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• Graphic card for parallel programming vs traditional methods

  - by Sambatyon

  With a simple search in amazon one can see that the modern approach for parallel programming is to use your graphic card. However I am still a little bit skeptical about it. My last computer has an 8 core CPU which I need is enough for basic all my parallel needs, if I need more I will probably use MPI through a network using my old machines. All in all, Why and/or when should I use CUDA or another method which uses my graphic card instead of traditional methods like pthreads, java threads, boost threads or the new C++ 11 threads? What about using processes?

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• How do I create my own programming language and a compiler for it

  - by Dave

  I am thorough with programming and have come across languages including BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, LOGO, Java, C++, C, MATLAB, Mathematica, Python, Ruby, Perl, Javascript, Assembly and so on. I can't understand how people create programming languages and devise compilers for it. I also couldn't understand how people create OS like Windows, Mac, UNIX, DOS and so on. The other thing that is mysterious to me is how people create libraries like OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenCV, Cocoa, MFC and so on. The last thing I am unable to figure out is how scientists devise an assembly language and an assembler for a microprocessor. I would really like to learn all of these stuff and I am 15 years old. I always wanted to be a computer scientist some one like Babbage, Turing, Shannon, or Dennis Ritchie. I have already read Aho's Compiler Design and Tanenbaum's OS concepts book and they all only discuss concepts and code in a high level. They don't go into the details and nuances and how to devise a compiler or operating system. I want a concrete understanding so that I can create one myself and not just an understanding of what a thread, semaphore, process, or parsing is. I asked my brother about all this. He is a SB student in EECS at MIT and hasn't got a clue of how to actually create all these stuff in the real world. All he knows is just an understanding of Compiler Design and OS concepts like the ones that you guys have mentioned (ie like Thread, Synchronisation, Concurrency, memory management, Lexical Analysis, Intermediate code generation and so on)

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• Can non-IT people handle a wiki?

  - by Andrew Heath

  (I'm hoping that some of you will have encountered this issue before and can offer some insights...) My company is looking to improve their market research data management. Current data management style: "Hey Jimbo, where's that picture of our WhatZit 2.0? "yeah I remember that email about that company from that guy, gimme a few minutes to search my Outlook" "who has the newest copy of the Important Competitor's product catalogue? Mine is from '09." ... "Colleen does, and she's on maternity leave. You'll have to call her to get her workstation password..." Desired data management style: data organized neatly by topic (legal, economic, industrial, competitor) for each topic, multiple media types stored together (company product images, press releases, contact info) but still neatly sorted by type data editing histories communal access (no data silos) I was thinking about setting up a department wiki for all users to access. It seems to satisfy the four criteria above, but I'm a little concerned about how user-friendly (read: decipherable to non-technical people) it is for the more advanced features like image galleries, article formatting, and the like. Has anyone here setup a wiki for non-IT people and had it not catch on fire//become a ghost town//look like Geocities? Bonus question: can you see any obvious drawbacks to my choice of MediaWiki (or any other wiki) for solving this problem? Thank you.

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• Are certain problems solved more elegantly with AOP?

  - by Winston Ewert

  I've come across the idea of Aspect Oriented Programming, and I have some concerns with it. The basic idea seems to be that we want to take cross-cutting concerns which aren't well modularized using object and modularize them. That is all very fine and well. But the implementation of AOP seems to be that of modifying code from outside of the module. So, for example, an aspect could be written that changes what happens when a particular object is passed as a parameter in a function. This seems to go directly against the idea of modules. I should not be able to modify a module's behavior from outside of that module, otherwise the whole point of modules are overturned. But aspects seem to be doing exactly that! Basically, aspects seems to be a form of code patching. It may useful for some quick hacks; but, as a general principle perhaps its not something you want to do. Aspect Oriented Programming seems to me taking a bad practice and raising to a general design principle. Is AOP a good practice? Are certain programming problems solved more elegantly with AOP?

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• SQL: empty string vs NULL value

  - by Jacek Prucia

  I know this subject is a bit controversial and there are a lot of various articles/opinions floating around the internet. Unfortunatelly, most of them assume the person doesn't know what the difference between NULL and empty string is. So they tell stories about surprising results with joins/aggregates and generally do a bit more advanced SQL lessons. By doing this, they absolutely miss the whole point and are therefore useless for me. So hopefully this question and all answers will move subject a bit forward. Let's suppose I have a table with personal information (name, birth, etc) where one of the columns is an email address with varchar type. We assume that for some reason some people might not want to provide an email address. When inserting such data (without email) into the table, there are two available choices: set cell to NULL or set it to empty string (''). Let's assume that I'm aware of all the technical implications of choosing one solution over another and I can create correct SQL queries for either scenario. The problem is even when both values differ on the technical level, they are exactly the same on logical level. After looking at NULL and '' I came to a single conclusion: I don't know email address of the guy. Also no matter how hard i tried, I was not able to sent an e-mail using either NULL or empty string, so apparently most SMTP servers out there agree with my logic. So i tend to use NULL where i don't know the value and consider empty string a bad thing. After some intense discussions with colleagues i came with two questions: am I right in assuming that using empty string for an unknown value is causing a database to "lie" about the facts? To be more precise: using SQL's idea of what is value and what is not, I might come to conclusion: we have e-mail address, just by finding out it is not null. But then later on, when trying to send e-mail I'll come to contradictory conclusion: no, we don't have e-mail address, that @!#$ Database must have been lying! Is there any logical scenario in which an empty string '' could be such a good carrier of important information (besides value and no value), which would be troublesome/inefficient to store by any other way (like additional column). I've seen many posts claiming that sometimes it's good to use empty string along with real values and NULLs, but so far haven't seen a scenario that would be logical (in terms of SQL/DB design). P.S. Some people will be tempted to answer, that it is just a matter of personal taste. I don't agree. To me it is a design decision with important consequences. So i'd like to see answers where opion about this is backed by some logical and/or technical reasons.

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• How to choose a new technology for mastering and not lose sense of reality and practicality?

  - by Eyewan

  How to choose the right next step in learning programming and mastering new technologies? I have experience with WinForms applications in C# .NET. Next what I see as a good area of expanding the knowledge is ASP.NET. Language I already know, C #, so I think there is now more a matter of mastering new technologies. Also I have interest in WPF. Perhaps the best is to work on ASP.NET and WPF at the same time. Sometimes the problem is when we do not have motivation, but also known to become a problem when we want to much :) How to choose a new technology for mastering and not lose sense of reality and practicality?

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• KISS principle applied to programming language design?

  - by Giorgio

  KISS ("keep it simple stupid", see e.g. here) is an important principle in software development, even though it apparently originated in engineering. Citing from the wikipedia article: The principle is best exemplified by the story of Johnson handing a team of design engineers a handful of tools, with the challenge that the jet aircraft they were designing must be repairable by an average mechanic in the field under combat conditions with only these tools. Hence, the 'stupid' refers to the relationship between the way things break and the sophistication available to fix them. If I wanted to apply this to the field of software development I would replace "jet aircraft" with "piece of software", "average mechanic" with "average developer" and "under combat conditions" with "under the expected software development / maintenance conditions" (deadlines, time constraints, meetings / interruptions, available tools, and so on). So it is a commonly accepted idea that one should try to keep a piece of software simple stupid so that it easy to work on it later. But can the KISS principle be applied also to programming language design? Do you know of any programming languages that have been designed specifically with this principle in mind, i.e. to "allow an average programmer under average working conditions to write and maintain as much code as possible with the least cognitive effort"? If you cite any specific language it would be great if you could add a link to some document in which this intent is clearly expressed by the language designers. In any case, I would be interested to learn about the designers' (documented) intentions rather than your personal opinion about a particular programming language.

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• Named arguments (parameters) as a readability aid

  - by Damian Mehers

  A long time ago I programmed a lot in ADA, and it was normal to name arguments when invoking a function - SomeObject.DoSomething(SomeParameterName = someValue); Now that C# supports named arguments, I'm thinking about reverting to this habit in situations where it might not be obvious what an argument means. You might argue that it should always be obvious what an argument means, but if you have a boolean argument, and callers are passing in "true" or "false" then qualifying the value with the name makes the call site more readable. contentFetcher.DownloadNote(note, manual : true); I guess I could create Enums instead of using true or false (Manual, Automatic in this case). What do you think about occasionally using named arguments to make code easier to read?

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• What is the best C++ interview question?

  - by David Thielen

  If you could ask a C++ programmer one question to measure their C++ skills, what would it be? The question I think is best is: Can you call "delete this;" inside a member function? (I put this as a link so you can think it through first, then go to The Best C++ Interview Question – Ever! to see the correct answer.) I don't ask this because I expect most people to know the answer. If they did it would not be that useful a question. I ask to see if they can work their way to the correct answer and how they do so.

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• What are the common mistakes in 'tailored Scrum approaches'?

  - by Clark Gable

  I have seen this before. Management wants to be agile and be scrummified, but does not want to step out of the status quo. My latest observation is no different; here, the Scrum is 'tailored' to the organization; specifically into a weird many-people-process. The diagram showing the different participants. I am putting together a document listing why this will not work. Here are the obvious ones: 1. There are product owner agents (an obvious WTF), who report to the product owner: causing dilution of decision making capability 2. There is a role that looks similar to a manager in the traditional approach - development manager: an obvious attempt at command-and-control model 3. The ScrumMaster's role includes collecting timesheets, which are used to track progress instead of burndown charts: detrimental to agile's efforts to build teams with motivated individuals Leaving the question "how would you convince the management?", my question is more at, "what else do you see as failures in this/similar 'tailored Scrum approaches'? EDIT: The diagram might use a few more details 1. The development manager is not part of the development team, with not very clearly defined responsibilities, except: developer performance assessemnt, recruitment, etc., 2. There are more than two teams (with ScrumMaster+development manager+dev team) with the same product owner for all teams!

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• Opinion of OSCON?

  - by 16bytes

  This year I have the opportunity to travel to the conference of my choice and thus far have been looking at OSCON. For those who have attended, what is your opinion of the conference? Any tips/tricks? Any tips to effectively plan what to see/attend? Any suggestions for lesser known conferences? As a working programmer, my interest is pretty general; I want to learn more about up-and-coming tech that I may have a chance to use and/or use more effectively.

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• Open Source sponsored feature development

  - by Suma

  I am considering to sponsor a development of some particular features in some Open Source tools. I would like the results of the work to be available publicly, and if possible, to be included in the main product line. The features are usually something which is of general use, but not very critical, and no one has currently a plan to develop it. For illustration, imagine I would like to use MinGW for Win32 development, but I miss a post mortem debugging option, I would like this feature to be implemented and I am willing to pay $1000 for it. Is there some common way how to proceed, or is this wildly per-project dependent? Are there some general guidelines how to contact the product developers, or are there some common meeting places where smart open source people who might interested to participate in such sponsored development meet, which I should visit to advertise the sponsoring option? Are there some specific ways how to talk about the job to be more attractive to people participating in open source (e.g. it might be more interesting for them to participate in a contest than just to take a payed job, which might have a bit of mundane feel)? Or perhaps is this something which you think has little chance to succeed, because perhaps money has very little value for open source developers? Any tips and experiences from someone who has some experience of open source sponsorhip from any side (sponsor or the developer) are welcome.

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• How to convince my boss to improve code quality?

  - by Vimvq1987

  The place I'm working for is a service provider. We have a lot of services, which are written to deal with deadline, so their code are really terrible: No coding convention, everyone codes in his own style No unit testing (which is really bad) No refactoring (which is truly worse) No automation build/deployment etc and these code are used again and again, so bad code continue to spread all over my department. I really want to set up a standard quality for our code, by requiring everyone to follow "rules": every line of code which does not follow convention will be rejected, and every function of code which does not pass unit testing will not be committed,...But I don't know how to convince my boss to allow me to do this. I'm relatively new comer, so inspiring people from my works is really hard, and I think it's easier if my boss support me to this. Thank you very much for your advices

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• Finding Telecommuting Opportunities as a Recent College Graduate

  - by stanigator

  Reading the answers to hiring practices of remote vs. local employees and freelance programming sites, I would like to add this question to the mix. I am a recent college graduate from an electrical engineering background with 2 years worth of work terms in programming (C, C++, VBA, Matlab, etc.) while I was still in school. While I am interested in learning other software tools (such as Python, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, etc.), I want to use the tools I have now in a telecommuting role while I grow my toolset. Despite having 2 years of work experience (and I've lost track of when I have started programming), my status as a recent college graduate may be an obstacle of my credibility to compete for telecommuting (or in fact any) programming opportunities. I don't know how I can go about finding telecommute programming opportunities for someone with my situation. Overall, many of previous places I've worked at liked my work. What are your suggestions? Thanks in advance!

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• Where to place the R code for R+Sweave+LaTeX workflow

  - by claytontstanley

  I spent the last week learning 3 new tools: R, Sweave, and LaTeX. One question that came to my mind though when working through my first project: Where do I place the majority of the R code? The tutorials that I read online placed the majority of the R code in the LaTeX .Rnw file. However, I find having a bunch of R calculations in the LaTeX file distracting. What I do find extremely helpful (of course) is to call out to R code in the LaTeX file and embed the result. So the workflow I've been using is to place 99% of my R code in my .R file. I run that file first, save a bunch of calculations as objects, and output the .Rout file once finished (to save the work). Then when running Sweave, I load up that .Rout file, so that I have the majority of my calculations already completed and in the Sweave R session. Then my LaTeX callouts to R are quite simple: Just give me the XTable stored in 'res.table', or give me the result of an already-computed calculation stored in the variable 'res'. So I push towards the minimal amount of R code in the LaTex file possible, to achieve the desired result (embedding stats results in the LaTeX writeup). Does anyone have any experience with this approach? I'm just worried I might run into trouble further down the line, when I start really trying to load up and leverage this workflow.

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• Perfomance of 8 bit operations on 64 bit architechture

  - by wobbily_col

  I am usually a Python / Database programmer, and I am considering using C for a problem. I have a set of sequences, 8 characters long with 4 possible characters. My problem involves combining sets of these sequences and filtering which sets match a criteria. The combinations of 5 run into billions of rows and takes around an hour to run. So I can represent each sequence as 2 bytes. If I am working on a 64 bit architechture will I gain any advantage by keeping these data structures as 2 bytes when I generate the combinations, or will I be as well storing them as 8 bytes / double ? (64 bit = 8 x 8) If I am on a 64 bit architecture, all registers will be 64 bit, so in terms of operations that shouldn´t be any faster (please correct me if I am wrong). Will I gain anything from the smaller storage requirements - can I fit more combinations in memory, or will they all take up 64 bits anyway? And finally, am I likley to gain anything coding in C. I have a first version, which stores the sequence as a small int in a MySQL database. It then self joins the tabe to itself a number of times in order to generate all the possible combinations. The performance is acceptable, depending on how many combinations are generated. I assume the database must involve some overhead.

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• How to write functionally in a web framework

  - by Kevin Burke

  I love Rich Hickey, Clojure and Haskell and I get it when he talks about functions and the unreliability of side-effecting code. However I work in an environment where nearly all the functions I write have to read from the database, write to the database, make HTTP requests, decrement a user's balance, modify a frontend HTML component based on a click action, return different results based on the URI or the POST body. We also use PHP for the frontend, which is littered with functions like parse_str(), which modifies an object in place. All of these are side-effecting to one degree or another. Given these constraints and the side-effecting nature of the logic I'm coding, what can I do to make my code more reliable and function-able?

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• How to estimate tasks in scrum?

  - by Arian

  Let's say we have a backlog of User Stories, each with an estimated number of Story Points, and now we're doing the Sprint Planning. Now, the Stories should be broken down into tasks and many Scrum resources suggest that each task should be estimated in person-hours. Since all questions have been discussed by the team at this point, estimating a task should not take longer than a minute. However, since a task should not be longer than a day, assuming a three week sprint with 8 developers means 120 tasks, and taking two hours only for estimations seems to be a bit much to me. I know that experienced teams can skip or short-cut task estimations, but let's say we're not at that stage yet. In your experience, how many tasks are there in a sprint* and how long should it take to estimate all of them? (Estimating only half of them doesn't make much sense, does it?) (*) I know that depends on sprint length and team size, so let's assume 8 developers and three weeks.

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• Refactoring and Open / Closed principle

  - by Giorgio

  I have recently being reading a web site about clean code development (I do not put a link here because it is not in English). One of the principles advertised by this site is the Open Closed Principle: each software component should be open for extension and closed for modification. E.g., when we have implemented and tested a class, we should only modify it to fix bugs or to add new functionality (e.g. new methods that do not influence the existing ones). The existing functionality and implementation should not be changed. I normally apply this principle by defining an interface I and a corresponding implementation class A. When class A has become stable (implemented and tested), I normally do not modify it too much (possibly, not at all), i.e. If new requirements arrive (e.g. performance, or a totally new implementation of the interface) that require big changes to the code, I write a new implementation B, and keep using A as long as B is not mature. When B is mature, all that is needed is to change how I is instantiated. If the new requirements suggest a change to the interface as well, I define a new interface I' and a new implementation A'. So I, A are frozen and remain the implementation for the production system as long as I' and A' are not stable enough to replace them. So, in view of these observation, I was a bit surprised that the web page then suggested the use of complex refactorings, "... because it is not possible to write code directly in its final form." Isn't there a contradiction / conflict between enforcing the Open / Closed Principle and suggesting the use of complex refactorings as a best practice? Or the idea here is that one can use complex refactorings during the development of a class A, but when that class has been tested successfully it should be frozen?

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• What is the best way to keep track of the median?

  - by Steven Mou

  I read a question in one book: Numbers are randomly generated and stored into an (expanding) array, How would you keep track of the median? There are two data structures can solve the problem. One is the balanced binary tree, the other is two heaps which keep trace of the biggest half and the smallest half of the elements. I think these two solutions has the same running time as O(n lg n), but I am not sure of my judgement. In your opinions, What is the best way to keep track of the median?

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• If PHP websites represnt 70% of websites in my country then should I learn it?

  - by Fadi Tiwari

  In my country most of the sites are built using PHP and MySQL. Half of those sites use vbulletin and Wordpress. When it comes to companies, ministries and universities they use ASP.NET. I am not sure what should I learn to get more money as freelacer? Should I learn ASP.NET and focus my area to build companies and universities' sites? (And the question if they will know me one day and ask me to build any of their sites or not?) Or should I learn PHP and focus my business on people's sites and maybe some small formal sites? Which option will give me more money?

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• CQRS applicability when some commands need to block the UI

  - by regularfry

  I am working on an app which I would dearly love to transition from a fairly traditional layered architecture to CQRS, for a number of reasons, not least fo which is that having a robust event log will make adding a couple of feature requests I can see barrelling towards me trivial to accomodate. Now, I have a conceptual problem: of around 40 commands the user can initiate, there are three which the user needs to be sure have successfully completed before the UI lets them do anything else. Everything else fits into the "submit a request, query for success later" model, except for these three commands. How is this handled in CQRS-land? Do I separate the three blocking commands to effectively a third service, so I have Commands, Queries, and BlockingCommands? Do I have a two-stage event processor with an in-request blocking first stage which only gets used for the blocking commands? Does the existence of these three commands mean that the whole idea of applying CQRS is invalid? Should I just pretend they aren't blocking and poll for success in the UI? I'm sure this must come up on other projects, how is it usually handled?

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• Is anyone teaching the application of ethics to programming?

  - by blueberryfields

  Ethical questions come up more and more in the news, and can be core to a software developers' life. On several occasions this year I was asked for advice that amounts to answering ethical questions, in a computer programming context, and I was surprised to see how much fretting and trouble questions which I consider trivial can lead to. Are there any courses or programs specializing in teaching what is expected of an ethical programmer? Has anyone put together a formal curriculum anywhere?

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• How do I make a firefox extension execute script on page open/load? [migrated]

  - by Will Mc

  Thanks in advance! I am creating my first extension (A firefox extension). See below for full description of final product. I need help starting off. I have looked and studied the HelloWorld.xpi example found on Mozilla's site so I am happy to edit that to learn. In the example, when you click a menu item it runs script to display an alert message. My question is, how would I edit this extension to run the script on page load? I am guessing I need to insert some code in the browserOverlay as it loads on page load so, here is the browserOverlay.xpi from the example I am editing to learn: <?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="chrome://global/skin/" ?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="chrome://xulschoolhello/skin/browserOverlay.css" ?> <!DOCTYPE overlay SYSTEM "chrome://xulschoolhello/locale/browserOverlay.dtd"> <overlay id="xulschoolhello-browser-overlay" xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"> <script type="application/x-javascript" src="chrome://xulschoolhello/content/browserOverlay.js" /> <stringbundleset id="stringbundleset"> <stringbundle id="xulschoolhello-string-bundle" src="chrome://xulschoolhello/locale/browserOverlay.properties" /> </stringbundleset> <menubar id="main-menubar"> <menu id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloMenu.accesskey;" insertafter="helpMenu"> <menupopup> <menuitem id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu-item" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloItem.accesskey;" oncommand="XULSchoolChrome.BrowserOverlay.sayHello(event);" /> </menupopup> </menu> </menubar> <vbox id="appmenuSecondaryPane"> <menu id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu-2" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloMenu.accesskey;" insertafter="appmenu_addons"> <menupopup> <menuitem id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu-item-2" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloItem.accesskey;" oncommand="XULSchoolChrome.BrowserOverlay.sayHello(event);" /> </menupopup> </menu> </vbox> </overlay> I hope you can help me. I need to know what code I should use and where I should put it... Here is the gist of my overall extension - I am creating a click to call extension. This extension will search any new page for a phone number whether just refreshed, new page, new tab etc... Each phone number when clicked will open a new tab and direct user to a custom URL. Thanks again!

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• How do you KISS?

  - by Conor

  The KISS principle is a highly quoted design mantra. The aim of this principle is to stamp out unnecessary complexity on a project. This is a good thing, saving time, energy and money. It can lead to a relatively stress free implementation and a simple, elegant, maintainable end product. A lot of discussion on KISS provides mechanisms to simplify requirements, design and implementation. Things that spring to mind include: avoid scope creep; simple obvious design and code; minimal run-time dependencies; refactoring to maintain simplicity; etc. However there are a lot of implicit things that we do to KISS. Examples: small team sizes; minimal management layers; tidy desk; mastery of a single IDE; clear concise error messages; scripts to automate/encapsulate tasks; etc Why KISS practices do you apply? How have they been of benefit? I'm especially interested in non-obvious practices.

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