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• What to do if I am working on a language that I don't like

  - by Sayem Ahmed

  Hi there, I really don't know if this is the right place to ask this question, but if it isn't, then I guess someone will notify. Anyway, I am working in a software development farm which is currently using PowerBuilder to develop a mid-size ERP solution. The work environment and company management are so great that it may be the best in the whole Bangladesh. Only problem is the technology that are currently being used, which is this PowerBuilder. Now I am a guy who tends to prefer modern development technologies, like DI containers, ORM, TDD, JQuery etc. PowerBuilder is a great tool too, but I couldn' like the application techniques used to build PB applications. These techniques are so inheritance-dependent that many a times these create a great deal of sufferings. I remember two days ago I had to change some processing logic in a core user object and as a result I had to test and re-test all the forms that the application have(apparently, there are almost 20 forms there, each of them with 3-4 kinds of functionalities). Also, learning PB is tough, because online material on this thing is very, very low. I can't afford to read all the documentation that PB provide because I have hard deadlines on the work that I have to do. Another thing with PB is that applications tend to rely on business logic that are implemented on databases which causes debugging to be a nightmare. As a result, I don't feel motivated enough to work in this IDE/System/Framework (or whatever) anymore. My productivity has greatly decreased, and I am not delivering quality code. I think I have the following options available to me - Remain in the current job, keep delivering worse code and let my productivity decrease day by day, taking salaries and bonuses but not delivering quality codes/doing my job the way I should, Search for a new job. At this point number 2 seems a good option, but there are also some issues. As I mentioned before, our management may be the best in the country. Our company owner is himself a software developer with 24 years of experience in software development. He is currently our Team Leader and System Analyst. He is by far the greatest manager and boss I have ever seen. He understands developer's mentality very well(as he IS himself a developer). He is also a great, kind and generous guy. Our company is only a start-up company with 10 developers. Among them, only 3-4 people knows about the business logic behind the ERP, and I am one of them. If I switch my current job, it may hamper the development of this product which I really don't want. I couldn't decide what to do in this situation, so I turned to the community for advice.

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• May I use full-texted feed for my News Reader app?

  - by Mahdi Ghiasi

  I'm creating a news reader app. (Users will choose sources, but not the exact feed addresses. for example, they can choose Gizmodo but they will not see the exact url of Gizmodo's feed) Some of sources are giving partial feeds, and user must go to their website to read the complete article. My question is, May I make a fulltext version of their feed (for example, using this service) and use it instead of their feed in my News reader categories? Am I legally/ethically allowed to do this? What about using some other service like Readability? (Readability gives HTML page instead of feed as input, but anyway, output will be clean article without any advertises or such) Please note that some of these partial feeds may have some advertises inside, but the fulltext feed generators usually remove that advertises.

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• Is it legal and ethical to reverse engineer software to port it to another system?

  - by Igor Zinov'yev

  I love gaming, I love games that allow modding and I love linux. But the fact that most games right now are targeted for windows (consoles aside), most mods and modding tools are also targeted for windows. There is a certain modder called Boris Vorontsov that makes a famous visual overhaul mod series called ENB. What he does (or I think he does) is he enhances or changes the behavior of classes defined in the d3d9.dll library. Needless to say it almost never works under wine. Recently I have asked him if he would ever release his version of the library under some open license, and he said "no". Now that I think of it, even if he did release his code, he would have surely faced some legal problems. Now there is my question. Is it legal and ethical to reverse engineer his version of the library to adapt the wine's open source version of d3d9.dll to be able to run his mods?

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• I sold my source code to a client, can I now re-build similar code and sell to someone else?

  - by flashhag

  So we built a website and software for a client, charged our fee and handed over the code. The client then got a request from another company about the software. The client passed on the request but said since they owned the code they would need to recieve money for it. I'm thinking there are 2 options here: Work with the client as requested We've actually re-built the software, made it much better and use it for other projects. Am i in my rights to sell that direct to the company that enquired about it instead of going through the client? Any help on this would be much appreciated

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• Would this be viewed poorly amongst the programming community?

  - by Eric P

  So one of my responsibilities at work is to build an internal tool that helps the workers enter in all their information. It's an enterprise application that is similar to a Windows forms database tool. So it's not much different than like developing a Word + Excel combo application, but the average person in this workgroup is a 20-40 year old woman or a random chatty male type. Plus I know all of these people are heavily involved with Facebook on a daily basis. How bad would it be if I styled my new interface to be similar to what Facebook does. People could get award points and stuff when they fill out different types of forms and basically compete against each other like it was a game. When people had completed one, it would be posted on their wall and everyone could comment/like stuff just like in Facebook. And it would be like they are doing peer reviewing for fun. The rewards would be outstanding I would imagine. These people are so into Facebook and Facebook games that productivity would rise due to them trying to compete and earn points and achievements. Would this be taking advantage of the people by 'tricking them into working harder by giving them a game' or would it be viewed as something that would improve happiness at work?

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• Legal concern over "borrowed" code

  - by iandisme

  A company my friend works for (let's call him Me) recently unveiled a new face for their internal "networking" website. This new face looks remarkably like Facebook, and indeed, examination of the source code reveals that it's almost identical: The code, class names, and even the fonts are the same. There is also no indication that Facebook is in any way involved or aware. I know this is unethical, but is it illegal? I can't find anything concrete about this to help Me decide what to do about it. EDIT: We're talking front-end code. It does not appear to be linking to Facebook in any way.

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• Would adding award points or game features to workplace software be viewed poorly amongst the programming community?

  - by Eric P

  So one of my responsibilities at work is to build an internal tool that helps the workers enter in all their information. It's an enterprise application that is similar to a Windows forms database tool. So it's not much different than like developing a Word + Excel combo application, but the average person in this workgroup is a 20-40 year old woman or a random chatty male type. Plus I know all of these people are heavily involved with Facebook on a daily basis. How bad would it be if I styled my new interface to be similar to what Facebook does. People could get award points and stuff when they fill out different types of forms and basically compete against each other like it was a game. When people had completed one, it would be posted on their wall and everyone could comment/like stuff just like in Facebook. And it would be like they are doing peer reviewing for fun. The rewards would be outstanding I would imagine. These people are so into Facebook and Facebook games that productivity would rise due to them trying to compete and earn points and achievements. Would this be taking advantage of the people by 'tricking them into working harder by giving them a game' or would it be viewed as something that would improve happiness at work?

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• What's the ethos of the programming profession?

  - by mac

  I am one of those people who became professional programmer by chance, rather than by choice: I moved to a country whose main language I couldn't speak, I knew how to code... and here I am a few years later. Because of this I never really gave much a thought about the ethos of being a programmer, and working as a freelance I neither had many occasions to discuss this with fellow colleagues. Among others, Dictionary.com define the word ethos as follows: The fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; dominant assumptions of a people or period. So my question is: How would you describe the ethos of being a programmer, and why would you say so? Please note that: my question is different than this and this other ones (although you might have chosen to become a programmer because of the programmer'ethos or you might think that part of the programmer ethos is about "programming being a meaningful profession"). beside the "how/what" part of the question, there is a "why" part too! :) I would appreciate if the answer could be based not only on the idealised vision of the hero-programmer, but also on real working and life experience. Thank you in advance for your time and contributions!

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• Is it common to lie in job ads regarding the technologies in use?

  - by Desolate Planet

  Wanted: Experienced Delphi programmer to maintain ginormous legacy application and assist in migration to C# Later on, as the new hire settles into his role... "Oh, that C# migration? Yeah, we'd love to do that. But management is dead-set against it. Good thing you love Pascal, eh?" I've noticed quite a lot of this where I live (Scotland) and I'm not sure how common this is across IT: a company is using a legacy technology and they know that most developers will avoid them to keep mainstream technology on their resumes. So, they will put out a advertisement saying they are looking to move their product to some hip new tech (C#, Ruby, FORTRAN 99) and require someone who has exposure to both - but the migration is just a carrot on a stick, perpetually hung in front of the hungry developer as he spends each day maintaining the legacy app. I've experienced this myself, and heard far too many similar stories to the point where it seems like common practice. I've learned over time that every company has legacy problems of some sort, but I fail to see why they can't be honest about it. It should be common sense to any developer that the technology in place is there to support the business and not the other way round. Unless the technology is hurting the business in someway, I hardly see any just cause for reworking the software stack to be made up whatever is currently vogue in the industry. Would you say that this is commonplace? If so, how can I detect these kinds of leading advertisements beforehand?

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• How to recover after embarrassing yourself and your company?

  - by gaearon

  I work in an outsourcing company in Russia, and one of our clients is a financial company located in USA. For the last six months I have been working on several projects for this particular company, and as I was being assigned a larger project, I was invited to work onsite in USA in order to understand and learn the new system. Things didn't work out as well as I hoped because the environment was messy after original developers, and I had to spent quite some time to understand the quirks. However we managed to do the release several days ago, and it looks like everything's going pretty smooth. From technical perspective, my client seems to be happy with me. My solutions seem to work, and I always try to add some spark of creativity to what I do. However I'm very disorganized in a certain sense, as I believe many of you fellas are. Let me note that my current job is my first job ever, and I was lucky enough to get a job with flexible schedule, meaning I can come in and out of the office whenever I want as long as I have 40 hours a week filled. Sometimes I want to hang out with friends in the evening, and days after that I like to have a good sleep in the morning—this is why flexible schedule (or lack of one) is ideal fit for me. [I just realized this paragraph looks too serious, I should've decorated it with some UNICORNS!] Of course, after coming to the USA, things changed. This is not some software company with special treatment for the nerdy ones. Here you have to get up at 7:30 AM to get to the office by 9 AM and then sit through till 5 PM. Personally, I hate waking up in the morning, not to say my productivity begins to climb no sooner than at 5 o'clock, i.e. I'm very slow until I have to go, which is ironic. Sometimes I even stay for more than 8 hours just to finish my current stuff without interruptions. Anyway, I could deal with that. After all, they are paying for my trip, who am I to complain? They need me to be in their working hours to be able to discuss stuff. It makes perfect sense that fixed schedule doesn't make any sense for me. But it does makes sense that it does make sense for my client. And I am here for client, therefore sense is transferred. Awww, you got it. I was asked several times to come exactly at 9 AM but out of laziness and arrogance I didn't take these requests seriously enough. This paid off in the end—on my last day I woke up 10 minutes before final status meeting with business owner, having overslept previous day as well. Of course this made several people mad, including my client, as I ignored his direct request to come in time for two days in the row, including my final day. Of course, I didn't do it deliberately but certainly I could've ensured that I have at least two alarms to wake me up, et cetera...I didn't do that. He also emailed my boss, calling my behavior ridiculous and embarrassing for my company and saying “he's not happy with my professionalism at all”. My boss told me that “the system must work both in and out” and suggested me to stay till late night this day working in a berserker mode, fixing as many issues as possible, and sending a status email to my client. So I did, but I didn't receive the response yet. These are my questions to the great programmers community: Did you have situations where your ignorance and personal non-technical faults created problems for your company? Were you able to make up for your fault and stay in a good relationship with your client or boss? How? How would you act if you were in my situation?

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• I think client's project will be a flop; should I discuss with him? [closed]

  - by WeaklyTyped

  I have a meeting with a prospective client tomorrow for a certain e-commerce project he wants to commission. I had an overview of it over the phone and from what I understand there are gazillion such concepts already floating and most of them are disasters and I have reasons to believe that his project is significantly likely to have the same fate. Should I raise/discuss the commercial feasibility of his idea with him or simply accept the project, give my best and leave out all the rest?

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• My Last "Catch-Up" Post for 2010 Content

  - by KKline

  I did a lot of writing in 2010. Unfortunately, I didn't do a good job of keeping all of that writing equally distributed throughout all of the channels where I'm active. So here are a few more posts from my blog, put on-line during the months of November and December 2010, that I didn't get posted here on SQLBlog.com: 1. It's Time to Upgrade! So many of my customers and many of you, dear readers, are still on SQL Server 2005. Join Kevin Kline , SQL Server MVP and SQL Server Technology Strategist...(read more)

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• Disruption

  - by andyleonard

  Introduction This post is the thirty-first part of a ramble-rant about the software business. The current posts in this series are: Goodwill, Negative and Positive Visions, Quests, Missions Right, Wrong, and Style Follow Me Balance, Part 1 Balance, Part 2 Definition of a Great Team The 15-Minute Meeting Metaproblems: Drama The Right Question Software is Organic, Part 1 Metaproblem: Terror I Don't Work On My Car A Turning Point Human Doings Everything Changes Getting It Right The First Time One-Time...(read more)

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• Inspiring the method of teaching. Example- C++ :)

  - by Ashwin

  A year ago I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering. Considering C++ as the first choice of programming language I have been in the process of learning C++ in many ways. At first - five years back - I had many conceptions, most of which were so abstract to me. It started when I knew almost everything about Structs in C and nothing about Classes in C++. I went through a great time experimenting them all and learning a lot. I had a hard time evaluating Procedural programming vs Object-Oriented Programming. Deciding when to choose Procedural or Object-Oriented Programming took a great deal of patience for me. I knew that I cannot underestimate any of these Programming styles... Though Procedural programming is often a better choice than simple sequential unstructured programming, when solving problems with procedural programming, we usually divide one problem into several steps in order regarded as functions. Then we call these functions one by one to get the result of the problem. When solving problems with Object Oriented Priciples we divide one problem into several classes and form the interaction between them. Evaluating these two at the beginning (as a learner) required a lot of inspiration and thoughts. Instructing to think step by step. Relative concepts to understand deeply. Intensive interests to contrast both solving in both POP and OOP. If you were ever a mentor: What ideas/methods would you teach to students in which it will Inspire them to learn a programming language (in general, computer sciences)?

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• Is there a difference between "self-plagiarizing" in programming vs doing so as a writer?

  - by makerofthings7

  I read this Gawker article about how a writer reused some of his older material for new assignments for different magazines. Is there any similar ethical (societal?) dilemma when doing the same thing in the realm of Programming? Does reusing a shared library you've accumulated over the years amount to self-plagarizm? What I'm getting at is that it seems that the creative world of software development isn't as stringent regarding self-plagarism as say journalism or blogging. In fact on one of my interviews at GS I was asked what kind of libraries I've developed over the years, implying that me getting the job would entail co-licensing helpful portions of code to that company. Are there any cases where although it's legal to self-plagarize, it would be frowned upon in the software world?

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• Building a company and want to know how ethical to put samples from projects I did before on the new company website

  - by Amr ElGarhy

  I built a lot of websites and applications during my life, I can put them under the following categories: Did all the project as a freelancer - For other companies Did part of the project as a freelancer - For other companies Did all the project my self while was working for another company Did the project with team members while was working for another company Did all the project my self and for my self Now I am creating a company with a new brand and have my own employees, My question is: Is it ethical, and normal to put on my new company website, screenshots and info about these projects I created my self before? which to put and which not put from the previous categories?

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• Extracting main article from webpage/feed. Is it legal/ethical?

  - by Mahdi Ghiasi

  There are some applications like Readability and Pocket, which are letting users to read the main content of web pages, in a clean interface or such. But the articles should be bookmarked from another application, or the web browser. However, I'm creating a news reader app (Zite and Flipboard are popular news reader apps), and I want to create a clean experience for users, so I want to show full content of articles inside my application. Some websites have fulltext feeds, and I'm using it. But about some other websites, which don't have full text feeds: I want to know, is it legal/ethical to use for example Readability API (Or maybe writing my own code for this) to show full text of articles inside my application?

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• About plagiarism

  - by user20018

  Hi I don't know if it is appropriate to ask this question here. The moderator can delete this question after getting answered if he finds this question as inappropriate in this forum I'm performing a project course work in my computer science department. For example I don't know how to develop logic for some requirements in my project and I find the code in some tutorial. If i implement the feature along the same lines mentioned in that tutorial. Does it constitute academic plagiarism ?? Thank you in anticipation.

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• How do I convince my boss that it's OK to use an application to access an outside website?

  - by Cyberherbalist

  That is, if you agree that it's OK. We have a need to maintain an accurate internal record of bank routing numbers, and my boss wants me to set up a process where once a week someone goes to the Federal Reserve's website, clicks on the link to get the list of routing numbers (or the link giving the updates since a particular date), and then manually uploads the resultant text file to an application that will make the update to our data. I told him that a manual process was not at all necessary, and that I could write a routine that would access the FED's routing numbers in the application that keeps our data updated, and put it on whatever schedule was appropriate. But he is greatly opposed to doing this, and calls it "hacking the Federal Reserve website." I think he's afraid that the FED is going to get after us. I showed him the FED's robot.txt file, and the only thing it forbids is an automated indexing of pages with extension .cf*: User-agent: * # applies to all robots Disallow: CF # disallow indexing of all CF* directories and pages This says nothing about accessing the same data automatically that you could access manually. Anyone have a good counterargument to the idea that we'd be "hacking" the FED?

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• Is it unethical to sell the award of a competition? [closed]

  - by Ahmet Yildirim

  This summer, i won a competition held by microsoft & nokia... Winners from each uni. received an high-end smartphone... Knowing that particular "high-end smartphone" had not much user to develop for, as soon as i receive it, i put an ad on a ebay-like site to sell it. Eventually i exchanged it with a tablet which had high developer demand & many many users to develop for , so i could make money by developing for it. I also email microsoft asking, when something technical goes wrong with the device , can i get it fixed by warranty. Which i never received a respond. Later on, after a while... I got some feedback from a connection i have from nokia, regarding sale of the device & asking for the warranty.. He says and i quote : " They say, they werent happy that you sold the device and got offended that you asked for warranty. You should not expect anything at all from microsoft or nokia in the future. " I was like what the frak, they didnt gave it to me as a gift, i won it in a competition as an award , it is my right to do whatever i want. How ethical is that , they dont respond to my email directly? Is it unethical to sell a gadget you won in a competition? Is it unethical to ask for warranty on award?

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• Attributes of an Ethical Programmer?

  - by ahmed

  Software that we write has ramifications in the real world. If not, it wouldn't be very useful. Thus, it has the potential to sweep across the world faster than a deadly manmade virus or to affect society every bit as much as genetic manipulation. Maybe we can't see how right now, but in the future our code will have ever-greater potential for harm or good. Of course, there's the issue of hacking. That's clearly a crime. Or is it that clear? Isn't hacking acceptable for our government in the event of national security? What about for other governments? Cases of life-and-death emergency? Tracking down deadbeat parents? Screening the genetic profile of job candidates? Where is the line drawn? Who decides? Do programmers have responsibility for how their code is used? What if a programmer writes code to pry into confidential information or copy-protected material? Does he bear responsibility along with the person who used the program? What about a programmer who knowingly or unknowingly writes code to "fix the books?" Should he be liable?

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• Why do we keep using CSV?

  - by Stephen

  Why do we keep using CSV? I recently made a shift to working the health domain and despite the wonderful work in data transfer standards, all data transfer is in CSV, both for reporting to external organisations, and for data migrations when implementing new systems. Unfortunately the use of CSV is the cause of the endless repetition of the same stupid errors, with the same waste of developer time. (bad escaping, failing to handle null fields etc.) I know we can do better, and anything between JSON and XML (depending on the instance) would be fine. (Most of the time this is data going from one MS SQLserver 2005 to another!) I feel as if each time I see this happening I am literally watching one developer waste anothers time. So why do we keep shafting each other? When will we stop?

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• What is considered to be a "modification" of sources under the BSD license?

  - by Den

  I have a question about the 3-clause BSD license based on it's Wiki description. It states: Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: ... What is understood by "modification"? Specifically I am interested whether any/all of the following is considered as such modification: 1) reading the original sources and then re-implementing; 2) reading the original sources, waiting for a year and then re-implementing something based on whatever you could remember; 3) direct and very significant "complete" refactoring of the original sources.

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• What to expect during an interview with Senior Development Exec?

  - by Umanga

  I passed first two technical interviews at a global e-commerce company for the position of Senior Software Engineer. I was told that there are two more interviews ,one with "Senior Development Exec" and another with "HR". 1) I am wondering what kind of questions I should expect during the interview with "Senior Development Exec"? Is is technical,high level architecture related ..etc? 2) During HR interviews,is it Ok to ask about the work-life balance and actual working hours?

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• Is it ethical for a programmer to promote his/her own library?

  - by Kit Menke

  Fairly recently I started maintaining my own open source JavaScript library. I created it to solve a pretty specific need but fairly regularly see questions that can be solved (in whole/part) by using my library. I've always gone ahead to post my answer including my library and make sure to always include a disclosure specifying that I maintain it. I feel for open source projects this may not be such a big deal but where do you draw the line? (ex: commercial products) Is it ethical for a programmer to promote is own library? When is it not?

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