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  • How can a developer realize the full value of his work [closed]

    - by Jubbat
    I, honestly, don't want to work as a developer in a company anymore after all I have seen. I want to continue developing software, yes, but not in the way I see it all around me. And I'm in London, a city that congregates lots of great developers from the whole world, so it shouldn't be a problem of location. So, what are my concerns? First of all, best case scenario: you are paying managers salary out of yours. You are consistently underpaid by making up for the average manager negative net return plus his whole salary. Typical scenario. I am a reasonably good developer with common sense who cares for readable code with attention to basic principles. I have found way too often, overconfident and arrogant developers with a severe lack of common sense. Personally, I don't want to follow TDD or Agile practices like all the cool kids nowadays. I would read about them, form my own opinion and take what I feel is useful, but don't follow it sheepishly. I want to work with people who understand that you have to design good interfaces, you absolutely have to document your code, that readability is at the top of your priorities. Also people who don't have a cargo cult mentality too. For instance, the same person who asked me about design patterns in a job interview, later told me that something like a List of Map of Vector of Map of Set (in Java) is very readable. Why would someone ask me about design patterns if they can't even grasp encapsulation? These kind of things are the norm. I've seen many examples. I've seen worse than that too, from very well paid senior devs, by the way. Every second that you spend working with people with such lack of common sense and clear thinking, you are effectively losing money by being terribly inefficient with your time. Yet, with all these inefficiencies, the average developer earns a high salary. So I tried working on my own then, although I don't like the idea. I prefer healthy exchange of opinions and ideas and task division. I then did a bit of online freelancing for a while but I think working in a sweatshop might be more enjoyable. Also, I studied computer engineering and you are in an environment in which your client will presume you don't have any formal education because there is no way to prove it. Again, you are undervalued. You could try building a product, yes. But, of course, luck is a big factor. I wonder if there is a way to work in something you can do well, software development, and be valued for the quality of your work and be paid accordingly, and where you and only you get fairly paid for the value you generate. I know that what I have written seems somehow unlikely but I strongly feel this way. Hopefully someone will understand me and has already figured this out. I don't think I'm alone in this kind of feeling.

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  • Getting graduates up to speed?

    - by Simon
    This question got me thinking about how comapnies deal with newly-hired graduated. Do experienced programmers expect CS graduates to write clean code (by clean I mean code easily understandable by others — maybe that is too much to expect?) Or do significant portion of graduates at your place (if any) just end up testing and fixing small bugs on existing applications? And, even if they do bug fixes, do you end up spending double the amount of time just checking they did not end up breaking anything and creating new bugs? How do you deal with such scenarios when pair programming and code reviews are not available options (for reasons such as personal deadlines), and also what techniques did you find to get fresh graduate up to speed? Some suggestions would be great.

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  • Sucking Less Every Year ?

    - by AdityaGameProgrammer
    Sucking Less Every Year A trail of thought that had been on my mind for a while Quoting directly from the post I've often thought that sucking less every year is how humble programmers improve. You should be unhappy with code you wrote a year ago. If you aren't, that means either A) you haven't learned anything in a year, B) your code can't be improved, or C) you never revisit old code. All of these are the kiss of death for software developers. How often does this happen or not happen to you? How long before you see an actual improvement in your coding ? month, year? Do you ever revisit Your old code? How often does your old code plague you? or how often do you have to deal with your technical debt. It is definitely very painful to fix old bugs n dirty code that we may have done to quickly meet a deadline and those quick fixes ,some cases we may have to rewrite most of the application/code. No arguments about that. Some of the developers i had come across argued that they were already at the evolved stage where their coding doesn't need improvement or cant get improved anymore. Does this happen? If so how many years into coding on a particular language does one expect this to happen?

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  • How to focus on one topic? [closed]

    - by Brian
    I have a huge problem while reading computer books. Every couple pages I'll end up googling something I want to learn more about, but then I'll find something on that page that I'll want to learn more about and google that (sometimes programming related, sometime hardware related). Normally after wasting around 3 hours going into different subjects I'll return to the original text only to repeat the process a few pages later. Any advice for sticking to one subject and learning that in-depth? I have tons of programming books I've read half-way through since I'll become interested in other languages/topics (not that I'm not interested in the books I've started). Also, what would be worth focusing on in depth? I've gone into Python in the most depth but for classes I'm learning Java and assembly (ARM and Motorola 68000). Also, I've taken a class on C++. Lately I've been spending most of my time learning about Linux instead of programming though. I'm not sure what would be worth focusing on the most to get a job. In other words, how can you focus on one topic and not let curiosity about everything else get in the way? Thanks in advance, Brian

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  • How do you keep your basic skills from atrophy?

    - by kojiro
    I've been programming for about 10 years, and I've started to migrate to more of a project management position. I still do coding, but less often now. One of the things that I think is holding me back in my career is that I can't "let go". I think I fear letting hard-won programming skills atrophy while I sit in meetings and annotate requirements. (Not to mention I don't trust people to write requirements who don't understand the code.) I can't just read books and magazines about coding. I'm involved in some open source projects in my free time, and stackoverflow and friends help a bit, because I get the opportunity to help people solve their programming problems without micromanaging, but neither of these are terribly structured, so it's tempting to work first on the problems I can solve easily. I guess what I'd like to find is a structured set of exercises (don't care what language or environment) that… …I can do periodically …has some kind of time requirement so I can tell if I've been goofing off …has some kind of scoring so I can tell if I'm making mistakes Is there such a thing? What would you do to keep your skills fresh?

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  • What are `Developmental Milestones` for programming skills?

    - by Holmes
    I studied in the field of Computer Science for 6 years, bachelor's degree and master's degree. I have studied all the basic programming like C, Java, VB, C#, Python, and etc. When I have free times, I will learn new programming languages and follow new programming trends by myself , such as PHP, HTML5, CSS5, LESS, Bootstrap, Symfony2, and GitHub. So, if someone wants me to write some instructions using these languages, I'm certain that I can do it, not so good but I can get a job done. However, I don't have any favorite programming language. Moreover, I also have studied about algorithms, database, and etc. Everything I just wrote so far seems that I know a lot in this field. In fact, I feel I am very stupid. I cannot answer 80% of the questions on SO. In spite of those languages??, I have studied. Perhaps it is because I have never worked before. As there is the Developmental Milestones for children, which refers to how a child becomes able to do more complex things as they get older, I would like to evaluate the same thing but for programming skills. What are the set of functional skills or age-specific tasks that most programmers can do at a certain age range? In order to evaluate myself, I would like to ask your opinions that all of the skills I mentioned above, are they enough for programmers to know when they are 25 years old? What are your suggestions in order to improve the skills in this field?

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  • At what point does "constructive" criticism of your code become unhelpful?

    - by user15859
    I recently started as a junior developer. As well as being one of the least experienced people on the team, I'm also a woman, which comes with all sorts of its own challenges working in a male-dominated environment. I've been having problems lately because I feel like I am getting too much unwarranted pedantic criticism on my work. Let me give you an example of what happened recently. Team lead was too busy to push in some branches I made, so he didn't get to them until the weekend. I checked my mail, not really meaning to do any work, and found that my two branches had been rejected on the basis of variable names, making error messages more descriptive, and moving some values to the config file. I don't feel that rejecting my branch on this basis is useful. Lots of people were working over the weekend, and I had never said that I would be working. Effectively, some people were probably blocked because I didn't have time to make the changes and resubmit. We are working on a project that is very time-sensitive, and it seems to me that it's not helpful to outright reject code based on things that are transparent to the client. I may be wrong, but it seems like these kinds of things should be handled in patch type commits when I have time. Now, I can see that in some environments, this would be the norm. However, the criticism doesn't seem equally distributed, which is what leads to my next problem. The basis of most of these problems was due to the fact that I was in a codebase that someone else had written and was trying to be minimally invasive. I was mimicking the variable names used elsewhere in the file. When I stated this, I was bluntly told, "Don't mimic others, just do what's right." This is perhaps the least useful thing I could have been told. If the code that is already checked in is unacceptable, how am I supposed to tell what is right and what is wrong? If the basis of the confusion was coming from the underlying code, I don't think it's my responsibility to spend hours refactoring a whole file that someone else wrote (and works perfectly well), potentially introducing new bugs etc. I'm feeling really singled out and frustrated in this situation. I've gotten a lot better about following the standards that are expected, and I feel frustrated that, for example, when I refactor a piece of code to ADD error checking that was previously missing, I'm only told that I didn't make the errors verbose enough (and the branch was rejected on this basis). What if I had never added it to begin with? How did it get into the code to begin with if it was so wrong? This is why I feel so singled out: I constantly run into this existing problematic code, that I either mimic or refactor. When I mimic it, it's "wrong", and if I refactor it, I'm chided for not doing enough (and if I go all the way, introducing bugs, etc). Again, if this is such a problem, I don't understand how any code gets into the codebase, and why it becomes my responsibility when it was written by someone else, who apparently didn't have their code reviewed. Anyway, how do I deal with this? Please remember that I said at the top that I'm a woman, and I'm sure these guys don't usually have to worry about decorum when they're reviewing other guys' code, but honestly that doesn't work for me, and it's causing me to be less productive. I'm worried that if I talk to my manager about it, he'll think I can't handled the environment, etc.

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  • Where can I find design exercises to work on?

    - by Oak
    I feel it's important to continue practicing my problem-solving skills. Writing my own mini-projects is one way, but another is to try and solve problems posted online. It's easy to find interesting programming quizzes online that require applying clever algorithms to solve - Project Euler is one well-known example. However, in a lot of real-life projects the design of the software - especially in the initial phases - has a large impact and at later stages it cannot be tweaked as easily as plain algorithms. In order to improve these skills, I'm looking for any collection of design problems. When I say "design", I mean the abstract design of a software solution - for example what modules will there be and what are the dependencies between them, how data will flow in the program, what sort of data needs to be saved in the database, etc. Design problems are those problems that are critical to solve in the early stages of any project, but their solution is a whiteboard diagram without a single line of code. Of course these sort of problems do not have a single correct solution, but I'll be especially happy with any place that also displays pros and cons of the typical solutions that might be used to approach the problem.

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  • Solving programming problems or contributing code?

    - by nischayn22
    What are the best skills to develop for a college graduate?? Should one spend hours/days trying to solve problems on codechef or topcoder or contribute code to open source organizations? My personal experience says solving problems teaches you how to make optimal code and learn new programming techniques (which someone else has researched and made available) to solve problems, whereas contributing to open source teaches you how to organize code (so others can work on it), use coding conventions and make "real" use of what you have learnt so far, blah blah!! Also another thing to note is that many companies are hiring today based on one's problem solving skills (Is this something I should worry about?) P.S. I have done little of online problem solving and little of code contribution (via GSoC), but left confused what I should continue doing (as doing both simultaneously isn't easy).

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  • Any tips to learn how to program with severe ADHD?

    - by twinbornJoint
    I have a difficult time trying to learn how to program from straight text-books. Video training seems to work well for me in my past experiences with PHP. I am trying my hardest to stay focussed and push through. Specifically I am looking to start indie game development. Over the last two weeks I have been trying to pick the "right" language and framework to develop with. I started going through Python, but I am not really enjoying the language so far. I am constantly looking through this website to compare this language to that, and keep getting distracted. Aside from all of this, is it possible to become a programmer when you have trouble focussing? Has anyone been through this that can recommend some advice? edit - you guys can check my new question out with detailed information thanks to all of the responses from this thread. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/15916/what-is-the-best-language-and-framework-for-my-situation

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  • Wide gap in my resume as a Java developer. What are must-have skills required to get hired those days? [closed]

    - by OnlineAlien
    For some legal reasons I haven't worked for anybody for the last 12 years. I am a java web developer or at least I am thinking so. For this period I have been working on my project- some sort of business network - and I did few small jobs, so right now I feel I am far behind in terms of my skills and the skills needed today. I lingered too long on Struts and Hibernate and thought that could the job for my project. I need to get a job, right now, so I am spending most of my time brushing my skills. My question is: What are the current necessary skills that could convince employers to hire me regardless of my past employment or the lack of it. Right now I am on AspectJ, IoC and Spring Thanks

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  • Handle complexity in large software projects

    - by Oliver Vogel
    I am a lead developer in a larger software projects. From time to time its getting hard to handle the complexity within this project. E. g. Have the whole big picture in mind all the time Keeping track of the teammates work results Doing Code Reviews Supply management with information etc. Are there best practices/ time management techniques to handle these tasks? Are there any tools to support you having an overview?

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  • Being stupid to get better productivity?

    - by loki2302
    I've spent a lot of time reading different books about "good design", "design patterns", etc. I'm a big fan of the SOLID approach and every time I need to write a simple piece of code, I think about the future. So, if implementing a new feature or a bug fix requires just adding three lines of code like this: if(xxx) { doSomething(); } It doesn't mean I'll do it this way. If I feel like this piece of code is likely to become larger in the nearest future, I'll think of adding abstractions, moving this functionality somewhere else and so on. The goal I'm pursuing is keeping average complexity the same as it was before my changes. I believe, that from the code standpoint, it's quite a good idea - my code is never long enough, and it's quite easy to understand the meanings for different entities, like classes, methods, and relations between classes and objects. The problem is, it takes too much time, and I often feel like it would be better if I just implemented that feature "as is". It's just about "three lines of code" vs. "new interface + two classes to implement that interface". From a product standpoint (when we're talking about the result), the things I do are quite senseless. I know that if we're going to work on the next version, having good code is really great. But on the other side, the time you've spent to make your code "good" may have been spent for implementing a couple of useful features. I often feel very unsatisfied with my results - good code that only can do A is worse than bad code that can do A, B, C, and D. Are there any books, articles, blogs, or your ideas that may help with developing one's "being stupid" approach?

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  • What are the various development tools beneficial for Java/J2EE developers?

    - by Saurabh
    I am a J2EE developer and have used some tools like Eclipse, ANT, SVN, etc. while developing various projects using Java, Spring, Struts, etc. Can you please tell me what are the other various tools which will help me while building the projects. Are there any tools helping in designing databases, building architecture, etc. It would be great if you can advice some tools which can help me in various software development activities.

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  • I have an MIS degree. How do I sell myself as a programmer?

    - by hydroparadise
    So, I graduated with a BSBA in Management Information Systems with honors almost 2 years ago which is more of a business degree. As of right now, I do have a job title of "Programmer", but it's more of a report writing position in an arbitrary, proprietary language called PowerOn with the occasional interesting project using more mainstream technologies like .Net and Java. I am also somewhat isoloated being the only programmer in the workplace, which I beleive is a detriment to my career path. The only people I have to bounce ideas against are those on the various SE sites. I don't regret going MIS, but over the past couple of years I have discovered my passion for coding, even though I have been doing some form of coding profesionally and as an enthusiast for years. I do want to persue my Masters in CS (at a later time), but I am not sure if I necessarily need a CS degree to get in with a team of programmers. In addition, I do have a number classes I have taken for different laguanges on the way (C++, Java, SQL, and VB.Net) I beleive my strength is in problem solving where code is just a tool to tackling to problem if needed. My question: How do I best sell myself as a programmer? Should I continue pounding out reports and wait till I have my masters in CS? Or am I viable to be a programmer as I stand?

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  • How can I improve my skills while working on actual projects, in the absence of more experienced developers?

    - by LolCoder
    I'm the lead developer at a small company, working with C# and ASP.Net. Our team is small, 2-3 people, without much experience in development and design. I don't have the opportunity to learn from more senior developers, there is no one in my team to guide me and help me choose the best approaches, as I take care most of the projects myself. How can I improve my software development skills while working on actual projects, in the absence of more experienced developers?

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  • What does a programmer really need to become a professional?

    - by Dehumanizer
    There are huge numbers of programmers, especially juniors, who need good assistance in becoming professional. I've heard a lot of about "books every programmer should read", etc. I have two years of programming experience, feel good in C++, but currently have a strange feeling, that I do not know anything about programming. I should read Algorithms by Cormen, Code Complete by McConnell etc., but I don't know the exact steps required to become a professional. What should we do? What should we learn? Operating systems? Computer organization? Algorithms? C++ in depth? How much time do we have to spend to become what we want?

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  • How do you encourage yourself to program?

    - by Goma
    Imagine that you were given a studio or a room in 7-star hotel which is located by the sea, a luxury car and free massage service. All that were given on the condition that you should write your best code every day. You should come with new ideas and try and try again and again.. Will you accept that? Now come back to me please, the question is: what do you do to encourage youself to like programming and to write more of best practices and to come with new ideas? For example, if you were writing code and you get bored, in this case what do you do? Another example is, what do you do when some days are passed and you did not write anything? How do you recover and get back to work with high energy?

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  • Is it possible to learn maths via programming, or you should learn maths for programming?

    - by SAFAD
    I am not the best in maths, not very horrid either, but lower than the average, I've always been thinking to improve my maths, but schools and books didn't do the job because I get bored too fast. The only thing I don't get bored with is coding and gaming, so I thought what if coding a program that solves mathematical problems will help me understand maths better, most of these problems are limits (calculus), functions, Differential calculus, and some other subjects (I already said am not that good) similar to the previous noted. My question is: Am I able to achieve a better knowledge in maths if I do some specific program coding, and if possible, is physics possible that way too? Or am I wrong and Maths should be learned before programming to help improve my coding? P.S : C++ is the preferred language.

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  • Finding the balance between working on the things that you have to work on and the things that you want to work on [closed]

    - by Emanuil
    Sometimes I go for what I find interesting instead of what is considered right. Having this attitude has been educational and it has let me produce work that I'm exceptionally proud of but it has also made me miss deadlines and disappoint people. Sometimes I think I'm this way because I don't want to "break" my curiosity. I'm afraid that if I ignore it I may gradually lose it. Do you have any advice for me? Meta: How can I make this a community wiki?

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  • Personal/career objectives tracker

    - by scottyab
    Looking for a simple, clean and easy to use personal/career objectives tracker for my team of ~10 developers something like what remember the milk is for tasks. At the moment I track these in a google doc, but ideally like a system where I can browse the teams objectives, add a team objective and it automatically appear on members personal objectives. Also where team members can add/manage their own objectives, browse colleges public/team objectives. Ideally it would also have option for people to add personal out side of work objectives for personal dev projects. Anyone used a tool to do this? our a combination of existing tools like gdocs, rtm?

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  • How do you deal with the details when reading code?

    - by upton
    After reading some projects, I find that it is not the architecture of the software that is really hard to know. It is not hard to figure out the architecture immediately if the project is clearly designed and implemented, if it's hard and never seen before, some day later I can find out some pattern similar to the one I read in the same domain. The difficulty is that the concepts and mechanism defined by the author are really hard to guess, and these concepts may spread in the whole project which makes it hard to grasp. The situation is normal and universal and you can ask questions to your colleague when in a company. However, it gets worse if nobody around you knows these details. How do you handle these details which block your reading?

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  • How do you stay motivated for hobby projects?

    - by aubreyrhodes
    I started seriously programming as a hobbiest, student and then intern about 4 years ago and I've always done small projects on the side as a learning exercise. Schools over now though, and I spend my days at work as a software developer. I would still love to do projects on the side to learn about areas in computer science that I'm not exposed to at work, but I've noticed that after 8 hours of starring at an IDE it's far to tempting to veg out. Any time I do get up the gumption to work on something for a few hours lately it's gotten left by the wayside. Anyone have any advice for sticking with side projects when you spend most of your day coding?

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  • Skillset improvement in coming new year

    - by exiter2000
    Here is a little background information. I have been working for Java 10 years. The product I am working on went to live about 3 years ago. Now, the product is getting stable. After all the post-product drama, I gained a lot of knowledge about Oracle & SQL. People(mainly management) were desperated enough to give me deep oracle-related task over DBAs. I admit I considered becoming DBA but eventually decided to remain as a programmer. DBAs & Management are demanding all the DB & Query related task back to DBA, which makes me a bit sad. In short, I anticipate a lot of time next year. What would you do to improve your skillset?? I am thinking to upgrade my Java version(Not from experience though, we are using JDK1.5) to 1.6 getting certificate. Any good idea from fellow developers?? -----------Edit --------------------- How about data modeling for application? Do you guys think it is developer role??

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  • How do you take into account usability and user requirements for your application?

    - by voroninp
    Our team supports BackOffice application: a mix of WinForm and WPF windows. (about 80 including dialogs). Really a kind of a Swiss Army Knife. It is used by developers, tech writers, security developers, testers. The requirements for new features come quite often and sometimes we play Wizard of Oz to decide which GUI our users like the most. And it usually happens (I admit it can be just my subjective interpretation of the reality) that one tiny detail giving the flavor of good usability to our app requires a lot of time. This time is being spent on 'fighting' with GUI framework making it act like we need. And it very difficult to make estimations for this type of tasks (at least for me and most members of our team). Scrum poker is not a help either. Management often considers this usability perfectionism to be a waste of time. On the other hand an accumulated affect of features where each has some little usability flaw frustrates users. But the same users want frequent releases and instant bug fixes. Hence, no way to get the positive feedback: there is always somebody who is snuffy. I constantly feel myself as competing with ourselves: more features - more bugs/tasks/architecture. We are trying to outrun the cart we are pushing. New technologies arrive and some of them can potentially help to improve the design or decrease task implementation time but these technologies require learning, prototyping and so on. Well, that was a story. And now is the question: How do you balance between time pressure, product quality, users and management satisfaction? When and how do you decide to leave the problem with not a perfect but to some extent acceptable solution, how often do you make these decisions? How do you do with your own satisfaction? What are your priorities? P.S. Please keep in mind, we are a BackOffice team, we have neither dedicated technical writer nor GUI designer. The tester have joined us recently. We've much work to do and much freedom concerning 'how'. I like it because it fosters creativity but I don't want to become too nerdy perfectionist.

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