm consists of logic, a process on the other hand consists just of steps or stages. Each processing step transforms input into output or a side effect. Also it might access resources, e.g. a printer, a database, or just memory. Processing steps thus can rely on state of some sort. This is different from Functional Programming, where functions are supposed to not be stateful and not cause side effects.[1] In its simplest form a process can be written as a bullet point list of steps, e.g. Get data from user Output result to user Transform data Parse data Map result for output Such a compilation of steps - possibly on different levels of abstraction - often is the first artifact of functional design. It can be generated by a team in an initial design brainstorming. Next comes ordering the steps. What should happen first, what next etc.? Get data from user Parse data Transform data Map result for output Output result to user That´s great for a start into functional design. It´s better than starting to code right away on a given function using TDD. Please get me right: TDD is a valuable practice. But it can be unnecessarily hard if the scope of a functionn is too large. But how do you know beforehand without investing some thinking? And how to do this thinking in a systematic fashion? My recommendation: For any given function you´re supposed to implement first do a functional design. Then, once you´re confident you know the processing steps - which are pretty small - refine and code them using TDD. You´ll see that´s much, much easier - and leads to cleaner code right away. For more information on this approach I call “Informed TDD” read my book of the same title. Thinking before coding is smart. And writing down the solution as a bunch of functions possibly is the simplest thing you can do, I´d say. It´s more according to the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle than returning constants or other trivial stuff TDD development often is started with. So far so good. A simple ordered list of processing steps will do to start with functional design. As shown in the above example such steps can easily be translated into functions. Moving from design to coding thus is simple. However, such a list does not scale. Processing is not always that simple to be captured in a list. And then the list is just text. Again. Like code. That means the design is lacking visuality. Textual representations need more parsing by your brain than visual representations. Plus they are limited in their “dimensionality”: text just has one dimension, it´s sequential. Alternatives and parallelism are hard to encode in text. In addition the functional design using numbered lists lacks data. It´s not visible what´s the input, output, and state of the processing steps. That´s why functional design should be done using a lightweight visual notation. No tool is necessary to draw such designs. Use pen and paper; a flipchart, a whiteboard, or even a napkin is sufficient. Visualizing processes The building block of the functional design notation is a functional unit. I mostly draw it like this: Something is done, it´s clear what goes in, it´s clear what comes out, and it´s clear what the processing step requires in terms of state or hardware. Whenever input flows into a functional unit it gets processed and output is produced and/or a side effect occurs. Flowing data is the driver of something happening. That´s why I call this approach to functional design Flow Design. It´s about data flow instead of control flow. Control flow like in algorithms is of no concern to functional design. Thinking about control flow simply is too low level. Once you start with control flow you easily get bogged down by tons of details. That´s what you want to avoid during design. Design is supposed to be quick, broad brush, abstract. It should give overview. But what about all the details? As Robert C. Martin rightly said: “Programming is abot detail”. Detail is a matter of code. Once you start coding the processing steps you designed you can worry about all the detail you want. Functional design does not eliminate all the nitty gritty. It just postpones tackling them. To me that´s also an example of the SRP. Function design has the responsibility to come up with a solution to a problem posed by a single function (Entry Point). And later coding has the responsibility to implement the solution down to the last detail (i.e. statement, API-call). TDD unfortunately mixes both responsibilities. It´s just coding - and thereby trying to find detailed implementations (green phase) plus getting the design right (refactoring). To me that´s one reason why TDD has failed to deliver on its promise for many developers. Using functional units as building blocks of functional design processes can be depicted very easily. Here´s the initial process for the example problem: For each processing step draw a functional unit and label it. Choose a verb or an “action phrase” as a label, not a noun. Functional design is about activities, not state or structure. Then make the output of an upstream step the input of a downstream step. Finally think about the data that should flow between the functional units. Write the data above the arrows connecting the functional units in the direction of the data flow. Enclose the data description in brackets. That way you can clearly see if all flows have already been specified. Empty brackets mean “no data is flowing”, but nevertheless a signal is sent. A name like “list” or “strings” in brackets describes the data content. Use lower case labels for that purpose. A name starting with an upper case letter like “String” or “Customer” on the other hand signifies a data type. If you like, you also can combine descriptions with data types by separating them with a colon, e.g. (list:string) or (strings:string[]). But these are just suggestions from my practice with Flow Design. You can do it differently, if you like. Just be sure to be consistent. Flows wired-up in this manner I call one-dimensional (1D). Each functional unit just has one input and/or one output. A functional unit without an output is possible. It´s like a black hole sucking up input without producing any output. Instead it produces side effects. A functional unit without an input, though, does make much sense. When should it start to work? What´s the trigger? That´s why in the above process even the first processing step has an input. If you like, view such 1D-flows as pipelines. Data is flowing through them from left to right. But as you can see, it´s not always the same data. It get´s transformed along its passage: (args) becomes a (list) which is turned into (strings). The Principle of Mutual Oblivion A very characteristic trait of flows put together from function units is: no functional units knows another one. They are all completely independent of each other. Functional units don´t know where their input is coming from (or even when it´s gonna arrive). They just specify a range of values they can process. And they promise a certain behavior upon input arriving. Also they don´t know where their output is going. They just produce it in their own time independent of other functional units. That means at least conceptually all functional units work in parallel. Functional units don´t know their “deployment context”. They now nothing about the overall flow they are place in. They are just consuming input from some upstream, and producing output for some downstream. That makes functional units very easy to test. At least as long as they don´t depend on state or resources. I call this the Principle of Mutual Oblivion (PoMO). Functional units are oblivious of others as well as an overall context/purpose. They are just parts of a whole focused on a single responsibility. How the whole is built, how a larger goal is achieved, is of no concern to the single functional units. By building software in such a manner, functional design interestingly follows nature. Nature´s building blocks for organisms also follow the PoMO. The cells forming your body do not know each other. Take a nerve cell “controlling” a muscle cell for example:[2] The nerve cell does not know anything about muscle cells, let alone the specific muscel cell it is “attached to”. Likewise the muscle cell does not know anything about nerve cells, let a lone a specific nerve cell “attached to” it. Saying “the nerve cell is controlling the muscle cell” thus only makes sense when viewing both from the outside. “Control” is a concept of the whole, not of its parts. Control is created by wiring-up parts in a certain way. Both cells are mutually oblivious. Both just follow a contract. One produces Acetylcholine (ACh) as output, the other consumes ACh as input. Where the ACh is going, where it´s coming from neither cell cares about. Million years of evolution have led to this kind of division of labor. And million years of evolution have produced organism designs (DNA) which lead to the production of these different cell types (and many others) and also to their co-location. The result: the overall behavior of an organism. How and why this happened in nature is a mystery. For our software, though, it´s clear: functional and quality requirements needs to be fulfilled. So we as developers have to become “intelligent designers” of “software cells” which we put together to form a “software organism” which responds in satisfying ways to triggers from it´s environment. My bet is: If nature gets complex organisms working by following the PoMO, who are we to not apply this recipe for success to our much simpler “machines”? So my rule is: Wherever there is functionality to be delivered, because there is a clear Entry Point into software, design the functionality like nature would do it. Build it from mutually oblivious functional units. That´s what Flow Design is about. In that way it´s even universal, I´d say. Its notation can also be applied to biology: Never mind labeling the functional units with nouns. That´s ok in Flow Design. You´ll do that occassionally for functional units on a higher level of abstraction or when their purpose is close to hardware. Getting a cockroach to roam your bedroom takes 1,000,000 nerve cells (neurons). Getting the de-duplication program to do its job just takes 5 “software cells” (functional units). Both, though, follow the same basic principle. Translating functional units into code Moving from functional design to code is no rocket science. In fact it´s straightforward. There are two simple rules: Translate an input port to a function. Translate an output port either to a return statement in that function or to a function pointer visible to that function. The simplest translation of a functional unit is a function. That´s what you saw in the above example. Functions are mutually oblivious. That why Functional Programming likes them so much. It makes them composable. Which is the reason, nature works according to the PoMO. Let´s be clear about one thing: There is no dependency injection in nature. For all of an organism´s complexity no DI container is used. Behavior is the result of smooth cooperation between mutually oblivious building blocks. Functions will often be the adequate translation for the functional units in your designs. But not always. Take for example the case, where a processing step should not always produce an output. Maybe the purpose is to filter input. Here the functional unit consumes words and produces words. But it does not pass along every word flowing in. Some words are swallowed. Think of a spell checker. It probably should not check acronyms for correctness. There are too many of them. Or words with no more than two letters. Such words are called “stop words”. In the above picture the optionality of the output is signified by the astrisk outside the brackets. It means: Any number of (word) data items can flow from the functional unit for each input data item. It might be none or one or even more. This I call a stream of data. Such behavior cannot be translated into a function where output is generated with return. Because a function always needs to return a value. So the output port is translated into a function pointer or continuation which gets passed to the subroutine when called:[3]void filter_stop_words( string word, Action<string> onNoStopWord) { if (...check if not a stop word...) onNoStopWord(word); } If you want to be nitpicky you might call such a function pointer parameter an injection. And technically you´re right. Conceptually, though, it´s not an injection. Because the subroutine is not functionally dependent on the continuation. Firstly continuations are procedures, i.e. subroutines without a return type. Remember: Flow Design is about unidirectional data flow. Secondly the name of the formal parameter is chosen in a way as to not assume anything about downstream processing steps. onNoStopWord describes a situation (or event) within the functional unit only. Translating output ports into function pointers helps keeping functional units mutually oblivious in cases where output is optional or produced asynchronically. Either pass the function pointer to the function upon call. Or make it global by putting it on the encompassing class. Then it´s called an event. In C# that´s even an explicit feature.class Filter { public void filter_stop_words( string word) { if (...check if not a stop word...) onNoStopWord(word); } public event Action<string> onNoStopWord; } When to use a continuation and when to use an event dependens on how a functional unit is used in flows and how it´s packed together with others into classes. You´ll see examples further down the Flow Design road. Another example of 1D functional design Let´s see Flow Design once more in action using the visual notation. How about the famous word wrap kata? Robert C. Martin has posted a much cited solution including an extensive reasoning behind his TDD approach. So maybe you want to compare it to Flow Design. The function signature given is:string WordWrap(string text, int maxLineLength) {...} That´s not an Entry Point since we don´t see an application with an environment and users. Nevertheless it´s a function which is supposed to provide a certain functionality. The text passed in has to be reformatted. The input is a single line of arbitrary length consisting of words separated by spaces. The output should consist of one or more lines of a maximum length specified. If a word is longer than a the maximum line length it can be split in multiple parts each fitting in a line. Flow Design Let´s start by brainstorming the process to accomplish the feat of reformatting the text. What´s needed? Words need to be assembled into lines Words need to be extracted from the input text The resulting lines need to be assembled into the output text Words too long to fit in a line need to be split Does sound about right? I guess so. And it shows a kind of priority. Long words are a special case. So maybe there is a hint for an incremental design here. First let´s tackle “average words” (words not longer than a line). Here´s the Flow Design for this increment: The the first three bullet points turned into functional units with explicit data added. As the signature requires a text is transformed into another text. See the input of the first functional unit and the output of the last functional unit. In between no text flows, but words and lines. That´s good to see because thereby the domain is clearly represented in the design. The requirements are talking about words and lines and here they are. But note the asterisk! It´s not outside the brackets but inside. That means it´s not a stream of words or lines, but lists or sequences. For each text a sequence of words is output. For each sequence of words a sequence of lines is produced. The asterisk is used to abstract from the concrete implementation. Like with streams. Whether the list of words gets implemented as an array or an IEnumerable is not important during design. It´s an implementation detail. Does any processing step require further refinement? I don´t think so. They all look pretty “atomic” to me. And if not… I can always backtrack and refine a process step using functional design later once I´ve gained more insight into a sub-problem. Implementation The implementation is straightforward as you can imagine. The processing steps can all be translated into functions. Each can be tested easily and separately. Each has a focused responsibility. And the process flow becomes just a sequence of function calls: Easy to understand. It clearly states how word wrapping works - on a high level of abstraction. And it´s easy to evolve as you´ll see. Flow Design - Increment 2 So far only texts consisting of “average words” are wrapped correctly. Words not fitting in a line will result in lines too long. Wrapping long words is a feature of the requested functionality. Whether it´s there or not makes a difference to the user. To quickly get feedback I decided to first implement a solution without this feature. But now it´s time to add it to deliver the full scope. Fortunately Flow Design automatically leads to code following the Open Closed Principle (OCP). It´s easy to extend it - instead of changing well tested code. How´s that possible? Flow Design allows for extension of functionality by inserting functional units into the flow. That way existing functional units need not be changed. The data flow arrow between functional units is a natural extension point. No need to resort to the Strategy Pattern. No need to think ahead where extions might need to be made in the future. I just “phase in” the remaining processing step: Since neither Extract words nor Reformat know of their environment neither needs to be touched due to the “detour”. The new processing step accepts the output of the existing upstream step and produces data compatible with the existing downstream step. Implementation - Increment 2 A trivial implementation checking the assumption if this works does not do anything to split long words. The input is just passed on: Note how clean WordWrap() stays. The solution is easy to understand. A developer looking at this code sometime in the future, when a new feature needs to be build in, quickly sees how long words are dealt with. Compare this to Robert C. Martin´s solution:[4] How does this solution handle long words? Long words are not even part of the domain language present in the code. At least I need considerable time to understand the approach. Admittedly the Flow Design solution with the full implementation of long word splitting is longer than Robert C. Martin´s. At least it seems. Because his solution does not cover all the “word wrap situations” the Flow Design solution handles. Some lines would need to be added to be on par, I guess. But even then… Is a difference in LOC that important as long as it´s in the same ball park? I value understandability and openness for extension higher than saving on the last line of code. Simplicity is not just less code, it´s also clarity in design. But don´t take my word for it. Try Flow Design on larger problems and compare for yourself. What´s the easier, more straightforward way to clean code? And keep in mind: You ain´t seen all yet ;-) There´s more to Flow Design than described in this chapter. In closing I hope I was able to give you a impression of functional design that makes you hungry for more. To me it´s an inevitable step in software development. Jumping from requirements to code does not scale. And it leads to dirty code all to quickly. Some thought should be invested first. Where there is a clear Entry Point visible, it´s functionality should be designed using data flows. Because with data flows abstraction is possible. For more background on why that´s necessary read my blog article here. For now let me point out to you - if you haven´t already noticed - that Flow Design is a general purpose declarative language. It´s “programming by intention” (Shalloway et al.). Just write down how you think the solution should work on a high level of abstraction. This breaks down a large problem in smaller problems. And by following the PoMO the solutions to those smaller problems are independent of each other. So they are easy to test. Or you could even think about getting them implemented in parallel by different team members. Flow Design not only increases evolvability, but also helps becoming more productive. All team members can participate in functional design. This goes beyon collective code ownership. We´re talking collective design/architecture ownership. Because with Flow Design there is a common visual language to talk about functional design - which is the foundation for all other design activities.   PS: If you like what you read, consider getting my ebook “The Incremental Architekt´s Napkin”. It´s where I compile all the articles in this series for easier reading. I like the strictness of Function Programming - but I also find it quite hard to live by. And it certainly is not what millions of programmers are used to. Also to me it seems, the real world is full of state and side effects. So why give them such a bad image? That´s why functional design takes a more pragmatic approach. State and side effects are ok for processing steps - but be sure to follow the SRP. Don´t put too much of it into a single processing step. ? Image taken from www.physioweb.org ? My code samples are written in C#. C# sports typed function pointers called delegates. Action is such a function pointer type matching functions with signature void someName(T t). Other languages provide similar ways to work with functions as first class citizens - even Java now in version 8. I trust you find a way to map this detail of my translation to your favorite programming language. I know it works for Java, C++, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Go. And if you´re using a Functional Programming language it´s of course a no brainer. ? Taken from his blog post “The Craftsman 62, The Dark Path”. ?

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  • Another Marketing Conference, part one – the best morning sessions.

    - by Roger Hart
    Yesterday I went to Another Marketing Conference. I honestly can’t tell if the title is just tipping over into smug, but in the balance of things that doesn’t matter, because it was a good conference. There was an enjoyable blend of theoretical and practical, and enough inter-disciplinary spread to keep my inner dilettante grinning from ear to ear. Sure, there was a bumpy bit in the middle, with two back-to-back sales pitches and a rather thin overview of the state of the web. But the signal:noise ratio at AMC2012 was impressively high. Here’s the first part of my write-up of the sessions. It’s a bit of a mammoth. It’s also a bit of a mash-up of what was said and what I thought about it. I’ll add links to the videos and slides from the sessions as they become available. Although it was in the morning session, I’ve not included Vanessa Northam’s session on the power of internal comms to build brand ambassadors. It’ll be in the next roundup, as this is already pushing 2.5k words. First, the important stuff. I was keeping a tally, and nobody said “synergy” or “leverage”. I did, however, hear the term “marketeers” six times. Shame on you – you know who you are. 1 – Branding in a post-digital world, Graham Hales This initially looked like being a sales presentation for Interbrand, but Graham pulled it out of the bag a few minutes in. He introduced a model for brand management that was essentially Plan >> Do >> Check >> Act, with Do and Check rolled up together, and went on to stress that this looks like on overall business management model for a reason. Brand has to be part of your overall business strategy and metrics if you’re going to care about it at all. This was the first iteration of what proved to be one of the event’s emergent themes: do it throughout the stack or don’t bother. Graham went on to remind us that brands, in so far as they are owned at all, are owned by and co-created with our customers. Advertising can offer a message to customers, but they provide the expression of a brand. This was a preface to talking about an increasingly chaotic marketplace, with increasingly hard-to-manage purchase processes. Services like Amazon reviews and TripAdvisor (four presenters would make this point) saturate customers with information, and give them a kind of vigilante power to comment on and define brands. Consequentially, they experience a number of “moments of deflection” in our sales funnels. Our control is lessened, and failure to engage can negatively-impact buying decisions increasingly poorly. The clearest example given was the failure of NatWest’s “caring bank” campaign, where staff in branches, customer support, and online presences didn’t align. A discontinuity of experience basically made the campaign worthless, and disgruntled customers talked about it loudly on social media. This in turn presented an opportunity to engage and show caring, but that wasn’t taken. What I took away was that brand (co)creation is ongoing and needs monitoring and metrics. But reciprocally, given you get what you measure, strategy and metrics must include brand if any kind of branding is to work at all. Campaigns and messages must permeate product and service design. What that doesn’t mean (and Graham didn’t say it did) is putting Marketing at the top of the pyramid, and having them bawl demands at Product Management, Support, and Development like an entitled toddler. It’s going to have to be collaborative, and session 6 on internal comms handled this really well. The main thing missing here was substantiating data, and the main question I found myself chewing on was: if we’re building brands collaboratively and in the open, what about the cultural politics of trolling? 2 – Challenging our core beliefs about human behaviour, Mark Earls This was definitely the best show of the day. It was also some of the best content. Mark talked us through nudging, behavioural economics, and some key misconceptions around decision making. Basically, people aren’t rational, they’re petty, reactive, emotional sacks of meat, and they’ll go where they’re led. Comforting stuff. Examples given were the spread of the London Riots and the “discovery” of the mountains of Kong, and the popularity of Susan Boyle, which, in turn made me think about Per Mollerup’s concept of “social wayshowing”. Mark boiled his thoughts down into four key points which I completely failed to write down word for word: People do, then think – Changing minds to change behaviour doesn’t work. Post-rationalization rules the day. See also: mere exposure effects. Spock < Kirk - Emotional/intuitive comes first, then we rationalize impulses. The non-thinking, emotive, reactive processes run much faster than the deliberative ones. People are not really rational decision makers, so  intervening with information may not be appropriate. Maximisers or satisficers? – Related to the last point. People do not consistently, rationally, maximise. When faced with an abundance of choice, they prefer to satisfice than evaluate, and will often follow social leads rather than think. Things tend to converge – Behaviour trends to a consensus normal. When faced with choices people overwhelmingly just do what they see others doing. Humans are extraordinarily good at mirroring behaviours and receiving influence. People “outsource the cognitive load” of choices to the crowd. Mark’s headline quote was probably “the real influence happens at the table next to you”. Reference examples, word of mouth, and social influence are tremendously important, and so talking about product experiences may be more important than talking about products. This reminded me of Kathy Sierra’s “creating bad-ass users” concept of designing to make people more awesome rather than products they like. If we can expose user-awesome, and make sharing easy, we can normalise the behaviours we want. If we normalize the behaviours we want, people should make and post-rationalize the buying decisions we want.  Where we need to be: “A bigger boy made me do it” Where we are: “a wizard did it and ran away” However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some purchasing decisions are personal and informed rather than social and reactive. There’s a quadrant diagram, in fact. What was really interesting, though, towards the end of the talk, was some advice for working out how social your products might be. The standard technology adoption lifecycle graph is essentially about social product diffusion. So this idea isn’t really new. Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm” idea may not strictly apply. However, his concepts of beachheads and reference segments are exactly what is required to normalize and thus enable purchase decisions (behaviour change). The final thing is that in only very few categories does a better product actually affect purchase decision. Where the choice is personal and informed, this is true. But where it’s personal and impulsive, or in any way social, “better” is trumped by popularity, endorsement, or “point of sale salience”. UX, UCD, and e-commerce know this to be true. A better (and easier) experience will always beat “more features”. Easy to use, and easy to observe being used will beat “what the user says they want”. This made me think about the astounding stickiness of rational fallacies, “common sense” and the pathological willful simplifications of the media. Rational fallacies seem like they’re basically the heuristics we use for post-rationalization. If I were profoundly grimy and cynical, I’d suggest deploying a boat-load in our messaging, to see if they’re really as sticky and appealing as they look. 4 – Changing behaviour through communication, Stephen Donajgrodzki This was a fantastic follow up to Mark’s session. Stephen basically talked us through some tactics used in public information/health comms that implement the kind of behavioural theory Mark introduced. The session was largely about how to get people to do (good) things they’re predisposed not to do, and how communication can (and can’t) make positive interventions. A couple of things stood out, in particular “implementation intentions” and how they can be linked to goals. For example, in order to get people to check and test their smoke alarms (a goal intention, rarely actualized  an information campaign will attempt to link this activity to the clocks going back or forward (a strong implementation intention, well-actualized). The talk reinforced the idea that making behaviour changes easy and visible normalizes them and makes them more likely to succeed. To do this, they have to be embodied throughout a product and service cycle. Experiential disconnects undermine the normalization. So campaigns, products, and customer interactions must be aligned. This is underscored by the second section of the presentation, which talked about interventions and pre-conditions for change. Taking the examples of drug addiction and stopping smoking, Stephen showed us a framework for attempting (and succeeding or failing in) behaviour change. He noted that when the change is something people fundamentally want to do, and that is easy, this gets a to simpler. Coordinated, easily-observed environmental pressures create preconditions for change and build motivation. (price, pub smoking ban, ad campaigns, friend quitting, declining social acceptability) A triggering even leads to a change attempt. (getting a cold and panicking about how bad the cough is) Interventions can be made to enable an attempt (NHS services, public information, nicotine patches) If it succeeds – yay. If it fails, there’s strong negative enforcement. Triggering events seem largely personal, but messaging can intervene in the creation of preconditions and in supporting decisions. Stephen talked more about systems of thinking and “bounded rationality”. The idea being that to enable change you need to break through “automatic” thinking into “reflective” thinking. Disruption and emotion are great tools for this, but that is only the start of the process. It occurs to me that a great deal of market research is focused on determining triggers rather than analysing necessary preconditions. Although they are presumably related. The final section talked about setting goals. Marketing goals are often seen as deriving directly from business goals. However, marketing may be unable to deliver on these directly where decision and behaviour-change processes are involved. In those cases, marketing and communication goals should be to create preconditions. They should also consider priming and norms. Content marketing and brand awareness are good first steps here, as brands can be heuristics in decision making for choice-saturated consumers, or those seeking education. 5 – The power of engaged communities and how to build them, Harriet Minter (the Guardian) The meat of this was that you need to let communities define and establish themselves, and be quick to react to their needs. Harriet had been in charge of building the Guardian’s community sites, and learned a lot about how they come together, stabilize  grow, and react. Crucially, they can’t be about sales or push messaging. A community is not just an audience. It’s essential to start with what this particular segment or tribe are interested in, then what they want to hear. Eventually you can consider – in light of this – what they might want to buy, but you can’t start with the product. A community won’t cohere around one you’re pushing. Her tips for community building were (again, sorry, not verbatim): Set goals Have some targets. Community building sounds vague and fluffy, but you can have (and adjust) concrete goals. Think like a start-up This is the “lean” stuff. Try things, fail quickly, respond. Don’t restrict platforms Let the audience choose them, and be aware of their differences. For example, LinkedIn is very different to Twitter. Track your stats Related to the first point. Keeping an eye on the numbers lets you respond. They should be qualified, however. If you want a community of enterprise decision makers, headcount alone may be a bad metric – have you got CIOs, or just people who want to get jobs by mingling with CIOs? Build brand advocates Do things to involve people and make them awesome, and they’ll cheer-lead for you. The last part really got my attention. Little bits of drive-by kindness go a long way. But more than that, genuinely helping people turns them into powerful advocates. Harriet gave an example of the Guardian engaging with an aspiring journalist on its Q&A forums. Through a series of serendipitous encounters he became a BBC producer, and now enthusiastically speaks up for the Guardian community sites. Cultivating many small, authentic, influential voices may have a better pay-off than schmoozing the big guys. This could be particularly important in the context of Mark and Stephen’s models of social, endorsement-led, and example-led decision making. There’s a lot here I haven’t covered, and it may be worth some follow-up on community building. Thoughts I was quite sceptical of nudge theory and behavioural economics. First off it sounds too good to be true, and second it sounds too sinister to permit. But I haven’t done the background reading. So I’m going to, and if it seems to hold real water, and if it’s possible to do it ethically (Stephen’s presentations suggests it may be) then it’s probably worth exploring. The message seemed to be: change what people do, and they’ll work out why afterwards. Moreover, the people around them will do it too. Make the things you want them to do extraordinarily easy and very, very visible. Normalize and support the decisions you want them to make, and they’ll make them. In practice this means not talking about the thing, but showing the user-awesome. Glib? Perhaps. But it feels worth considering. Also, if I ever run a marketing conference, I’m going to ban speakers from using examples from Apple. Quite apart from not being consistently generalizable, it’s becoming an irritating cliché.

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  • Abstracting functionality

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/08/22/abstracting-functionality.aspxWhat is more important than data? Functionality. Yes, I strongly believe we should switch to a functionality over data mindset in programming. Or actually switch back to it. Focus on functionality Functionality once was at the core of software development. Back when algorithms were the first thing you heard about in CS classes. Sure, data structures, too, were important - but always from the point of view of algorithms. (Niklaus Wirth gave one of his books the title “Algorithms + Data Structures” instead of “Data Structures + Algorithms” for a reason.) The reason for the focus on functionality? Firstly, because software was and is about doing stuff. Secondly because sufficient performance was hard to achieve, and only thirdly memory efficiency. But then hardware became more powerful. That gave rise to a new mindset: object orientation. And with it functionality was devalued. Data took over its place as the most important aspect. Now discussions revolved around structures motivated by data relationships. (John Beidler gave his book the title “Data Structures and Algorithms: An Object Oriented Approach” instead of the other way around for a reason.) Sure, this data could be embellished with functionality. But nevertheless functionality was second. When you look at (domain) object models what you mostly find is (domain) data object models. The common object oriented approach is: data aka structure over functionality. This is true even for the most modern modeling approaches like Domain Driven Design. Look at the literature and what you find is recommendations on how to get data structures right: aggregates, entities, value objects. I´m not saying this is what object orientation was invented for. But I´m saying that´s what I happen to see across many teams now some 25 years after object orientation became mainstream through C++, Delphi, and Java. But why should we switch back? Because software development cannot become truly agile with a data focus. The reason for that lies in what customers need first: functionality, behavior, operations. To be clear, that´s not why software is built. The purpose of software is to be more efficient than the alternative. Money mainly is spent to get a certain level of quality (e.g. performance, scalability, security etc.). But without functionality being present, there is nothing to work on the quality of. What customers want is functionality of a certain quality. ASAP. And tomorrow new functionality needs to be added, existing functionality needs to be changed, and quality needs to be increased. No customer ever wanted data or structures. Of course data should be processed. Data is there, data gets generated, transformed, stored. But how the data is structured for this to happen efficiently is of no concern to the customer. Ask a customer (or user) whether she likes the data structured this way or that way. She´ll say, “I don´t care.” But ask a customer (or user) whether he likes the functionality and its quality this way or that way. He´ll say, “I like it” (or “I don´t like it”). Build software incrementally From this very natural focus of customers and users on functionality and its quality follows we should develop software incrementally. That´s what Agility is about. Deliver small increments quickly and often to get frequent feedback. That way less waste is produced, and learning can take place much easier (on the side of the customer as well as on the side of developers). An increment is some added functionality or quality of functionality.[1] So as it turns out, Agility is about functionality over whatever. But software developers’ thinking is still stuck in the object oriented mindset of whatever over functionality. Bummer. I guess that (at least partly) explains why Agility always hits a glass ceiling in projects. It´s a clash of mindsets, of cultures. Driving software development by demanding small increases in functionality runs against thinking about software as growing (data) structures sprinkled with functionality. (Excuse me, if this sounds a bit broad-brush. But you get my point.) The need for abstraction In the end there need to be data structures. Of course. Small and large ones. The phrase functionality over data does not deny that. It´s not functionality instead of data or something. It´s just over, i.e. functionality should be thought of first. It´s a tad more important. It´s what the customer wants. That´s why we need a way to design functionality. Small and large. We need to be able to think about functionality before implementing it. We need to be able to reason about it among team members. We need to be able to communicate our mental models of functionality not just by speaking about them, but also on paper. Otherwise reasoning about it does not scale. We learned thinking about functionality in the small using flow charts, Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams, pseudo code, or UML sequence diagrams. That´s nice and well. But it does not scale. You can use these tools to describe manageable algorithms. But it does not work for the functionality triggered by pressing the “1-Click Order” on an amazon product page for example. There are several reasons for that, I´d say. Firstly, the level of abstraction over code is negligible. It´s essentially non-existent. Drawing a flow chart or writing pseudo code or writing actual code is very, very much alike. All these tools are about control flow like code is.[2] In addition all tools are computationally complete. They are about logic which is expressions and especially control statements. Whatever you code in Java you can fully (!) describe using a flow chart. And then there is no data. They are about control flow and leave out the data altogether. Thus data mostly is assumed to be global. That´s shooting yourself in the foot, as I hope you agree. Even if it´s functionality over data that does not mean “don´t think about data”. Right to the contrary! Functionality only makes sense with regard to data. So data needs to be in the picture right from the start - but it must not dominate the thinking. The above tools fail on this. Bottom line: So far we´re unable to reason in a scalable and abstract manner about functionality. That´s why programmers are so driven to start coding once they are presented with a problem. Programming languages are the only tool they´ve learned to use to reason about functional solutions. Or, well, there might be exceptions. Mathematical notation and SQL may have come to your mind already. Indeed they are tools on a higher level of abstraction than flow charts etc. That´s because they are declarative and not computationally complete. They leave out details - in order to deliver higher efficiency in devising overall solutions. We can easily reason about functionality using mathematics and SQL. That´s great. Except for that they are domain specific languages. They are not general purpose. (And they don´t scale either, I´d say.) Bummer. So to be more precise we need a scalable general purpose tool on a higher than code level of abstraction not neglecting data. Enter: Flow Design. Abstracting functionality using data flows I believe the solution to the problem of abstracting functionality lies in switching from control flow to data flow. Data flow very naturally is not about logic details anymore. There are no expressions and no control statements anymore. There are not even statements anymore. Data flow is declarative by nature. With data flow we get rid of all the limiting traits of former approaches to modeling functionality. In addition, nomen est omen, data flows include data in the functionality picture. With data flows, data is visibly flowing from processing step to processing step. Control is not flowing. Control is wherever it´s needed to process data coming in. That´s a crucial difference and needs some rewiring in your head to be fully appreciated.[2] Since data flows are declarative they are not the right tool to describe algorithms, though, I´d say. With them you don´t design functionality on a low level. During design data flow processing steps are black boxes. They get fleshed out during coding. Data flow design thus is more coarse grained than flow chart design. It starts on a higher level of abstraction - but then is not limited. By nesting data flows indefinitely you can design functionality of any size, without losing sight of your data. Data flows scale very well during design. They can be used on any level of granularity. And they can easily be depicted. Communicating designs using data flows is easy and scales well, too. The result of functional design using data flows is not algorithms (too low level), but processes. Think of data flows as descriptions of industrial production lines. Data as material runs through a number of processing steps to be analyzed, enhances, transformed. On the top level of a data flow design might be just one processing step, e.g. “execute 1-click order”. But below that are arbitrary levels of flows with smaller and smaller steps. That´s not layering as in “layered architecture”, though. Rather it´s a stratified design à la Abelson/Sussman. Refining data flows is not your grandpa´s functional decomposition. That was rooted in control flows. Refining data flows does not suffer from the limits of functional decomposition against which object orientation was supposed to be an antidote. Summary I´ve been working exclusively with data flows for functional design for the past 4 years. It has changed my life as a programmer. What once was difficult is now easy. And, no, I´m not using Clojure or F#. And I´m not a async/parallel execution buff. Designing the functionality of increments using data flows works great with teams. It produces design documentation which can easily be translated into code - in which then the smallest data flow processing steps have to be fleshed out - which is comparatively easy. Using a systematic translation approach code can mirror the data flow design. That way later on the design can easily be reproduced from the code if need be. And finally, data flow designs play well with object orientation. They are a great starting point for class design. But that´s a story for another day. To me data flow design simply is one of the missing links of systematic lightweight software design. There are also other artifacts software development can produce to get feedback, e.g. process descriptions, test cases. But customers can be delighted more easily with code based increments in functionality. ? No, I´m not talking about the endless possibilities this opens for parallel processing. Data flows are useful independently of multi-core processors and Actor-based designs. That´s my whole point here. Data flows are good for reasoning and evolvability. So forget about any special frameworks you might need to reap benefits from data flows. None are necessary. Translating data flow designs even into plain of Java is possible. ?

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