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  • Should I continue to pursue programming based on my experience?

    - by El Be
    The reason I ask this question is because I am not sure my troubles come from a lack of confidence, or something much deeper like lack of passion. I'm hoping experienced programmers and developers can help identify the cause of my troubles. To be brief my undergraduate major was in Computer Science, but in a small school and I had the highest gpa in my year in computer science. The first time I ever programmed was once in the 5th grade (using logo) and when I was a freshman in college. I enjoyed programming when I was in school. Then I did an internships where I was expected to produce image processing software and program microchips. I was unsuccessful and produced little results and I hated the job, because I had to figure out everything for myself, did not have any help, and there was a lot of pressure to produce results. Although I tried I could not figure out what to do and was stuck all the time and made me dislike the job. When the internship ended I went to a PhD program for computer science at a prestigious computer science school. I had a very hard time with the course, met people who have been programming since they were 6 and made plenty of applications in their spare time (which I never did, although I tried). I even met many sophomores who understood more than I did. The combination of this and other things have made me feel that programming is not for me, but sometimes I consider a career in programming. I still consider programming as a career because of the career potential (not only just because of money). Based on my experience do you believe my confidence has just been shaken and I should continue to prepare for a programming career, or do you see a lack of passion and it would make it tough to continue programming. thank you for reading and for your advice Thank you for everyone's advice so far! Also: I dropped out of the ph.D program for computer science and switched to a master's in computer graphics. Its more applied, but I still find it hard to be motivated (due to either lack of confidence or passion), but since programming is such a big field I am looking for that niche area that I feel good programming in.

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  • Chrome Countdown Extension [migrated]

    - by Mike Saffold
    I have modified this countdown script to countdown to 4:20pm everyday. I have attempted to create a Google Chrome app that displays the countdown. The javascript is supposed replace a paragraph tag with id of "note" with the time left. It works when I load the page in chrome, but does not work when I load the extension. Example, if I put: <p id="note">asdf</a> I get just the text, "asdf", but when I open the html file I get the countdown. Here is the manifest.json file: { "name": "My First Extension", "version": "1.0", "manifest_version": 2, "description": "The first extension that I made.", "browser_action": { "default_icon": "icon.png", "default_popup": "popup.html" } } Here is the popup.html code: <html> <head> <title>4:20PM Countdown</title> <!-- Our CSS stylesheet file --> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans+Condensed:300" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://treesmoke.com/cd/assets/css/styles.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://treesmoke.com/cd/assets/countdown/jquery.countdown.css" /> </head> <body> <p id="note">asdf</p> <!-- JavaScript includes --> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://treesmoke.com/cd/assets/countdown/jquery.countdown.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://treesmoke.com/cd/assets/js/script.js"></script> </body> </html> Here's the popup.html page, showing that the script works. Thanks guys, it isn't that big of a deal if I can't get it to work. I was just bored and decided to learn a little.

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  • Strategy to use two different measurement systems in software

    - by Dennis
    I have an application that needs to accept and output values in both US Custom Units and Metric system. Right now the conversion and input and output is a mess. You can only enter in US system, but you can choose the output to be US or Metric, and the code to do the conversions is everywhere. So I want to organize this and put together some simple rules. So I came up with this: Rules user can enter values in either US or Metric, and User Interface will take care of marking this properly All units internally will be stored as US, since the majority of the system already has most of the data stored like that and depends on this. It shouldn't matter I suppose as long as you don't mix unit. All output will be in US or Metric, depending on user selection/choice/preference. In theory this sounds great and seems like a solution. However, one little problem I came across is this: There is some data stored in code or in the database that already returns data like this: 4 x 13/16" screws, which means "four times screws". I need the to be in either US or Metric. Where exactly do I put the conversion code for doing the conversion for this unit? The above already mixing presentation and data, but the data for the field I need to populate is that whole string. I can certainly split it up into the number 4, the 13/16", and the " x " and the " screws", but the question remains... where do I put the conversion code? Different Locations for Conversion Routines 1) Right now the string is in a class where it's produced. I can put conversion code right into that class and it may be a good solution. Except then, I want to be consistent so I will be putting conversion procedures everywhere in the code at-data-source, or right after reading it from the database. The problem though is I think that my code will have to deal with two systems, all throughout the codebase after this, should I do this. 2) According to the rules, my idea was to put it in the view script, aka last change to modify it before it is shown to the user. And it may be the right thing to do, but then it strikes me it may not always be the best solution. (First, it complicates the view script a tad, second, I need to do more work on the data side to split things up more, or do extra parsing, such as in my case above). 3) Another solution is to do this somewhere in the data prep step before the view, aka somewhere in the middle, before the view, but after the data-source. This strikes me as messy and that could be the reason why my codebase is in such a mess right now. It seems that there is no best solution. What do I do?

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  • Anticipating JavaOne 2012 – Number 17!

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    As I write this, JavaOne 2012 (September 30-October 4 in San Francisco, CA) is just over a week away -- the seventeenth JavaOne! I’ll resist the impulse to travel in memory back to the early days of JavaOne. But I will say that JavaOne is a little like your birthday or New Year’s in that it invites reflection, evaluation, and comparison. It’s a time when we take the temperature of Java and assess the world of information technology generally. At JavaOne, insight and information flow amongst Java developers like no other time of the year.This year, the status of Java seems more secure in the eyes of most Java developers who agree that Oracle is doing an acceptable job of stewarding the platform, and while the story is still in progress, few doubt that Oracle is engaging strongly with the Java community and wants to see Java thrive. From my perspective, the biggest news about Java is the growth of some 250 alternative languages for the JVM – from Groovy to Jython to JRuby to Scala to Clojure and on and on – offering both new opportunities and challenges. The JVM has proven itself to be unusually flexible, resulting in an embarrassment of riches in which, more and more, developers are challenged to find ways to optimally mix together several different languages on projects.    To the matter at hand -- I can say with confidence that Oracle is working hard to make each JavaOne better than the last – more interesting, more stimulating, more networking, and more fun! A great deal of thought and attention is being devoted to the task. To free up time for the 475 technical sessions/Birds of feather/Hands-on-Labs slots, the Java Strategy, Partner, and Technical keynotes will be held on Sunday September 30, beginning at 4:00 p.m.   Let’s not forget Java Embedded@JavaOne which is being held Wednesday, Oct. 3rd and Thursday, Oct. 4th at the Hotel Nikko. It will provide business decision makers, technical leaders, and ecosystem partners important information about Java Embedded technologies and new business opportunities.   This year's JavaOne theme is “Make the Future Java”. So come to JavaOne and make your future better by:--Choosing from 475 sessions given by the experts to improve your working knowledge and coding expertise --Networking with fellow developers in both casual and formal settings--Enjoying world-class entertainment--Delighting in one of the world’s great cities (my home town) Hope to see you there! Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

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  • Changing jobs and leaving a project without a leader (aka, me)

    - by AnonUntilAfterTheEvent
    I'm the lead on a project that has been underway for about a year and a half. Two of us have been working on it. One is the database guy. I'm the javascript/ui guy. Which is to say, essentially no overlap in code knowledge. Here's the thing. Someone is about to offer me a sweet job with a nearly 30% bump in pay. Though I am perfectly happy with my current job and love the project, the new one would be better and I can't imagine saying no. The big problem is that my project is supposed to go into production starting in a few weeks. I will consider the new guys to have disqualified the new job by being bad people who would ruin my life if they won't cooperate and let me start after deployment. Since they seem like decent, ethical people, I don't expect that to be a problem. The current project will be brutalized by my absence. I take some comfort in the fact that I have emphatically requested an understudy for at least six months. That puts a little of the responsibility on the boss's head, but still, it's going to be a really bad thing. What do others of you do when you are a critical to a project when it's time to move on? Do I owe any obligation to stick around even though something better shows up? I know my spouse would object if I found someone else. Does that apply to work? I do have an understudy now, though he's fresh out of college. He's not going to replace me anytime soon. It's a small shop and the boss is going to be crushed. I am traumatized in anticipation of telling him and feel guilty about the practical consequences. I'm looking for some solace and some strategy about how to deal with this transition. Thank you for listening. =========================Subsequent notes ========================= @ChaosPandion, Chance: No, I can't stay to finish the project. I will insist on a compromise where I finish the current sprint (about a month from now) but there is at least a half year, probably a year of solid, full-time, work still to be done. I wouldn't expect the new employer to hold the job that long.

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  • Determining cause of random latency/loading issues

    - by Sherwin Flight
    I'm not sure exactly what details to post in regards to my issue, because I'm not sure what is relevant. Prior to the end of September my websites all loaded quickly, in almost all cases. Loading time wasn't usually more than a few seconds. However, since the end of September I noticed a big increase in page loading times. In some cases pages were taking 30 seconds or more to load. I do have a remote monitoring service monitoring some of the sites as well, and the image below shows the response times over the past month. The response times shown at the beginning of this graph were what the usual response times were prior to this issue occurring. You can see that there has been a significant increase in response times from the beginning to the end of this graph. The thing is, the problem is not happening 100% of the time. If I click through the site, or even just keep refreshing the page, about 25% of the time the pages load quickly, the remaining 75% of the time they load slowly. Sometimes the pages take so long to load that they time out, and don't load at all. I have contacted my hosting provider, and they said things at their end was fine. I don't believe the problem is my home internet provider, because all other websites load without a problem. The server is located in Texas, USA. This also raises another interesting point. My remote monitor checks my site from two locations, California, USA, and London, England. As you can see in the chart below the response time is actually shorter when checked from London, which doesn't seem to make sense, since the server is physically closer to the California monitoring location. I would have expected the London monitoring location to have higher response times since they are physically farther away. I should also point out that in some traceroute test I've done it seem like the first connection to the server seems to take the longest, then after that the rest of the page loads quickly. Below is a little chart showing the times for the first connection to the server. So, what could be causing this problem, and what steps can I take to resolve it or at least narrow down the problem? Sending the request to the server was very quick, and receiving the reply back seems pretty quick, but the WAIT time is really long. So it connects, sends the request, but then waits close to 30 seconds before it starts receiving data back. I am also aware that there are things I can do to speed up page loading times, like reducing the number of css/js files used on a page, compressing images, etc. This is not really what the source of the problem is though, because nothing has really changed on the site since before the problem started, and other sites on the same server are loading slowly as well. Any help or advice is much appreciated.

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 10-24-2012

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Play Oracle Vanquisher Here's a little respite from whatever it is you normally spend your time on. Oracle Vanquisher is an online diversion that makes a game of data center optimization. According to the description: "Armed with a cool Oracle vacuum pack suit and a strategic IT roadmap, you will thwart threats and optimize your data center to increase your company’s stock price and boost your company's position." Mainly you avoid electric shock and killer birds. The current high score belongs to someone identified as "TEN." My score? Never mind. Book: DevOps for Developers | The Java Source The subject of DevOps has come up in a couple of recent OTN ArchBeat Podcasts, so it's somewhat serendipitous that Tori Weildt's recent blog post offers an overview of Java Champion Michael Hutterman's new book, DevOps for Developers, now available from Apress. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) : Context is everything… | The ORACLE-BASE Blog BOYD is a factor in the evolution of IT, but in what context? "The real IT work in companies is still being done on PCs," says Oracle ACE Director Tim Hall. "Yes, you can use a cloud service on your phone, but look around the office and you will see those cloud services are actually being used by people on PCs." Oracle in the Cloud: Oracle EBusiness Suite sizing | Tom Laszewski Cloud expert Tom Laszewski shares several technical resources that will be helpful for sizing of Oracle EBusiness Suite. Setting Up, Configuring, and Using an Oracle WebLogic Server Cluster Author and expert Yuli Vasiliev shows you how take advantage of multiple Oracle WebLogic Server instances grouped into a cluster to maximize scalability and availability. Webcast: Reduce Costs with Oracle's Database Storage Management Watch this! Join Oracle experts Kevin Jernigan and Margaret Hamburger for an interactive webcast in which you'll learn how Oracle's Database Storage Management can reduce storage costs and management complexity while improving query performance to meet service-level agreements and compliance requirements. Event Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2012 Event Time: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET Thought for the Day "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves." — Alan Kay Source: softwarequotes.com

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  • Multi-Part Map Troubleshooting

    - by Michael Stephenson
    Scenario I came across a nice little one with multi-part maps the other day. I had an orchestration where I needed to combine 4 input messages into one output message like in the below table:   Input Messages Output Messages Company Details Member Details Event Message Member Search Member Import   I thought my orchestration was working fine but for some reason when I was trying to send my message it had no content under the root node like below <ns0:ImportMemberChange xmlns:ns0="http://---------------/"></ns0:ImportMemberChange>   My map is displayed in the below picture. I knew that the member search message may not have any elements under it but its root element would always exist. The rest of the messages were expected to be fully populated. I tried a number of different things and testing my map outside of the orchestration it always worked fine. The Eureka Moment The eureka moment came when I was looking at the xslt produced by the map. Even though I'd tried swapping the order of the messages in the input of the map you can see in the below picture that the first part of the processing of the message (with the red circle around it) is doing a for-each over the GetCompanyDetailsResult element within the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message. This is because the processing is driven by the output message format and the first element to output is the OrganisationID which comes from the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message. At this point I could focus my attention on this message as the xslt shows that if this xpath statement doesn’t return the an element from the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message then the whole body of the output message will not be produced and the output from the map would look like the message I was getting. <ns0:ImportMemberChange xmlns:ns0="http://---------------/"></ns0:ImportMemberChange> I was quickly able to prove this in my map test which proved this was a likely candidate for the problem. I revisited the orchestration focusing on the creation of the GetCompanyDetailsResponse message and there was actually a bug in the orchestration which resulted in the message being incorrectly created, once this was fixed everything worked as expected. Conclusion Originally I thought it was a problem with the map itself, and looking online there wasn’t really much in the way of content around troubleshooting for multi-part map problems so I thought I'd write this up. I guess technically it isn't a multi-part map problem, but I spend a good couple of hours the other day thinking it was.

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  • Complete Beginner to Game Programming and Unreal Engine 4, Looking For Advice [on hold]

    - by onemic
    I am currently a 2nd year programming student(Just finished my first year so I will be starting my second year in September) and have mainly learned C and C++ in my classes. In terms of what I know of C++, I know about general inheritance, polymorphism, overloading operators, iterators, a little bit about templates(only class and function templates) etc. but not of the more advanced topics like linked lists and other sequential containers(containers in general I guess), enumerations, most of the standard library(other than like strings and vectors), and probably a bunch of other stuff I dont even know about yet. I subscribed to Unreal Engine 4 as I was very intrigued by their Unreal Tournament announcement earlier this month, especially after hearing that UE4 is going completely C++. Of course my end goal in doing this programming program is to eventually go into game/graphics programming. Since it's my summer off, I thought what better way then to actually apply some of my skills to a personal project so I actually have a firmer understanding of C++ past what my professors tell me. My questions are this: What would be the best way to start off making a small personal game in UE4 as a project for the summer? What should I be aiming for, especially for someone that is still learning C++? Should I focus on making a simple 2D game rather than a 3D one to get started? Seeing the Flappy Chicken showcase intrigued me because before I thought the UE engine was pretty much pigeonholed into being for FPS games What should my expectations be going into UE4 and a game engine for the first time?(UE4 will be my first foray into making a game) What can I expect to gain from making things in UE4, in terms of making games and in terms of further fleshing out my knowledge of C++? Would you recommend I start off 100% using C++ for scripting or using the visual blueprints? Since I'm not a designer, how would I be able to add objects and designs to my game? For someone at my level is retaining the UE4 subscription worth it or is it better to cancel and resub when I learn enough about UE4 and C++? Lastly is there anything to be gained in terms of knowledge/insight through me looking at the source code for UE4? I opened it in VS2013, but noticed that most of the files were C# files and not cpp's. Thanks in advance for taking the time to answer.

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  • What is going on in this SAT/vector projection code?

    - by ssb
    I'm looking at the example XNA SAT collision code presented here: http://www.xnadevelopment.com/tutorials/rotatedrectanglecollisions/rotatedrectanglecollisions.shtml See the following code: private int GenerateScalar(Vector2 theRectangleCorner, Vector2 theAxis) { //Using the formula for Vector projection. Take the corner being passed in //and project it onto the given Axis float aNumerator = (theRectangleCorner.X * theAxis.X) + (theRectangleCorner.Y * theAxis.Y); float aDenominator = (theAxis.X * theAxis.X) + (theAxis.Y * theAxis.Y); float aDivisionResult = aNumerator / aDenominator; Vector2 aCornerProjected = new Vector2(aDivisionResult * theAxis.X, aDivisionResult * theAxis.Y); //Now that we have our projected Vector, calculate a scalar of that projection //that can be used to more easily do comparisons float aScalar = (theAxis.X * aCornerProjected.X) + (theAxis.Y * aCornerProjected.Y); return (int)aScalar; } I think the problems I'm having with this come mostly from translating physics concepts into data structures. For example, earlier in the code there is a calculation of the axes to be used, and these are stored as Vector2, and they are found by subtracting one point from another, however these points are also stored as Vector2s. So are the axes being stored as slopes in a single Vector2? Next, what exactly does the Vector2 produced by the vector projection code represent? That is, I know it represents the projected vector, but as it pertains to a Vector2, what does this represent? A point on a line? Finally, what does the scalar at the end actually represent? It's fine to tell me that you're getting a scalar value of the projected vector, but none of the information I can find online seems to tell me about a scalar of a vector as it's used in this context. I don't see angles or magnitudes with these vectors so I'm a little disoriented when it comes to thinking in terms of physics. If this final scalar calculation is just a dot product, how is that directly applicable to SAT from here on? Is this what I use to calculate maximum/minimum values for overlap? I guess I'm just having trouble figuring out exactly what the dot product is representing in this particular context. Clearly I'm not quite up to date on my elementary physics, but any explanations would be greatly appreciated.

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  • You probably have enough

    - by BuckWoody
    This a decidedly non-technical post, and even a little preachy. I post it here because you, the technical professional, are the perfect audience for it. I have enough stuff. I never think so, of course, but I do. I don’t consider myself rich, but if you have a comfortable place to sleep,  enough food to eat and you can plan for your future, you are rich. And when we are rich enough to have “enough” stuff, that usually means we have too much stuff. Stuff costs money that could be put to better use, stuff needs painting, cleaning, fueling, feeding, storage and caring for. Stuff is a burden. So I decided a few years back that I had enough stuff. We gave away a lot of things, and we don’t buy any new (meaning we didn’t have one before)  things – only replacement things. We’d rather “do something” than “have something”. But even so, when birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas rolled around, we got more stuff. So I asked all of my friends and relatives to do something for me.   I ask folks that want to give me a gift (for whatever reason) to donate the price they would have paid for the gift to a charity they care about. This does a few things: They have to find a charity to care about The fact that I made it through a calendar year now actually means something Someone else gets the help they need Everybody feels better No, I’m not saying these things so you’ll think I’m a wonderful person - the reason I’m posting this here is that as a technical professional you probably have enough stuff like I do. So I ask you to try this out. Try it for one birthday, or one Holiday, or even for a year. I can promise this: it will change your life, the life of the person who gives the gift, and the person’s life who receives it. If you do try it, I’d love to have a comment here on your thoughts.

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  • Yet another frustum culling question

    - by Christian Frantz
    This one is kinda specific. If I'm to implement frustum culling in my game, that means each one of my cubes would need a bounding sphere. My first question is can I make the sphere so close to the edge of the cube that its still easily clickable for destroying and building? Frustum culling is easily done in XNA as I've recently learned, I just need to figure out where to place the code for the culling. I'm guessing in my method that draws all my cubes but I could be wrong. My camera class currently implements a bounding frustum which is in the update method like so frustum.Matrix = (view * proj); Simple enough, as I can call that when I have a camera object in my class. This works for now, as I only have a camera in my main game class. The problem comes when I decide to move my camera to my player class, but I can worry about that later. ContainmentType CurrentContainmentType = ContainmentType.Disjoint; CurrentContainmentType = CamerasFrustrum.Contains(cubes.CollisionSphere); Can it really be as easy as adding those two lines to my foreach loop in my draw method? Or am I missing something bigger here? UPDATE: I have added the lines to my draw methods and it works great!! So great infact that just moving a little bit removes the whole map. Many factors could of caused this, so I'll try to break it down. cubeBoundingSphere = new BoundingSphere(cubePosition, 0.5f); This is in my cube constructor. cubePosition is stored in an array, The vertices that define my cube are factors of 1 ie: (1,0,1) so the radius should be .5. I least I think it should. The spheres are created every time a cube is created of course. ContainmentType CurrentContainmentType = ContainmentType.Disjoint; foreach (Cube block in cube.cubes) { CurrentContainmentType = cam.frustum.Contains(cube.cubeBoundingSphere); ///more code here if (CurrentContainmentType != ContainmentType.Disjoint) { cube.Draw(effect); } Within my draw method. Now I know this works because the map disappears, its just working wrong. Any idea on what I'm doing wrong?

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  • How far should an entity take care of its properties values by itself?

    - by Kharlos Dominguez
    Let's consider the following example of a class, which is an entity that I'm using through Entity Framework. - InvoiceHeader - BilledAmount (property, decimal) - PaidAmount (property, decimal) - Balance (property, decimal) I'm trying to find the best approach to keep Balance updated, based on the values of the two other properties (BilledAmount and PaidAmount). I'm torn between two practices here: Updating the balance amount every time BilledAmount and PaidAmount are updated (through their setters) Having a UpdateBalance() method that the callers would run on the object when appropriate. I am aware that I can just calculate the Balance in its getter. However, it isn't really possible because this is an entity field that needs to be saved back to the database, where it has an actual column, and where the calculated amount should be persisted to. My other worry about the automatically updating approach is that the calculated values might be a little bit different from what was originally saved to the database, due to rounding values (an older version of the software, was using floats, but now decimals). So, loading, let's say 2000 entities from the database could change their status and make the ORM believe that they have changed and be persisted back to the database the next time the SaveChanges() method is called on the context. It would trigger a mass of updates that I am not really interested in, or could cause problems, if the calculation methods changed (the entities fetched would lose their old values to be replaced by freshly recalculated ones, simply by being loaded). Then, let's take the example even further. Each invoice has some related invoice details, which also have BilledAmount, PaidAmount and Balance (I'm simplifying my actual business case for the sake of the example, so let's assume the customer can pay each item of the invoice separately rather than as a whole). If we consider the entity should take care of itself, any change of the child details should cause the Invoice totals to change as well. In a fully automated approach, a simple implementation would be looping through each detail of the invoice to recalculate the header totals, every time one the property changes. It probably would be fine for just a record, but if a lot of entities were fetched at once, it could create a significant overhead, as it would perform this process every time a new invoice detail record is fetched. Possibly worse, if the details are not already loaded, it could cause the ORM to lazy-load them, just to recalculate the balances. So far, I went with the Update() method-way, mainly for the reasons I explained above, but I wonder if it was right. I'm noticing I have to keep calling these methods quite often and at different places in my code and it is potential source of bugs. It also has a detrimental effect on data-binding because when the properties of the detail or header changes, the other properties are left out of date and the method has no way to be called. What is the recommended approach in this case?

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  • How do you conquer the challenge of designing for large screen real-estate?

    - by Berin Loritsch
    This question is a bit more subjective, but I'm hoping to get some new perspective. I'm so used to designing for a certain screen size (typically 1024x768) that I find that size to not be a problem. Expanding the size to 1280x1024 doesn't buy you enough screen real estate to make an appreciable difference, but will give me a little more breathing room. Basically, I just expand my "grid size" and the same basic design for the slightly smaller screen still works. However, in the last couple of projects my clients were all using 1080p (1920x1080) screens and they wanted solutions to use as much of that real estate as possible. 1920 pixels across provides just under twice the width I am used to, and the wide screen makes some of my old go to design approaches not to work as well. The problem I'm running into is that when presented with so much space, I'm confronted with some major problems. How many columns should I use? The wide format lends itself to a 3 column split with a 2:1:1 split (i.e. the content column bigger than the other two). However, if I go with three columns what do I do with that extra column? How do I make efficient use of the screen real estate? There's a temptation to put everything on the screen at once, but too much information actually makes the application harder to use. White space is important to help make sense of complex information, but too much makes related concepts look too separate. I'm usually working with web applications that have complex data, and visualization and presentation is key to making sense of the raw data. When your user also has a large screen (at least 24"), some information is out of eye sight and you need to move the pointer a long distance. How do you make sure everything that's needed stays within the visual hot points? Simple sites like blogs actually do better when the width is constrained, which results in a lot of wasted real estate. I kind of wonder if having the text box and the text preview side by side would be a big benefit for the admin side of that type of screen? (1:1 two column split). For your answers, I know almost everything in design is "it depends". What I'm looking for is: General principles you use How your approach to design has changed I'm finding that i have to retrain myself how to work with this different format. Every bump in resolution I've worked through to date has been about 25%: 640 to 800 (25% increase), 800 to 1024 (28% increase), and 1024 to 1280 (25% increase). However, the jump from 1280 to 1920 is a good 50% increase in space--the equivalent from jumping from 640 straight to 1024. There was no commonly used middle size to help learn lessons more gradually.

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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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  • TechEd 2010 Day Three: The Database Designer (Isn't)

    - by BuckWoody
    Yesterday at TechEd 2010 here in New Orleans I worked the front-booth, answering general SQL Server questions for the masses. I was actually a little surprised to find most of the questions I got were from folks that wanted to know more about Stream Insight and Master Data Services. In past conferences I've been asked a lot of "free consulting" questions, about problems folks have had from older products. I don't mind that a bit - in fact, I'm always happy to help in any way I can. But this time people are really interested in the new features in the product, and I like that they are thinking ahead, not just having to solve problems in production. My presentation was on "Database Design in an Hour". We had the usual fun, and SideShow Bob made an appearance - I kid you not. The guy in the back of the room looked just like Sideshow Bob, so I quickly held a "bes thair" contest, and he won. Duing the presentation, I explain the tools you can use to design databases. I also explain that the "Database Designer" tool in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) isn't truly a desinger - it uses non-standard notation, doesn't have a meta-data dictionary, and worst of all, it works at the physical level. In other words, whatever you do in SSMS will automatically change the field/table/relationship structures in the database. We fixed this in SSMS 2008 and higher by adding an option to block that, but the tool is not a good design function nonetheless. To be fair, no one I know of at Microsoft recommends that it is - but I was shocked to hear so many developers in the room defending it as a good tool. I think the main issue for someone who doesn't have to work with Relational Systems a great deal is that it can be difficult to figure out Foreign Keys. The syntax makes them look "backwards", so it's just easier to grab a field and place it on the table you want to point to. There are options. You can download a couple of free tools (CA has a community edition of ER-WIN, Quest has one, and Embarcadero also has one) and if you design more than one or two databases a year, it may be worth buying a true design tool. For years I used Visio, but we changed it so that it doesn't forward-engineer (create the DDL) any more, so it isn't a true design tool either. So investigate those free and not-so-free tools. You'll find they help you in your job - but stay away from the Database Designer in SSMS. Or I'll send Sideshow Bob over there to straighten you out. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • If most of team can't follow the architecture, what do you do?

    - by Chris
    Hi all, I'm working on a greenfields project with two other developers. We're all contractors, and myself and one other just started working on the project while the orginal one has been doing most of the basic framework coding. In the past month, my fellow programmer and I have been just frustrated by the design descisions done by our co-worker. Here's a little background information: The application at face value appeared to be your standard n-layered web application using C# on the 3.5 framework. We have a data layer, business layer and a web interface. But as we got deeper into the project we found some very interesting things that have caused us some troubles. There is a custom data access sqlHelper type base which only accepts dictionary key/valued entries and returns only data tables. There are no entity objects, but there are some massive objects which do everything and then are tossed into session for persitance. The general idea is that the pages (.aspx) don't do anything, while the controls (.ascx) do everything. The general flow is that a client clicks on a button, which goes to a user control base which passes a process request to the 'BLL' class which goes to the page processor, which then goes to a getControlProcessor, which at last actually processes the request. The request itself is made up of a dictionary which is passing a string valued method name, stored procedure name, a control name and possibly a value. All switching of the processing is done by comparing the string values of the control names and method names. Pages are linked together via a common header control that uses a combination of javascript and tables to create a hyperlink effect. And as I found out yesterday, a simple hyperlink between one page and another does not work because of the need to have quite a bit of information in session to determine which control to display on a page. My fellow programmer and I both believe that this is a strange and uncommon approach to web application development. Both of us have been in this business for over five years and neither of us have seen this approach. My question is this, how would we approach our co-worker and voice our concerns and what should we do if he does not want to accept the criteic? We both do not want to insult the work that has been done, but feel that going forward will create a nightmare for development. Thanks for your comments.

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  • Keeping your options open in a cloud solution

    - by BuckWoody
    In on-premises solutions we have the full range of options open for a given computing solution – but we don’t always take advantage of them, for multiple reasons. Data goes in a Relational Database Management System, files go on a share, and e-mail goes to the Exchange server. Over time, vendors (including ourselves) add in functionality to one product that allow non-standard use of the platform. For example, SQL Server (and Oracle, and others) allow large binary storage in or through the system – something not originally intended for an RDBMS to handle. There are certainly times when this makes sense, of course, but often these platform hammers turn every problem into a nail. It can make us “lazy” in our design – we sometimes don’t take the time to learn another architecture because the one we’ve spent so much time with can handle what we want to do. But there’s a distinct danger here. In nature, when a population shares too many of the same traits, it can cause a complete collapse if a situation exploits a weakness shared by that population. The same is true with not using the righttool for the job in a computing environment. Your company or organization depends on your knowledge as a professional to select the best mix of supportable, flexible, cost-effective technologies to solve their problems, whether you’re in an architect role or not.  So take some time today to learn something new. The way I do this is to select a given problem, and try to solve it with a technology I’m not familiar with. For instance – create a Purchase Order system in Excel, then in Hadoop or MongoDB, or even in flat-files using PowerShell as an interface. No, I’m not suggesting any of these architectures are the proper way to solve the PO problem, but taking something concrete that you know well and applying that meta-knowledge to another platform will assist you in exercising the “little grey cells” and help you and your organization understand what is open to you. And of course you can do all of this on-premises – but my recommendation is to check out a cloud platform (my suggestion would of course be Windows Azure :) ) and try it there. Most providers (including Microsoft) provide free time to do that.

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  • Designing Snake AI

    - by Ronald
    I'm new to this gamedev stackechange but have used the math and cs sites before. So, I'm in a competition to create AI for a snake that will compete with 3 other snakes in 5 minute rounds where the rules are much like the traditional Nokia snake game except that there are 4 snakes, the board is 50x50 and there are a number of small obstacles on the field. Like the Nokia game, your snake grows when you get to the fruit and if you crash into yourself, another snake or the wall you die. The game runs with a 50ms delay between moves and the server sends the new game state every 50ms which the code must analyze and what not and output the next move. The winner is the snake who had the longest length at any point in the game. Tie breakers are decided by kills. So far what I have done is implemented an A* graph search from each snake to determine if my snake is the closest to the apple and if it is, it goes for the apple. Otherwise, I made a neat little algorithm to determine the emptiest area of the board, which my snake goes for, to anticipate the next apple. Other than this I have some small survivability checks to ensure my snake isn't walking into a trap that it can't get out and if it does get stuck, I have something to give it a better chance of getting out. ... Anyway, I've tested my snake on a test server and it does quite well. Generally, my strategy of only going for the apple when its a sure thing and finding space when its not makes it grow faster than any other snakes (some snakes do a similar thing but often just go to the middle or a corner) sometimes it wins these trial games but is more often than not beaten by the same snake who seems to have the edge on survivability(my snake grows quicker but then dies somehow and this other snake just plods slowly along and wins on consistency. So I was wondering about any ideas anyone has to try and improve my snake. Or maybe ideas at a new approach to take. My functions and classes are good so changes that might seem drastic shouldn't be too bad. I encourage all ideas. Any thoughts ??

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  • 'Unable to mount Filesystem' Error

    - by Charles
    Trying to extract data from a 'bricked' Western Digital MyBook Live 2tb drive. I came across a forum that advised to use Ubuntu (booted from a CD) on my Macbook. Managed to download and create a boot CD for Ubuntu (like this little operating system btw). Booted the machine with the CD and plugged the drive (which I had extracted from it's casing and placed into a external USB SATA case & plugged to the laptop). The drive is seen by Ubuntu but each time I click on the drive, it gives me the following error: Unable to mount 2.0 TB Filesystem Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb4, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog -try dmesg | tail or so I am new to this and spent quite some time searching this site to see if I could find a solution to this problem without troubling anyone. I came up with a few that came close but some of the questioners mentioned that they had lost data...which scared me from going further. I need to basically extract 1 particular folder from the drive. If I can get to mount this volume 'sdb4', there is a folder called 'My_Work' which I need to back up. The rest I have/had a copy of. When I typed in dmesg | tail...I got several lines..but I think ones that are relevant are: [ 406.864677] EXT4-fs (sdb4): bad block size 65536 [ 429.098776] hfs: write access to a journaled filesystem is not supported, use the force option at your own risk, mounting read-only [ 439.786365] hfs: write access to a journaled filesystem is not supported, use the force option at your own risk, mounting read-only [ 445.982692] EXT4-fs (sdb4): bad block size 65536 [ 1565.841690] EXT4-fs (sdb4): bad block size 65536 I read somewhere to try/check 'sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb4'. It gave me the following result: Disk /dev/sdb44: 1995.8 GB, 1995774623744 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 242639 cylinders, total 3897997312 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/sdb4 doesn't contain a valid partition table This is where I reached and got frustrated and decided to try & get help on this without digging myself deeper into a hole! I understand that the answer may already be out there. If so, could someone please point me in the right direction. And if not, could someone please resolve (if possible) my situation!

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  • Legal concerns with orchestrating a music submission contest

    - by Amplify91
    My team and I are getting pretty far along in the development of our latest game and have been thinking about audio. We decided to host an audio submission contest where we will offer a little cash and some equity stake in the game as prizes. We are also giving away copies of the game to participants. We hope not only to find audio for our game, but to meet some cool sound artists and promote the game a bit through the process. First of all, is this even a good idea? What are some potential dangers in doing this? Will it even be well received among artists? Secondly, I wrote up some Terms and Conditions in my best legal-speak to try to protect us and clarify how the contest will be run. Are these sufficient to make sure everyone involved is treated fairly and is legally protected? They are as follows: All submissions (The Submission) must be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-3.0) By applying a CC-BY-3.0 license, you (The Submitter) expressly give Detour Games (and all members wherein) permission to copy, distribute, transmit, modify, adapt, and make commercial use of The Submission. The Submitter must own all rights to The Submission and be within their rights to license it as specified and submit it. The Submitter claims responsibility for the legality of The Submission. If The Submission is found to infringe on the rights of a person or entity other than those of The Submitter, Detour Games will not be held liable as all responsibility and liability for the legality of The Submission is that of The Submitter's. No more than two free copies of The Game per submitter. All flat cash prizes will only be disbursed pending the success of our first $5,000 Kickstarter campaign. These prizes will be disbursed 30 days after Detour Games receives the Kickstarter funds. All equity prizes (percentage of profits) are defined as the given percent of total profits after costs for a period of one year (12 months) after the release of RAW. These prizes will be disbursed semi-annually. All prize money will be disbursed through either an electronic fund transfer through a service such as PayPal or by a mailed money order. It is The Submitter's responsibility to cooperate with Detour Games in the disbursement of the funds. Detour Games reserves the right to change these Terms and Conditions at any time without notice. By participating in the contest, The Submitter agrees to and accepts all terms and conditions listed. What else could I do (legally) to protect everyone involved?

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  • Why is everything crashing?

    - by Kopkins
    I've been using Ubuntu for a while now and I love it, I wouldn't think of using another OS unless I can't fix this issue. The install I'm on is only around a month and a half old. I'm running 12.04 64bit on a 8,1 MBP. Up until around 2 weeks ago everything was running smoothly. Around then applications started crashing and weird things started happening. At first I thought it was just certain applications. The first thing to start giving me trouble was compiz. Occasionally compiz will stop decorating windows and lost many other functionalities. running compiz --replace fixes this, but I don't feel like doing it usually once a day. The other thing with this is that after running compiz --replace, my conky window gets lost somewhere and so I run killall conky && conky -c .conkyrc. But this isn't with just a couple applications, it seems like it is proliferating through my system. Last week fontforge started crashing while doing whatever task. So I ended up unable to finish what I was working on to completeness. Didn't find a fix. Today rhythmbox started crashing. Whenever I try to play anything, Rhythmbox becomes unresponsive and needs to be forced to close. When I try to do certain things with the disk utility, it crashes. I get the Ubuntu has experienced an internal error message much more often than I would like. Frequently applications stop appearing in the launcher. Wine almost never does anymore. After not being active for a little while, thunderbird can only fetch my mail after restarting wireless, sudo rmmod b43 && sudo modprobe b43 Occasionally some of my startup apps don't start. What is my best option here? Could they be bugs? I don't want to submit a ton of vague bug reports. Reinstall? switch OS? Thank you to anyone who responds. Kopkins

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  • Point line collision reaction

    - by user4523
    I am trying to program point line segment collision detection and reaction. I am doing this for fun and to learn. The point moves (it has a velocity, and can be controlled by the user), whilst the lines are strait and stationary. The lines are not axis aligned. Everything is in 2D. It is quite straight forward to work out if a collision has occurred. For each frame, the point moves from A to B. AB is a line, and if it crosses the line segment, a collision has occurred (or will occur) and I am able to work out the point of intersection (poi). The problem I am having is with the reaction. Ideally I would like the point to be prevented from moving across the line. In one frame, I can move the point back to the poi (or only alow it to move as far as the poi), and alter the velocity. The problem I am having with this approach (I think) is that, next frame the user may try to cross the line again. Although the point is on the poi, the point may not be exactly on the line. Since it is not axis aligned, I think there is always some subtle rounding issue (A float representation of a point on a line might be rounded to a point that is slightly on one side or the other). Because of this, next frame the path might not intersect the line (because it can start on the other side and move away from it) and the point is effectively allowed to cross the line. Firstly, does the analysis sound correct? Having accepted (maybe) that I cannot always exactly position the point on the line, I tried to move the point away from the line slightly (either along the normal to the line, or along the path vector). I then get a problem at edges. Attempting to fix one collision by moving the point away from the line (even slightly) can cause it to cross another line (one shape I am dealing with is a star, with sharp corners). This can mean that the solution to one collision inadvertently creates another collision, which is ignored. Again, does this sound correct? Anyway, whatever I try, I am having difficulty with edges, and the point is occasionally able to penetrate the polygons and cross lines, which is undesirable. Whilst I can find a lot of information about collision detection on the web (and on this site) I can find precious little information on collision reaction. Does any one know of any good point line collision reaction tutorials? Or is my approach too flawed/over complicated?

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  • Creating a Yes/No MessageBox in a NuGet install/uninstall script

    - by ParadigmShift
    Sometimes getting a little feedback during the install/uninstall process of a NuGet package could be really useful. Instead of accounting for all possible ways to install your NuGet package for every user, you can simplify the installation by clarifying with the user what they want. This example shows how to generate a windows yes/no message box to get input from the user in the PowerShell install or uninstall script. We’ll use the prompt on the uninstall to confirm if the user wants to delete a custom setting that the initial install placed in their configuration.  Obviously you could use the prompt in any way you want. The objects of the message box are generated similar to the controls in the code behind of a WinForm. At the beginning of your script enter this: param($installPath, $toolsPath, $package, $project)   # Set up path variables $solutionDir = Get-SolutionDir $projectName = (Get-Project).ProjectName $projectPath = Join-Path $solutionDir $projectName   ################################################################################################ # WinForm generation for prompt ################################################################################################ function Ask-Delete-Custom-Settings { [void][reflection.assembly]::loadwithpartialname("System.Windows.Forms") [Void][reflection.assembly]::loadwithpartialname("System.Drawing")   $title = "Package Uninstall" $message = "Delete the customized settings?" #Create form and controls $form1 = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Form $label1 = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Label $btnYes = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Button $btnNo = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Button   #Set properties of controls and form ############ # label1 # ############ $label1.Location = New-Object System.Drawing.Point(12,9) $label1.Name = "label1" $label1.Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size(254,17) $label1.TabIndex = 0 $label1.Text = $message   ############# # btnYes # ############# $btnYes.Location = New-Object System.Drawing.Point(156,45) $btnYes.Name = "btnYes" $btnYes.Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size(48,25) $btnYes.TabIndex = 1 $btnYes.Text = "Yes"   ########### # btnNo # ########### $btnNo.Location = New-Object System.Drawing.Point(210,45) $btnNo.Name = "btnNo" $btnNo.Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size(48,25) $btnNo.TabIndex = 2 $btnNo.Text = "No"   ########### # form1 # ########### $form1.ClientSize = New-Object System.Drawing.Size(281,86) $form1.Controls.Add($label1) $form1.Controls.Add($btnYes) $form1.Controls.Add($btnNo) $form1.Name = "Form1" $form1.Text = $title #Event Handler $btnYes.add_Click({btnYes_Click}) $btnNo.add_Click({btnNo_Click}) return $form1.ShowDialog() } function btnYes_Click { #6 = Yes $form1.DialogResult = 6 } function btnNo_Click { #7 = No $form1.DialogResult = 7 } ################################################################################################ This has also wired up the click events to the form.  This is all it takes to create the message box. Now we have to actually use the message box and get the user’s response or this is all pointless.  We’ll then delete the section of the application/web configuration called <Custom.Settings> [xml] $configXmlContent = Get-Content $configFile   Write-Host "Please respond to the question in the Dialog Box." $dialogResult = Ask-Delete-Custom-Settings #6 = Yes #7 = No Write-Host "dialogResult = $dialogResult" if ($dialogResult.ToString() -eq "Yes") { Write-Host "Deleting customized settings" $customSettingsNode = $configXmlContent.configuration.Item("Custom.Settings") $configXmlContent.configuration.RemoveChild($customSettingsNode) $configXmlContent.Save($configFile) } if ($dialogResult.ToString() -eq "No") { Write-Host "Do not delete customized settings" } The part where I check if ($dialog.Result.ToString() –eq “Yes”) could just as easily check the value for either 6 or 7 (Yes or No).  I just personally decided I liked this way better.   Shahzad Qureshi is a Software Engineer and Consultant in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA His certifications include: Microsoft Certified System Engineer 3CX Certified Partner Global Information Assurance Certification – Secure Software Programmer – .NET He is the owner of Utah VoIP Store at http://www.utahvoipstore.com/ and SWS Development at http://www.swsdev.com/ and publishes windows apps under the name Blue Voice.

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  • How can we unify business goals and technical goals?

    - by BAM
    Some background I work at a small startup: 4 devs, 1 designer, and 2 non-technical co-founders, one who provides funding, and the other who handles day-to-day management and sales. Our company produces mobile apps for target industries, and we've gotten a lot of lucky breaks lately. The outlook is good, and we're confident we can make this thing work. One reason is our product development team. Everyone on the team is passionate, driven, and has a great sense of what makes an awesome product. As a result, we've built some beautiful applications that we're all proud of. The other reason is the co-founders. Both have a brilliant business sense (one actually founded a multi-million dollar company already), and they have close ties in many of the industries we're trying to penetrate. Consequently, they've brought in some great business and continue to keep jobs in the pipeline. The problem The problem we can't seem to shake is how to bring these two awesome advantages together. On the business side, there is a huge pressure to deliver as fast as possible as much as possible, whereas on the development side there is pressure to take your time, come up with the right solution, and pay attention to all the details. Lately these two sides have been butting heads a lot. Developers are demanding quality while managers are demanding quantity. How can we handle this? Both sides are correct. We can't survive as a company if we build terrible applications, but we also can't survive if we don't sell enough. So how should we go about making compromises? Things we've done with little or no success: Work more (well, it did result in better quality and faster delivery, but the dev team has never been more stressed out before) Charge more (as a startup, we don't yet have the credibility to justify higher prices, so no one is willing to pay) Extend deadlines (if we charge the same, but take longer, we'll end up losing money) Things we've done with some success: Sacrifice pay to cut costs (everyone, from devs to management, is paid less than they could be making elsewhere. In return, however, we all have creative input and more flexibility and freedom, a typical startup trade off) Standardize project management (we recently started adhering to agile/scrum principles so we can base deadlines on actual velocity, not just arbitrary guesses) Hire more people (we used to have 2 developers and no designers, which really limited our bandwidth. However, as a startup we can only afford to hire a few extra people.) Is there anything we're missing or doing wrong? How is this handled at successful companies? Thanks in advance for any feedback :)

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