Search Results

Search found 16554 results on 663 pages for 'programmers identity'.

Page 198/663 | < Previous Page | 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205  | Next Page >

• How can QA prevent defects?

  - by user970696

  Also according to Software Testing By Srinisvasan Desikan, Gopalaswamy Ramesh or ISTQB text books. Quality assurance is e.g. reviewing products, inspections, walkthroughs to see if all standards are being followed. This is preventive activity. I cannot see how this can be preventive? For the references: defect prevention (Quality Assurance) Software Testing By Srinisvasan Desikan, Gopalaswamy Ramesh Quality Assurance (QA) tries to go one step further. Instead of concentrating on post- facto defect detection and correction, it focusses on the prevention of defects from the very start. Managing Global Software Projects - Page 110 QA deals with prevention of defects in the product being developed. Software Testing and Quality Assurance

  Read the article

• Workflow versioning

  - by Nitra

  I believe I have a fundamental misunderstanding when it comes to workflow engines which I would appreciate if you could help me sort out. I'm not sure if my misunderstanding is specific to the workflow engine I'm using, or if it's a general misunderstanding. I happen to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). TLDR-version WWF allows you to implement business processes in long-running workflows (think months or even years). When started, the workflows can't be changed. But what business process can't change at any time? And if a business process changes, wouldn't you want your software to reflect this change for already started 'instances' of the business process? What am I missing? Background In WWF you define a workflow by combining a set of activites. There are different types of activities - some of them are for flow control, such as the IfElseActivity and the WhileActivty while others allows you to perform actual tasks, such as the CodeActivity wich allows you to run .NET code and the InvokeWebServiceActivity which allows you to call web services. The activites are combined to a workflow using a visual designer. You pretty much drag-and-drop activities from a toolbox to a designer area and connect the activites to each other. The workflow and activities have input paramters, output parameters and variables. We have a single workflow which sometimes runs in a matter of a few days, but it may run for 5-6 months. WWF takes care of persisting the workflow state (what activity are we currently executing, what are the variable values and so on). So far I think WWF makes sense. Some people will prefer to implement a software representation of a business process using a visual designer over writing all of it in code. So what's the issue then? What I don't really get is the following: WWF is designed to take care of long-running workflows. But at the same time, WWF has no built-in functionality which allows you to modify the running workflows. So if you model a business process using a workflow and run that for 6 months, you better hope that the business process does not change. Because if it do, you'll have to have multiple versions of the workflow executing at the same time. This seems like a fundamental design mistake to me, but at the same time it seems more likely that I've misunderstood something. For us, this has had some real-world effects: We release new versions every month, but some workflows may run for a year. This means that we have several versions of the workflow running in parallell, in other words several versions of the business logics. This is the same as having many differnt versions of your code running in production in the same system at the same time, which becomes a bit hard to understand for users. (depending on on whether they clicked a 'Start' button 9 or 10 months ago, the software will behave differently) Our workflow refers to different types of entities and since WWF now has persisted and serialized these we can't really refactor the entities since then existing workflows can't be resumed (deserialization will fail We've received some suggestions on how to handle this When we create a new version of the workflow, cancel all running workflows and create new ones. But in our workflows there's a lot of manual work involved and if we start from scratch a lot of people has to re-do their work. Track what has been done in the workflow and when you create a new one skip activites which have already been executed. I feel that this alternative may work for simple workflows, but it becomes hairy to automatically figure out what activities to skip if there's major refactoring done to a workflow. When we create a new version of the workflow, upgrade old versions using the new WWF 4.5 functionality for upgrading workflows. But then we would have to skip using the visual designer and write code to inject activities in the right places in the workflow. According to MSDN, this upgrade functionality is only intended for minor bug fixes and not larger changes. What am I missing?

  Read the article

• Should I list this work experience on my resume? [closed]

  - by Phoenix

  I am currently working at a company. I did an internship before this job with a prestigious company and project itself was challenging but it was in the initial phases and hence there were no tight schedules and we ended up doing brainstorming for the first month and the 2nd month actually setting up our hardware, which is linux servers in lab and a cluster administrator for the servers. And then i wrote an addin task which runs on the server and uses existing API to collect some statistics from the the servers in the cluster and feeding them into another entity which is basically an algorithm that calculates how the load on the servers should be automatically balanced. Neither of these things went into production by the time I left the company and I'm not even sure of their current state. Does it make sense to include it in my resume then? I also worked as a software engineer right out of school at another prestigious company for 9 months. I was involved in some bug fixes before the product launched and I don't even recollect the exact fixes I made to the product. So, will it make sense to have these experiences on my resume ? Will people question me about them and will saying it was bug fixes and mentioning what kind of fixes suffice as enough to justify my work ex there ?

  Read the article

• Object-Oriented equivalent of LISP's progn function?

  - by Archer

  I'm currently writing a LISP parser that iterates through some AutoLISP code and does its best to make it a little easier to read (changing prefix notation to infix notation, changing setq assignments to "=" assignments, etc.) for those that aren't used to LISP code/only learned object oriented programming. While writing commands that LISP uses to add to a "library" of LISP commands, I came across the LISP command "progn". The only problem is that it looks like progn is simply executing code in a specific order and sometimes (not usually) assigning the last value to a variable. Am I incorrect in assuming that for translating progn to object-oriented understanding that I can simply forgo the progn function and print the statements that it contains? If not, what would be a good equivalent for progn in an object-oriented language?

  Read the article

• is it possible to execute keyboard input programmaticly in linux?

  - by Taylor Hawkes

  For example is there a Linux command or way that I could from a program (c++ | python| or other) enter a serious of keyboard inputs that are interpreted as though they are keyboard inputs. I have a bad case of RSI from typing. To ease my pain I developed a voice controlled interface using pocket sphinx and a custom grammar and to run a number of very common commands. ex: "open chrome" , "open vim". basically what is shown here, but with slightly diff tools: http://bloc.eurion.net/archives/2008/writing-a-command-and-control-application-with-voice-recognition/ I have run into some limitation as I can only execute command line commands given a voice command. Rather than having a "voice command" - "command line command" mapping I would like to have "voice command" - "keyboard input" mapping. So when my active window is a browser and i type + n, and new tab opens. If i'm in vim and new vim tab opens. Any suggestions, ideas, tools or approaches to this problem would be much appreciated. I understand the answer may not be simple, but would like to develop it none the less.

  Read the article

• How to manage a developer who has poor communication skills

  - by djcredo

  I manage a small team of developers on an application which is in the mid-point of its lifecycle, within a big firm. This unfortunately means there is commonly a 30/70 split of Programming tasks to "other technical work". This work includes: Working with DBA / Unix / Network / Loadbalancer teams on various tasks Placing & managing orders for hardware or infrastructure in different regions Running tests that have not yet been migrated to CI Analysis Support / Investigation Its fair to say that the Developers would all prefer to be coding, rather than doing these more mundane tasks, so I try to hand out the fun programming jobs evenly amongst the team. Most of the team was hired because, though they may not have the elite programming skills to write their own compiler / game engine / high-frequency trading system etc., they are good communicators who "can get stuff done", work with other teams, and somewhat navigate the complex beaurocracy here. They are good developers, but they are also good all-round technical staff. However, one member of the team probably has above-average coding skills, but below-average communication skills. Traditionally, the previous Development Manager tended to give him the Programming tasks and not the more mundane tasks listed above. However, I don't feel that this is fair to the rest of the team, who have shown an aptitute for developing a well-rounded skillset that is commonly required in a big-business IT department. What should I do in this situation? If I continue to give him more programming work, I know that it will be done faster (and conversly, I would expect him to complete the other work slower). But it goes against my principles, and promotes the idea that you can carve out a "comfortable niche" for yourself simply by being bad at the tasks you don't like.

  Read the article

• dependency injection example project suggestion

  - by TokenMacGuy

  I'm exploring dependency injection and trying to make the exercise as pythonic as possible; existing dependency injection frameworks seem very java-like. I've made some pretty good progress building my own framework, but I could really use a model project to validate the framework against. An ideal suggestion would be something that is hard without dependency injection, but is otherwise conceptually trivial.

  Read the article

• Should I give the answer to a failed interview coding exercise?

  - by GlenH7

  We had a senior level interview candidate fail a nuance of the FizzBuzz question*. I mean, really, utterly, completely, failed the question - not even close. I even coached him through to thinking about using a loop and that 3 and 5 were really worth considering as special cases. He blew it. Just for QA purposes, I gave the same exact question to three teammates; gave them 5 minutes; and then came back to collect their pseudo-code. All of them nailed it and hadn't seen the question before. Two asked what the trick was... On a different logic exercise, the candidate showed some understanding of some of the features available within the language he chose to use (C#). So it's not as if he had never written a line of code. But his logic still stunk. My question is whether or not I should have given him the answer to the logic questions. He knew he blew them, and acknowledged it later in the interview. On the other hand, he never asked for the answer or what I was expecting to see. I know coding exercises can be used to set candidates up for failure (again, see second link from above). And I really tried to help him home in on answering the core of the question. But this was a senior level candidate and Fizz-Buzz is, frankly, ridiculously easy even with accounting for interview jitters. I felt like I should have shown him a way of solving the problem so that he could at least learn from the experience. But again, he didn't ask. What's the right way to handle that situation? *Okay, that's not the link to the actual FizzBuzz question, but it is a good P.SE discussion around FizzBuzz and links to the various aspects of it.

  Read the article

• A new name for unit tests

  - by Will

  I never used to like unit testing. I always thought it increased the amount of work I had to do. Turns out, that's only true in terms of the actual number of lines of code you write and furthermore, this is completely offset by the increase in the number of lines of useful code that you can write in an hour with tests and test driven development. Now I love unit tests as they allow me to write useful code, that quite often works first time! (knock on wood) I have found that people are reluctant to do unit tests or start a project with test driven development if they are under strict time-lines or in an environment where others don't do it, so they don't. Kinda like, a cultural refusal to even try. I think one of the most powerful things about unit testing is the confidence that it gives you to undertake refactoring. It also gives new found hope, that I can give my code to someone else to refactor/improve, and if my unit tests still work, I can use the new version of the library that they modified, pretty much, without fear. It's this last aspect of unit testing that I think needs a new name. The unit test is more like a contract of what this code should do now, and in the future. When I hear the word testing, I think of mice in cages, with multiple experiments done on them to see the effectiveness of a compound. This is not what unit testing is, we're not trying out different code to see what is the most affective approach, we're defining what outputs we expect with what inputs. In the mice example, unit tests are more like the definitions of how the universe will work as opposed to the experiments done on the mice. Am I on crack or does anyone else see this refusal to do testing and do they think it's a similar reason they don't want to do it? What reasons do you / others give for not testing? What do you think their motivations are in not unit testing? And as a new name for unit testing that might get over some of the objections, how about jContract? (A bit Java centric I know :), or Unit Contracts?

  Read the article

• Getting rid of Massive View Controller in iOS?

  - by Earl Grey

  I had a discussion with my colleague about the following problem. We have an application where we need filtering functionality. On any main screen within the upper navigation bar, there is a button in the upper right corner. Once you touch that button, an custom written Alert View like view will pop up modally, behind it a semitransparent black overlay view. In that modal view, there is a table view of options, and you can choose one exclusively. Based on your selection, once this modal view is closed, the list of items in the main view is filtered. It is simply a modally presented filter to filter the main table view.This UI design is dictated by the design department, I cannot do anything about it so let accept this as a premise. Also the main filter button in the navbar will change colours to indicate that the filter is active. The question I have is about implementation. I suggested to my colleague that we create a separate XYZFilter class that will be an instance created by the main view controller acquire the filtering options handle saving and restoration of its state - i.e. last filter selected provide its two views - the overlay view and the modal view be the datasource for the table in its modal view. For some unknown reason, my colleague was not impressed by that approach at all. He simply wants to do these functionalities in the main view controller, maybe out of being used to do this in the past like that :-/ Is there any fundamental problem with my approach? I want to keep the view controller small, not to have spaghetti code create a reusable component (for use outside the project) have more object oriented, decoupled approach. prevent duplication of code as we need the filtering in two different places but it looks the same in both.. Any advice?

  Read the article

• Should I break contract early?

  - by cbang

  About 7 months ago I made the switch from a 5 year permie role (as a support developer in C#) to a contract role. I did this because I was stagnating in my old role. The extra cash contracting is really helping too. Unfortunately my team leader has taken a dislike to me from day 1. He regularly tells me I went out contracting too early, and frequently remarks that people in their 20's have no idea what they are talking about (I am 29). I was recently given the task of configuring our reports via our in house reporting library. It works off of a database driven criteria base, with controls being loaded as needed. The configs can get fairly complex, with controls having various levels of dependency on each other. I had a short time frame to get 50 reports working, and I was told to just get the basic configuration done, after which they will be handed over to the reporting team for fine tuning, then the test team. Our updated system was deployed 2 weeks ago, and it turned out that about 15 reports had issues causing incorrect data to be returned. Upon investigation I discovered that the reporting team hadn't even looked at them, and the test team hadn't bothered to test the reports. In spite of this, my team leader has told me that it is 100% my fault. As a result, our help desk got hit hard. I worked back until 2am that night to fix the highest priority issues (on my wedding anniversary!). The next day I arrive at work at 7:45 am to continue with the fixes. I got no thanks, but keep getting repeatedly told by my manager that "I fucked up" and "this is all my fault". I told my team leader I would spend part of my weekend working to fix the remaining issues. His response was "so you fucking should! you fucked it all up!" in front of the rest of the team. I responded "No worries." and left. I spent a decent chunk of my weekend working on it. Within 2 business days of finding out about the issues, I had all the medium and high priority issues fixed. The only comments my team leader has made to me in the last 2 weeks is to tell me how I have caused a big mess, and to tell me it was all my fault. I get this multiple times a day. If I make any jokes to anyone else in the team, I get told not to be a smartass... even though the rest of the team jokes throughout the day. Apart from that, all I get is angry looks any time I am anywhere near the guy. I don't give any response other than "alright" or silence when he starts giving me a hard time. Today we found out that the pilot release for the next stage has been pushed back. My team leader has said this was caused by me (but the higher ups said no such thing). He also said I have "no understanding of the ramifications of my actions". My question is, should I break contract (I am contracted until June 30) and find another role? No one else in my team will speak up in my favour, as they are contractors too and have no interest in rocking the boat. I could complain to my team leaders boss, but I can't see that helping, as I will still be stuck in the same team. As this is my first contract, I imagine getting the next one will be hard without a reference. I can't figure out if this guy is trying to get me fired up to provoke a confrontation (the guy loves conflict), or if he is just venting anger, or what. Copping this blame day after day is really wearing me down and making me depressed... especially since I have a wife and kid to support).

  Read the article

• Data structures in functional programming

  - by pwny

  I'm currently playing with LISP (particularly Scheme and Clojure) and I'm wondering how typical data structures are dealt with in functional programming languages. For example, let's say I would like to solve a problem using a graph pathfinding algorithm. How would one typically go about representing that graph in a functional programming language (primarily interested in pure functional style that can be applied to LISP)? Would I just forget about graphs altogether and solve the problem some other way?

  Read the article

• Tomorrow's web development: What's the bearing?

  - by pex

  I just read a wonderful article about headaches web developers have to live with nowadays. Several questions from that article busied me for some time as well. Now I am wondering whether I missed something, whether there are approaches other than Sproutcore or Cappucino to combine the eternal detached worlds of backend and frontend. How to only write validations once? How to collect business logic in only one model? Are we heading toward a combination of CouchDB Views, NodeJS and minimalistic client-side scripts including plenty of XHR requests? Or shall we follow the direction of handling everything except the database on client side? Is everything about JavaScript? I simply ask for approaches of setting up the next web application, for best practices and promising new technologies and frameworks.

  Read the article

• How to Implement Complex Form Data?

  - by SoulBeaver

  I'm supposed to implement a relatively complex form that looks like follows, but has at least four more pages requiring the user to fill in all necessary information for the tracks: This data will need to be sent to the server, which is implemented using Dropwizard. I'm looking for best practices on how to upload and send such a complex form with potentially dozens of songs to the server. The simplest available solution I have seen is a simple multipart/form-data request with the following form schema (Source): Client <html> <body> <h1>File Upload with Jersey</h1> <form action="rest/file/upload" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <p> Select a file : <input type="file" name="file" size="45" /> </p> <input type="submit" value="Upload It" /> </form> </body> </html> Server @POST @Path("/upload") @Consumes(MediaType.MULTIPART_FORM_DATA) public Response uploadTrack(final FormDataMultiPart multiPart) { List<FormDataBodyPart> artists = multiPart.getFields("artist"); StringBuffer output = new StringBuffer(); for (FormDataBodyPart artist : artists) output.append(artist.getValueAs(String.class)); List<FormDataBodyPart> tracks = multiPart.getFields("track"); for (FormDataBodyPart track : tracks) writeToFile(track.getValueAs(InputStream.class), "Foo"); return Response.status(200).entity(output.toString()).build(); } Then I have also read about file uploads via Ajax or Formdata (Mozilla HttpRequest) which allows for Posts in the formats application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain. I don't know which approach, if any, is best. An ideal solution would be to utilize Jackson to convert a json string into my data objects, but I don't get the impression that this is possible with binary data.

  Read the article

• DOMDocument groupping nodes, with clone, nodeClone, importNode, fragment... What the better way?

  - by Peter Krauss

  A "DOMNodeList grouper" (groupList() function below) is a function that envelopes a set of nodes into a tag. Example: INPUT <root><b>10</b><a/><a>1</a><b>20</b><a>2</a></root> OUTPUT of groupList($dom->getElementsByTagName('a'),'G') <root><b>10</b> <G><a/><a>1</a><a>2</a></G> <b>20</b></root> There are many ways to implement it, what is the better? function groupList_v1(DOMNodeList &$list,$tag,&$dom) { $list = iterator_to_array($list); // to save itens $n = count($list); if ($n && $list[0]->nodeType==1) { $T = $dom->createDocumentFragment(); $T->appendChild($dom->createElement($tag)); for($i=0; $i<$n; $i++) { $T->firstChild->appendChild( clone $list[$i] ); if ($i) $list[$i]->parentNode->removeChild($list[$i]); } $dom->documentElement->replaceChild($T,$list[0]); }//if return $n; }//func function groupList_v2(DOMNodeList &$list,$tag,&$dom) { $list = iterator_to_array($list); // to save itens $n = count($list); if ($n && $list[0]->nodeType==1) { $T = $dom->createDocumentFragment(); $T->appendChild($dom->createElement($tag)); for($i=0; $i<$n; $i++) $T->firstChild->appendChild( clone $list[$i] ); $dom->documentElement->replaceChild($T,$list[0]); for($i=1; $i<$n; $i++) $list[$i]->parentNode->removeChild($list[$i]); }//if return $n; }//func // ... YOUR SUGGESTION ... // My ugliest function groupList_vN(DOMNodeList &$list,$tag,&$dom) { $list = iterator_to_array($list); // to save itens $n = count($list); if ($n && $list[0]->nodeType==1) { $d2 = new DOMDocument; $T = $d2->createElement($tag); for($i=0; $i<$n; $i++) $T->appendChild( $d2->importNode($list[$i], true) ); $dom->documentElement->replaceChild( $dom->importNode($T, true), $list[0] ); for($i=1; $i<$n; $i++) $list[$i]->parentNode->removeChild($list[$i]); }//if return $n; }//func Related questions: at stackoverflow, at codereview.

  Read the article

• Good Freelance models for web developers

  - by Matthew Underwood

  I am a web developer with four years of experience in PHP, MYSQL and experience in Javascript etc. One day I hope to develop a freelance career in web development. Areas of freelance that I am thinking of going towards includes Wordpress, Magento development along with bespoke applications. I am also thinking of doing some consultancy work for clients and businesses when I build up some more experience and technical knowledge. I want to offer a web development service to potential clients that plays on my strengths in what I know but most importantly has a market. Web development can cover so many subjects that its difficult to pick out the areas that have demand. I am also curious to find out if web developers offer services that bring in a monthly income e.g application maintenance or database maintenance? Is there a market for certain areas like WordPress plugins or bespoke applications? Are there certain things to avoid because of work duration, unrealistic client expectations or the fact that its impossible to find a market for it? As professional and experienced freelance web developers have you learned some important do's and don'ts? Is there certain services that the majority of web developers offer because its in high demand? This is the one area of web development freelancing that I cant get my head around. I know there is never a definitive answer but there must be some good practises and general consensus on this subject. Web designers design websites they offer a lump sum and get paid monthly sometimes to add new content, PPC and SEO consultants market sites to the top this will involve monthly payments, web development doesn’t seem so clear cut.

  Read the article

• Need Help in Pointing to focus on the Key elements in Code Review Phase?

  - by Sankar Ganesh

  Hi Friends, Let us share your views on the Code Review process, If someone gave a code snippet and ask you to review that code, then what are the major things you will focus on that code Review process. For Instance: I will check any dead code is available in that code, other than Checking Dead Code, what are the key elements to be focused on CODE REVIEW PROCESS. Thanks For Sharing Your Views Sankar Ganesh.S

  Read the article

• UML Class diagrams with Java packages?

  - by loosebruce

  I am trying to model in UML 2.0 a Java servlet application that has three classes Servlet class; essentially a main class that acts as the controller DatabaseLogic; contains methods for database operations XMLBuilder; builds an XML from a query result string The classes use a variety of packages from the Java library. I am unsure how to model this in UML Do I have to create a package and show which libraries are used for each individual class or can I just have one large package in the diagram with all the libraries showing which classes have dependencies on which. As per this diagram This is my first time working with java properly (im a C++ guy) Apart from being a bit messy , is this a correct UML representation of the system I described? Does a Package in UML mean the same as a Package in Java?

  Read the article

• How would you rank these programming skills in order of learning them? [closed]

  - by mumtaz

  As a general purpose programmer, what should you learn first and what should you learn later on? Here are some skills I wonder about... SQL Regular Expressions Multi-threading / Concurrency Functional Programming Graphics The mastery of your mother programming language's syntax/semantics/featureset The mastery of your base class framework libraries Version Control System Unit Testing XML Do you know other important ones? Please specify them... On which skills should I focus first?

  Read the article

• Is it possible to create a single tokenizer to parse this?

  - by Adrian

  This extends off this other Q&A thread, but is going into details that are out of scope from the original question. I am generating a parser that is to parse a context-sensitive grammar which can take in the following subset of symbols: ,, [, ], {, }, m/[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z_0-9]*/, m/[0-9]+/ The grammar can take in the following string { abc[1] }, } and parse it as ({, abc[1], }, }). Another example would be to take: { abc[1] [, } and parse it as ({, abc[1], [,, }). This is similar to the grammar used in Perl for the qw() syntax. The braces indicate that the contents are to be whitespace tokenized. A closing brace must be on its own to indicate the end of the whitespace tokenized group. Can this be done using a single lexer/tokenizer, or would it be necessary to have a separate tokenizer when parsing this group?

  Read the article

• No SQLCompact Edition Support IN VS 2013

  - by James Izzard

  Firstly apologies if this is a poor question - I am an engineer not a programmer. I have spent time moving from Visual Basic to C#. I have started C#/SQL tutorials. I have noticed VS 2013 has stopped supporting the compact edition database normally used for standalone desktop apps. Somebody has kindly written a plugin to re-implement support. I have also noticed a belief circulating that SQLite is to replace the compact edition. Would anybody be able to advise if this was accurate - I am slightly confused as to which database is best suited for desktop app development inside VS 2013. Any comment greatly appreciated. Cheers James

  Read the article

• I have 5 days of vouchers for MS training… help me choose? [closed]

  - by Shyatic

  I'm a Microsoft centric guy (systems engineering side) and I already know the syntax of VB, have done VBScript pretty extensively and Excel VBA stuff as well. I want to make the leap into proper programming, probably with C# because it teaches me syntax I can use for Java if I want to go that route at some point. Since I have vouchers for 5 days of programming, and I can understand logic and understand how the .NET framework works... I would love to hear ideas on which MS Courses I should take. My primary focus is to work on web applications with web services that interact and do neat stuff... like for example, to create a 'chat' room or something interactive on the web. Or should I do something with HTML5/JS? I am really not sure... like I said, I want to work to make web services/sites. Not making the next Facebook mind you, but I'd like to work towards something in that spectrum on a much smaller scale. Please give me any advice, I'd like to book these classes asap Obviously getting involved with SQL and things that I will require would be important here.. you guys know better than me! Thanks!

  Read the article

• Hallmarks of a Professional PHP Programmer

  - by Scotty C.

  I'm a 19 year old student who really REALLY enjoys programming, and I'm hoping to glean from your years of experience here. At present, I'm studying PHP every chance I get, and have been for about 3 years, although I've never taken any formal classes. I'd love to some day be a programmer full time, and make a good career of it. My question to you is this: What do you consider to be the hallmarks or traits of a professional programmer? Mainly in the field of PHP, but other, more generalized qualifications are also more than welcome, as I think PHP is more of a hobbyist language and may not be the language of choice in the eyes of potential employers. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Above all, I don't want to wast time on something that isn't worth while. I'm currently feeling pretty confident in my knowledge of PHP as a language, and I know that I could build just about anything I need and have it "work", but I feel sorely lacking in design concepts and code structure. I can even write object oriented code, but in my personal opinion, that isn't worth a hill of beans if it isn't organized well. For this reason, I bought Matt Zandstra's book "PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice" and have been reading that a little every day. Anyway, I'm starting to digress a little here, so back to the original question. What advice would you give to an aspiring programmer who wants to make an impact in this field? Also, on a side note, I've been working on a project with a friend of mine that would give a fairly good idea of where I'm at coding wise. I'm gonna give a link, I don't want anyone to feel as though I'm pushing or spamming here, so don't click it if you don't want to. But if you are interested on giving some feedback there as well, you can see the code on github. I'm known as The Craw there. https://github.com/PureChat/PureChat--Beta-/tree/

  Read the article

• Basic web architecture : Perl -> PHP

  - by Sunny Jim

  This is an architecture question. If there is a better forum, please redirect me. Apologies in advance. Essentially every website is built around a relational database, right? When a user uploads form data, that data is stored in a table. The problem is that the table structure(s) need to be modified whenever the website form is modified. Although I understand that modern web frameworks work around this problem by automatically building forms based on the table structure. For the last 20 years, I have been building websites using Perl. When I first encountered this problem, the easiest solution was to save serialized Perl objects as data BLOBS. After XML's introduction, this solution worked even better because XML is so effective for representing arbitrary data. This approach is consistent with the original Perl principles of Hubris, Laziness, and Impatience and I'm pretty committed to it. Obviously, the biggest drawback is that this solution locks me into the Perl interpreter. So instead, I've just completed a prototype of a universal RDB table. The prototype is written in Perl but porting it to PHP will be a good chance to develop those skills. The principal is based on the XML::Dumper module, which converts arbitrary Perl data structures into uniform XML. With my approach, each XML node is stored as a table record. I underestimated this undertaking and rolled something up myself. But the effort allows me to discuss the basic design instead of implementation details. As mentioned, I'm pretty committed to this approach of using flexible data structures. It's been successfully deployed on many websites, large, and complex. But are there any drawbacks I've overlooked? I rolled my own. Are other people taking a similar approach to their data? What kinds of solutions are available? I have not abandoned my dream of eventually contributing something useful to the worldwide community. In order to proceed, the next step would be peer review. How does one pursue that effort? Thanks! -Jim

  Read the article

• Approaching Java/JVM internals

  - by spinning_plate

  I've programmed in Java for about 8 years and I know the language quite well as a developer, but my goal is to deepen my knowledge of the internals. I've taken undergraduate courses in PL design, but they were very broad academic overviews (in Scheme, IIRC). Can someone suggest a route to start delving into the details? Specifically, are there particular topics (say, garbage collection) that might be more approachable or be a good starting point? Is there a decent high-level book on the internals of the JVM and the design of the Java programming language? My current approach is going to be to start with the JVM spec and research as needed.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205  | Next Page >