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  • How to design shape class

    - by Tomek Tarczynski
    I want to design shape class. I need to distinguish several different shapes: -Point -Line -Triangle -Circle -Polygons The main purpose of this class is to calculate distance between two shapes. I've all methods for calculating those distances, but I want to have a single method that can be used, it should looks like this: float Distance(Shape a, Shape b) Simplest way to do it is to put a lot of if statements and then invoke proper method but this is deffinitely not OOP. How to design such class in OOP style?

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  • The Changing Face of PASS

    - by Bill Graziano
    I’m starting my sixth year on the PASS Board.  I served two years as the Program Director, two years as the Vice-President of Marketing and I’m starting my second year as the Executive Vice-President of Finance.  There’s a pretty good chance that if PASS has done something you don’t like or is doing something you don’t like, that I’m involved in one way or another. Andy Leonard asked in a comment on his blog if the Board had ever reversed itself based on community input.  He asserted that it hadn’t.  I disagree.  I’m not going to try and list all the changes we make inside portfolios based on feedback from and meetings with the community.  I’m going to focus on major governance issues since I was elected to the Board. Management Company The first big change was our management company.  Our old management company had a standard approach to running a non-profit.  It worked well when PASS was launched.  Having a ready-made structure and process to run the organization enabled the organization to grow quickly.  As time went on we were limited in some of the things we wanted to do.  The more involved you were with PASS, the more you saw these limitations.  Key volunteers were regularly providing feedback that they wanted certain changes that were difficult for us to accomplish.  The Board at that time wanted changes that were difficult or impossible to accomplish under that structure. This was not a simple change.  Imagine a $2.5 million dollar company letting all its employees go on a Friday and starting with a new staff on Monday.  We also had a very narrow window to accomplish that so that we wouldn’t affect the Summit – our only source of revenue.  We spent the year after the change rebuilding processes and putting on the Summit in Denver.  That’s a concrete example of a huge change that PASS made to better serve its members.  And it was a change that many in the community were telling us we needed to make. Financials We heard regularly from our members that they wanted our financials posted.  Today on our web site you can find audited financials going back to 2004.  We publish our budget at the start of each year.  If you ask a question about the financials on the PASS site I do my best to answer it.  I’m also trying to do a better job answering financial questions posted in other locations.  (And yes, I know I owe a few of you some blog posts.) That’s another concrete example of a change that our members asked for that the Board agreed was a good decision. Minutes When I started on the Board the meeting minutes were very limited.  The minutes from a two day Board meeting might fit on one page.  I think we did the bare minimum we were legally required to do.  Today Board meeting minutes run from 5 to 12 pages and go into incredible detail on what we talk about.  There are certain topics that are NDA but where possible we try to list the topic we discussed but that the actual discussion was under NDA.  We also publish the agenda of Board meetings ahead of time. This is another specific example where input from the community influenced the decision.  It was certainly easier to have limited minutes but I think the extra effort helps our members understand what’s going on. Board Q&A At the 2009 Summit the Board held its first public Q&A with our members.  We’d always been available individually to answer questions.  There’s a benefit to getting us all in one room and asking the really hard questions to watch us squirm.  We learn what questions we don’t have good answers for.  We get to see how many people in the crowd look interested in the various questions and answers. I don’t recall the genesis of how this came about.  I’m fairly certain there was some community pressure though. Board Votes Until last November, the Board only reported the vote totals and not how individual Board members voted.  That was one of the topics at a great lunch I had with Tim Mitchell and Kendal van Dyke at the Summit.  That was also the topic of the first question asked at the Board Q&A by Kendal.  Kendal expressed his opposition to to anonymous votes clearly and passionately and without trying to paint anyone into a corner.  Less than 24 hours later the PASS Board voted to make individual votes public unless the topic was under NDA.  That’s another area where the Board decided to change based on feedback from our members. Summit Location While this isn’t actually a governance issue it is one of the more public decisions we make that has taken some public criticism.  There is a significant portion of our members that want the Summit near them.  There is a significant portion of our members that like the Summit in Seattle.  There is a significant portion of our members that think it should move around the country.  I was one that felt strongly that there were significant, tangible benefits to our attendees to being in Seattle every year.  I’m also one that has been swayed by some very compelling arguments that we need to have at least one outside Seattle and then revisit the decision.  I can’t tell you how the Board will vote but I know the opinion of our members weighs heavily on the decision. Elections And that brings us to the grand-daddy of all governance issues.  My thesis for this blog post is that the PASS Board has implemented policy changes in response to member feedback.  It isn’t to defend or criticize our election process.  It’s just to say that is has been under going continuous change since I’ve been on the Board.  I ran for the Board in the fall of 2005.  I don’t know much about what happened before then.  I was actively volunteering for PASS for four years prior to that as a chapter leader and on the program committee.  I don’t recall any complaints about elections but that doesn’t mean they didn’t occur.  The questions from the Nominating Committee (NomCom) were trivial and the selection process rudimentary (For example, “Tell us about your accomplishments”).  I don’t even remember who I ran against or how many other people ran.  I ran for the VP of Marketing in the fall of 2007.  I don’t recall any significant changes the Board made in the election process for that election.  I think a lot of the changes in 2007 came from us asking the management company to work on the election process.  I was expecting a similar set of puff ball questions from my previous election.  Boy, was I in for a shock.  The NomCom had found a much better set of questions and really made the interview portion difficult.  The questions were much more behavioral in nature.  I’d already written about my vision for PASS and my goals.  They wanted to know how I handled adversity, how I handled criticism, how I handled conflict, how I handled troublesome volunteers, how I motivated people and how I responded to motivation. And many, many other things. They grilled me for over an hour.  I’ve done a fair bit of technical sales in my time.  I feel I speak well under pressure addressing pointed questions.  This interview intentionally put me under pressure.  In addition to wanting to know about my interpersonal skills, my work experience, my volunteer experience and my supervisory experience they wanted to see how I’d do under pressure.  They wanted to see who would respond under pressure and who wouldn’t.  It was a bit of a shock. That was the first big change I remember in the election process.  I know there were other improvements around the process but none of them stick in my mind quite like the unexpected hour-long grilling. The next big change I remember was after the 2009 elections.  Andy Warren was unhappy with the election process and wanted to make some changes.  He worked with Hannes at HQ and they came up with a better set of processes.  I think Andy moved PASS in the right direction.  Nonetheless, after the 2010 election even more people were very publicly clamoring for changes to our election process.  In August of 2010 we had a choice to make.  There were numerous bloggers criticizing the Board and our upcoming election.  The easy change would be to announce that we were changing the process in a way that would satisfy our critics.  I believe that a knee-jerk response to criticism is seldom correct. Instead the Board spent August and September and October and November listening to the community.  I visited two SQLSaturdays and asked questions of everyone I could.  I attended chapter meetings and asked questions of as many people as they’d let me.  At Summit I made it a point to introduce myself to strangers and ask them about the election.  At every breakfast I’d sit down at a table full of strangers and ask about the election.  I’m happy to say that I left most tables arguing about the election.  Most days I managed to get 2 or 3 breakfasts in. I spent less time talking to people that had already written about the election.  They were already expressing their opinion.  I wanted to talk to people that hadn’t spoken up.  I wanted to know what the silent majority thought.  The Board all attended the Q&A session where our members expressed their concerns about a variety of issues including the election. The PASS Board also chose to create the Election Review Committee.  We wanted people from the community that had been involved with PASS to look at our election process with fresh eyes while listening to what the community had to say and give us some advice on how we could improve the process.  I’m a part of this as is Andy Warren.  None of the other members are on the Board.  I’ve sat in numerous calls and interviews with this group and attended an open meeting at the Summit.  We asked anyone that wanted to discuss the election to come speak with us.  The ERC held an open meeting at the Summit and invited anyone to attend.  There are forums on the ERC web site where we’ve invited people to participate.  The ERC has reached to key people involved in recent elections.  The years that I haven’t mentioned also saw minor improvements in the election process.  Off the top of my head I don’t recall what exact changes were made each year.  Specifically since the 2010 election we’ve gone out of our way to seek input from the community about the process.  I’m not sure what more we could have done to invite feedback from the community. I think to say that we haven’t “fixed” the election process isn’t a fair criticism at this time.  We haven’t rushed any changes through the process.  If you don’t see any changes in our election process in July or August then I think it’s fair to criticize us for ignoring the community or ask for an explanation for what we’ve done. In Summary Andy’s main point was that the PASS Board hasn’t changed in response to our members wishes.  I think I’ve shown that time and time again the PASS Board has changed in response to what our members want.  There are only two outstanding issues: Summit location and elections.  The 2013 Summit location hasn’t been decided yet.  Our work on the elections is also in progress.  And at every step in the election review we’ve gone out of our way to listen to the community and incorporate their feedback on the process. I also hope I’m not encouraging everyone that wants some change in the organization to organize a “blog rush” against the Board.  We take public suggestions very seriously but we also take the time to evaluate those suggestions and learn what the rest of our members think and make a measured decision.

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  • Too complex/too many objects?

    - by Mike Fairhurst
    I know that this will be a difficult question to answer without context, but hopefully there are at least some good guidelines to share on this. The questions are at the bottom if you want to skip the details. Most are about OOP in general. Begin context. I am a jr dev on a PHP application, and in general the devs I work with consider themselves to use many more OO concepts than most PHP devs. Still, in my research on clean code I have read about so many ways of using OO features to make code flexible, powerful, expressive, testable, etc. that is just plain not in use here. The current strongly OO API that I've proposed is being called too complex, even though it is trivial to implement. The problem I'm solving is that our permission checks are done via a message object (my API, they wanted to use arrays of constants) and the message object does not hold the validation object accountable for checking all provided data. Metaphorically, if your perm containing 'allowable' and 'rare but disallowed' is sent into a validator, the validator may not know to look for 'rare but disallowed', but approve 'allowable', which will actually approve the whole perm check. We have like 11 validators, too many to easily track at such minute detail. So I proposed an AtomicPermission class. To fix the previous example, the perm would instead contain two atomic permissions, one wrapping 'allowable' and the other wrapping 'rare but disallowed'. Where previously the validator would say 'the check is OK because it contains allowable,' now it would instead say '"allowable" is ok', at which point the check ends...and the check fails, because 'rare but disallowed' was not specifically okay-ed. The implementation is just 4 trivial objects, and rewriting a 10 line function into a 15 line function. abstract class PermissionAtom { public function allow(); // maybe deny() as well public function wasAllowed(); } class PermissionField extends PermissionAtom { public function getName(); public function getValue(); } class PermissionIdentifier extends PermissionAtom { public function getIdentifier(); } class PermissionAction extends PermissionAtom { public function getType(); } They say that this is 'not going to get us anything important' and it is 'too complex' and 'will be difficult for new developers to pick up.' I respectfully disagree, and there I end my context to begin the broader questions. So the question is about my OOP, are there any guidelines I should know: is this too complicated/too much OOP? Not that I expect to get more than 'it depends, I'd have to see if...' when is OO abstraction too much? when is OO abstraction too little? how can I determine when I am overthinking a problem vs fixing one? how can I determine when I am adding bad code to a bad project? how can I pitch these APIs? I feel the other devs would just rather say 'its too complicated' than ask 'can you explain it?' whenever I suggest a new class.

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  • Why can't I send SOAP requests to Ebay finding API with this php?

    - by Jay
    This is my code: <?php error_reporting(E_ALL); //new instance of soapClient pointing to Ebay finding api $client = new SoapClient("http://developer.ebay.com/webservices/finding/latest/FindingService.wsdl"); //attach required parameters to soap message header $header_arr = array(); $header_arr[] = new SoapHeader("X-EBAY-SOA-MESSAGE-PROTOCOL", "SOAP11"); $header_arr[] = new SoapHeader("X-EBAY-SOA-SERVICE-NAME", "FindingService"); $header_arr[] = new SoapHeader("X-EBAY-SOA-OPERATION-NAME", "findItemsByKeywords"); $header_arr[] = new SoapHeader("X-EBAY-SOA-SERVICE-VERSION", "1.0.0"); $header_arr[] = new SoapHeader("X-EBAY-SOA-GLOBAL-ID", "EBAY-GB"); $header_arr[] = new SoapHeader("X-EBAY-SOA-SECURITY-APPNAME", "REMOVED"); $header_arr[] = new SoapHeader("X-EBAY-SOA-REQUEST-DATA-FORMAT", "XML"); $header_arr[] = new SoapHeader("X-EBAY-SOA-MESSAGE-PROTOCOL", "XML"); $test = $client->__setSoapHeaders($header_arr); $client->__setLocation("http://svcs.ebay.com/services/search/FindingService/v1");//endpoint $FindItemsByKeywordsRequest = array( "keywords" => "potter" ); $result = $client->__soapCall("findItemsByKeywords", $FindItemsByKeywordsRequest); //print_r($client->__getFunctions()); //print_r($client->__getTypes()); //print_r($result); ? And this is the error I receive: Fatal error: Uncaught SoapFault exception: [axis2ns2:Server] Missing SOA operation name header in C:\xampplite\htdocs\OOP\newfile.php:25 Stack trace: #0 C:\xampplite\htdocs\OOP\newfile.php(25): SoapClient-__soapCall('findItemsByKeyw...', Array) #1 {main} thrown in C:\xampplite\htdocs\OOP\newfile.php on line 25 It doesnt make sense, I have already set the operation name in the header of the request... Does anyone know what is wrong here?

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  • Handling incremental Data Modeling Changes in Functional Programming

    - by Adam Gent
    Most of the problems I have to solve in my job as a developer have to do with data modeling. For example in a OOP Web Application world I often have to change the data properties that are in a object to meet new requirements. If I'm lucky I don't even need to programmatically add new "behavior" code (functions,methods). Instead I can declarative add validation and even UI options by annotating the property (Java). In Functional Programming it seems that adding new data properties requires lots of code changes because of pattern matching and data constructors (Haskell, ML). How do I minimize this problem? This seems to be a recognized problem as Xavier Leroy states nicely on page 24 of "Objects and Classes vs. Modules" - To summarize for those that don't have a PostScript viewer it basically says FP languages are better than OOP languages for adding new behavior over data objects but OOP languages are better for adding new data objects/properties. Are there any design pattern used in FP languages to help mitigate this problem? I have read Phillip Wadler's recommendation of using Monads to help this modularity problem but I'm not sure I understand how?

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  • Can parser combinators be made efficient?

    - by Jon Harrop
    Around 6 years ago, I benchmarked my own parser combinators in OCaml and found that they were ~5× slower than the parser generators on offer at the time. I recently revisited this subject and benchmarked Haskell's Parsec vs a simple hand-rolled precedence climbing parser written in F# and was surprised to find the F# to be 25× faster than the Haskell. Here's the Haskell code I used to read a large mathematical expression from file, parse and evaluate it: import Control.Applicative import Text.Parsec hiding ((<|>)) expr = chainl1 term ((+) <$ char '+' <|> (-) <$ char '-') term = chainl1 fact ((*) <$ char '*' <|> div <$ char '/') fact = read <$> many1 digit <|> char '(' *> expr <* char ')' eval :: String -> Int eval = either (error . show) id . parse expr "" . filter (/= ' ') main :: IO () main = do file <- readFile "expr" putStr $ show $ eval file putStr "\n" and here's my self-contained precedence climbing parser in F#: let rec (|Expr|) (P(f, xs)) = Expr(loop (' ', f, xs)) and loop = function | ' ' as oop, f, ('+' | '-' as op)::P(g, xs) | (' ' | '+' | '-' as oop), f, ('*' | '/' as op)::P(g, xs) -> let h, xs = loop (op, g, xs) let op = match op with | '+' -> (+) | '-' -> (-) | '*' -> (*) | '/' -> (/) loop (oop, op f h, xs) | _, f, xs -> f, xs and (|P|) = function | '('::Expr(f, ')'::xs) -> P(f, xs) | c::xs when '0' <= c && c <= '9' -> P(int(string c), xs) My impression is that even state-of-the-art parser combinators waste a lot of time back tracking. Is that correct? If so, is it possible to write parser combinators that generate state machines to obtain competitive performance or is it necessary to use code generation?

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  • Have I taken a wrong path in programming by being excessively worried about code elegance and style?

    - by Ygam
    I am in a major stump right now. I am a BSIT graduate, but I only started actual programming less than a year ago. I observed that I have the following attitude in programming: I tend to be more of a purist, scorning unelegant approaches to solving problems using code I tend to look at anything in a large scale, planning everything before I start coding, either in simple flowcharts or complex UML charts I have a really strong impulse on refactoring my code, even if I miss deadlines or prolong development times I am obsessed with good directory structures, file naming conventions, class, method, and variable naming conventions I tend to always want to study something new, even, as I said, at the cost of missing deadlines I tend to see software development as something to engineer, to architect; that is, seeing how things relate to each other and how blocks of code can interact (I am a huge fan of loose coupling) i.e the OOP thinking I tend to combine OOP and procedural coding whenever I see fit I want my code to execute fast (thus the elegant approaches and refactoring) This bothers me because I see my colleagues doing much better the other way around (aside from the fact that they started programming since our first year in college). By the other way around I mean, they fire up coding, gets the job done much faster because they don't have to really look at how clean their codes are or how elegant their algorithms are, they don't bother with OOP however big their projects are, they mostly use web APIs, piece them together and voila! Working code! CLients are happy, they get paid fast, at the expense of a really unmaintainable or hard-to-read code that lacks structure and conventions, or slow executions of certain actions (which the common reasoning against would be that internet connections are much faster these days, hardware is more powerful). The excuse I often receive is clients don't care about how you write the code, but they do care about how long you deliver it. If it works then all is good. Now, did my "purist" approach to programming may have been the wrong way to start programming? Should I just dump these purist concepts and just code the hell up because I have seen it: clients don't really care how beautifully coded it is?

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  • How I May Have Taken A Wrong Path in Programming

    - by Ygam
    I am in a major stump right now. I am a BSIT graduate, but I only started actual programming less than a year ago. I observed that I have the following attitude in programming: I tend to be more of a purist, scorning unelegant approaches to solving problems using code I tend to look at anything in a large scale, planning everything before I start coding, either in simple flowcharts or complex UML charts I have a really strong impulse on refactoring my code, even if I miss deadlines or prolong development times I am obsessed with good directory structures, file naming conventions, class, method, and variable naming conventions I tend to always want to study something new, even, as I said, at the cost of missing deadlines I tend to see software development as something to engineer, to architect; that is, seeing how things relate to each other and how blocks of code can interact (I am a huge fan of loose coupling) i.e the OOP thinking I tend to combine OOP and procedural coding whenever I see fit I want my code to execute fast (thus the elegant approaches and refactoring) This bothers me because I see my colleagues doing much better the other way around (aside from the fact that they started programming since our first year in college). By the other way around I mean, they fire up coding, gets the job done much faster because they don't have to really look at how clean their codes are or how elegant their algorithms are, they don't bother with OOP however big their projects are, they mostly use web APIs, piece them together and voila! Working code! CLients are happy, they get paid fast, at the expense of a really unmaintainable or hard-to-read code that lacks structure and conventions, or slow executions of certain actions (which the common reasoning against would be that internet connections are much faster these days, hardware is more powerful). The excuse I often receive is clients don't care about how you write the code, but they do care about how long you deliver it. If it works then all is good. Now, did my "purist" approach to programming may have been the wrong way to start programming? Should I just dump these purist concepts and just code the hell up because I have seen it: clients don't really care how beautifully coded it is?

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  • So, "Are Design Patterns Missing Language Features"?

    - by Eduard Florinescu
    I saw the answer to this question: How does thinking on design patterns and OOP practices change in dynamic and weakly-typed languages? There it is a link to an article with an outspoken title: Are Design Patterns Missing Language Features. But where you can get snippets that seem very objective and factual and that can be verified from experience like: PaulGraham said "Peter Norvig found that 16 of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were 'invisible or simpler' in Lisp." and a thing that confirms what I recently seen with people trying to simulate classes in javascript: Of course, nobody ever speaks of the "function" pattern, or the "class" pattern, or numerous other things that we take for granted because most languages provide them as built-in features. OTOH, programmers in a purely PrototypeOrientedLanguage? might well find it convenient to simulate classes with prototypes... I am taking into consideration also that design patterns are a communcation tool and because even with my limited experience participating in building applications I can see as an anti-pattern(ineffective and/or counterproductive) for example forcing a small PHP team to learn GoF patterns for small to medium intranet app, I am aware that scale, scope and purpose can determine what is effective and/or productive. I saw small commercial applications that mixed functional with OOP and still be maintainable, and I don't know if many would need for example in python to write a singleton but for me a simple module does the thing. patterns So are there studies or hands on experience shared that takes into consideration, all this, scale and scope of project, dynamics and size of the team, languages and technologies, so that you don't feel that a (difficult for some)design pattern is there just because there isn't a simpler way to do it or that it cannot be done by a language feature?

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  • How much Ruby should I learn before moving to Rails?

    - by Kevin
    Just a quick question.. I can never get a definitive answer when googling this, either. Some people say you can learn Rails without knowing any Ruby, but at some point you'll run into a brick wall and wish you knew Ruby and will have to go back to learn it..and some say to learn the "basics" of Ruby before learning Rails and it will make your life that much easier.. My current knowledge is low. I'm not a beginner, but I'm not pro, either. I went through the Learn Python The Hard Way online book in about a month, but I stopped once I got to the OOP side of Python (I know booleans, elif/if/else/statements, for loops, while loops, functions) I agree with learning the "basics" of Ruby before learning Rails, but what exactly are the "basics" of Ruby? Would I need to learn the whole OOP side of Ruby before I went on to Rails? Or would I just need to learn the Ruby syntax up to where I learned Python (booleans, elif/if/else/statements, for loops, while loops, functions) before I went on to Rails? Thanks!

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  • How do you avoid being a "blowhard"?

    - by Conrad Frix
    When I'm passionate about something (particularly programming) I find it really easy come off like the guy Peter G. was talking about in Dealing with the “programming blowhard”. So what techniques do you use to 1) Identify when you are indeed a blowhard? 2) Communicate something "important" without seeming self important? Specific example help like When giving criticism ask "have you considered what happens when XXX changes" instead of "never take dependencies on implementation details" When giving advice "showing with code is better than talking" or use a reference.

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  • DAO/Webservice Consumption in Web Application

    - by Gavin
    I am currently working on converting a "legacy" web-based (Coldfusion) application from single data source (MSSQL database) to multi-tier OOP. In my current system there is a read/write database with all the usual stuff and additional "read-only" databases that are exported daily/hourly from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system by SSIS jobs with business product/item and manufacturing/SCM planning data. The reason I have the opportunity and need to convert to multi-tier OOP is a newer more modern ERP system is being implemented business wide that will be a complete replacement. This newer ERP system offers several interfaces for third party applications like mine, from direct SQL access to either a dotNet web-service or a SOAP-like web-service. I have found several suitable frameworks I would be happy to use (Coldspring, FW/1) but I am not sure what design patterns apply to my data access object/component and how to manage the connection/session tokens, with this background, my question has the following three parts: Firstly I have concerns with moving from the relative safety of a SSIS job that protects me from downtime and speed of the ERP system to directly connecting with one of the web services which I note seem significantly slower than I expected (simple/small requests often take up to a whole second). Are there any design patterns I can investigate/use to cache/protect my data tier? It is my understanding data access objects (the component that connects directly with the web services and convert them into the data types I can then work with in my Domain Objects) should be singletons (and will act as an Adapter/Facade), am I correct? As part of the data access object I have to setup a connection by username/password (I could set up multiple users and/or connect multiple times with this) which responds with a session token that needs to be provided on every subsequent request. Do I do this once and share it across the whole application, do I setup a new "connection" for every user of my application and keep the token in their session scope (might quickly hit licensing limits), do I set the "connection" up per page request, or is there a design pattern I am missing that can manage multiple "connections" where a requests/access uses the first free "connection"? It is worth noting if the ERP system dies I will need to reset/invalidate all the connections and start from scratch, and depending on which web-service I use might need manually close the "connection/session"

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  • Outlying DBAs

    - by steveh99999
    Read an interesting book recently, ‘Outliers – the story of success’ by Malcolm Gladwell. There’s a good synopsis of the book here on wikipedia. I don’t want to write in detailed review of the book, but it’s well worth a read. There were a couple of sections which I thought were possibly relevant to IT professionals and DBAs in particular. Firstly, ‘the 10,000 hour rule’, in this section Gladwell asserts that to be a real ‘elite performer’ takes 10,000 hours of practice. ‘Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good, it’s the thing you do that makes you good’.  He gives many interesting examples – the Beatles, Bill Gates etc – but I was wondering could this be applied to DBAs ? If it takes 10,000 hours to be a really elite DBA – how long does that really take ? 8 hours a day makes 1250 days. If we assume that most DBAs work around 230 days a year – then it takes around 5 and a half years to become an elite DBA.   But how much time per day does a DBA spend actually doing DBA work ? Certainly it’s my experience that the more experienced I get as a DBA, the less time I seem to spend actually doing DBA work – ie meetings, change-control meetings, project planning, liasing with other teams, appraisals etc.  Is it more accurate to assume that a DBA spends half their time actually doing ‘real’ DBA work – or is that just my bad luck ?   So, in reality, I’d argue it can take at least 5 1/2 and more likely closer to 10 years to become an elite DBA. Why do I keep receiving CVs for senior DBAs with 2-4 years actual DBA experience ? In the second section I found particularly interesting, Gladwell writes about analysis of plane crashes and the importance of in-cockpit communications. He describes a couple of crashes involving Korean Airlines – where co-pilots were often deferrential to pilots, and unwilling to openly criticise their more senior colleagues or point out errors when things were going badly wrong… There’s a better summary of Gladwell’s concepts on mitigation  here – but to apply this to a DBA role… If you are a DBA and you do not agree with  a decision of one of your superiors, then it’s your duty as a DBA to say what you think is wrong, before it’s too late…  Obviously there’s a fine line between constructive criticism and moaning, but a good senior DBA or manager should be able to take well-researched criticism\debate from a more junior DBA.   Is this really possible ?

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  • Can I assume interface oriented programming as a good object oriented programming?

    - by david
    I have been programming for decades but I have not been used to object oriented programming. But for recenet years, I had a great opportunity to learn OOP, its principles, and a lot of patterns that are great. Since I've learned OOP, I tried to apply them to a couple of projects and found those projects successful. Unfortunately I didn't follow extreme programming that suggests writing test first, mainly because their time frame were tight. What I did for those projects were Identify all necessary classes and create them with proper properties and methods whenever there is dependency between classes, write interface between them see if there is any patterns for certain relationships between classes to replace By successful, I meant that it was quick development effort, the classes can be reused better, and flexible enough so that another programmer does not have to change something else to fix another part. But I wonder if this is a good practice. Of course, I know I need to put writing unit tests first in my work process. But other than that, is there any problem with this approach - creating lots of interfaces - in long term?

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  • Avoiding Object Oriented Pitfalls, Migrating from C, What Worked for You?

    - by Stephen
    I've been programming in procedural languages for quite some time now, and my first reaction to a problem is to start breaking it down into tasks to perform rather than to consider the different entities (objects) that exist and their relationships. I have had a university course in OOP, and understand the fundamentals of encapsulation, data abstraction, polymorphism, modularity and inheritance. I read Learning to think in the Object Oriented Way and Learning object oriented thinking, and will be looking at some of the books pointed to in those answers. I think that several of my medium to large sized projects will benefit from effective use of OOP but as a novice I would like to avoid time consuming, common errors. Based on your experiences, what are these pitfalls and what are reasonable ways around them? If you could explain why they are pitfalls, and how your suggestion is effective in addressing the issue it'd be appreciated. I'm thinking along the lines of something like "Is it common to have a fair number of observer and modifier methods and use private variables or are there techniques for consolidating/reducing them?" I'm not worried about using C++ as a pure OO language, if there are good reasons to mix methods. (Reminiscent of the reasons to use GOTOs, albeit sparingly.) Thank you!

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  • Architects, Leadership, and Influence

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Technical expertise is a given for architects. In addition to solid development experience, extensive knowledge of technical trends, tools, standards, and methodolgies (not to mention business accumen) provides the foundation for the decisions the architect must make in the effort to get all the pieces to work together. But even superior technical chops can't overcome a lack of leadership. Leadership is about influence: the ability to effectively communicate — to sell your ideas and defend your decisions in a manner that affects the decisions of the people around you. Leadership and influence are especially important in situations in which the architect may not have the authority to simply tell people what to do. And even when the architect has that kind of authority, influential leadership can mean the difference between gaining real buy-in and support from colleagues and stakeholders, and settling for their grudging acceptance (or worse). Guess which outcome is likely to produce the best results. In a previous post I presented some examples of the kind of criticism that is leveled at architects, a great deal of which can be attributed to a lack of leadership and influence on the part of the targets of that criticism. So it was serendipitous that I recently ran across a post on the Harvard Business Review blog written by Chris Musselwhite and Tammie Plouffe. That post, When Your Influence Is Ineffective, includes this: [I]nfluence becomes ineffective when individuals become so focused on the desired outcome that they fail to fully consider the situation. While the influencer may still gain the short-term desired outcome, he or she can do long-term damage to personal effectiveness and the organization, as it creates an atmosphere of distrust where people stop listening, and the potential for innovation or progress is diminished. The need to "see the big picture" is a grossly reductive assesement of the architect's responsibilities — but that doesn't mean it's not true. That big picture perspective must encompass both the technological elements of the architecture and the elements responsible for implementing those technologies in compliance with the prescribed architecture. Technologies may be tempermental, but they don't have personalities or egos, and they are unlikely to carry a grudge — not yet, anyway (Hello, Skynet!).  Effective leadership and the ability to influence people can help to ensure that all the pieces fit and that they work together, today and tomorrow.

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  • DAX editor for SQL Server

    - by Davide Mauri
    One of the major criticism to DAX is the lack of a decent editor and more in general of a dedicated IDE, like the one we have for T-SQL or MDX. Well, this is no more true. On Codeplex a very interesting an promising Visual Studio 2010 extension has been released by the beginning of November 2011: http://daxeditor.codeplex.com/ Intellisense, Syntax Highlighting and all the typical features offered by Visual Studio are available also for DAX. Right now you have to download the source code and compile it, and that’s it!

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  • How to understand computer science as a whole?

    - by MrCellophane
    I am a college student in Computer Science, I have been studying CS for a long time. But even till today, I still feel so confused about a lot of things. First of all, I have solid foundation in alg, data structure, and OOP, but I don't have a clear understanding of the whole system of the subject. I studied database, alg, data structure, OOP, network, software engineering, OS, and a lot of courses. I know what they are, but I don't know how to connect them together. Is there a way to have a clear understanding of the architecture of the subject? And is there a way to know what technology is used to do what? For example, in interviews, when people ask me alg, data str, Java, OS or any other specific field, I could answer, but when they ask some other very general about the field, I have no idea. Well, I know my question maybe a little bit confusing, but what my situation is I don't even know how to ask a clear question. I don't know my question, it's totally a mess in my head. Is there a way to make it clear?

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  • Microsoft Refuses to Follow Others` Lead on China Censorship

    Despite receiving sharp criticism from U.S. officials Microsoft has remained stout in their stance on continuing to do business with China. At the heart of the entire issue is Internet censorship. Chinese law dictates that search engines that wish to do business in the powerful nation must abide by their laws concerning censorship of Internet search results.... Business Productivity Online Suite From $10 per user per month. Includes a 12-month subscription. Min 5 seats.

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  • Prefer class members or passing arguments between internal methods?

    - by geoffjentry
    Suppose within the private portion of a class there is a value which is utilized by multiple private methods. Do people prefer having this defined as a member variable for the class or passing it as an argument to each of the methods - and why? On one hand I could see an argument to be made that reducing state (ie member variables) in a class is generally a good thing, although if the same value is being repeatedly used throughout a class' methods it seems like that would be an ideal candidate for representation as state for the class to make the code visibly cleaner if nothing else. Edit: To clarify some of the comments/questions that were raised, I'm not talking about constants and this isn't relating to any particular case rather just a hypothetical that I was talking to some other people about. Ignoring the OOP angle for a moment, the particular use case that I had in mind was the following (assume pass by reference just to make the pseudocode cleaner) int x doSomething(x) doAnotherThing(x) doYetAnotherThing(x) doSomethingElse(x) So what I mean is that there's some variable that is common between multiple functions - in the case I had in mind it was due to chaining of smaller functions. In an OOP system, if these were all methods of a class (say due to refactoring via extracting methods from a large method), that variable could be passed around them all or it could be a class member.

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  • Java desktop programmer starting to learn Android development: how different is it?

    - by Prog
    I'm a Java programmer. All of my experience is on desktop applications, using Swing for the GUI. I spend a lot of time studying OOP, I have decent understanding of OO concepts and I design and program by the OO approach. I'm thinking of starting to learn Android development soon, and I'm wondering how different it is from desktop development. Obviously the GUI libraries will be different (not Swing), but other than that, I want to know if there are significant differences. I will divide this question to two parts: Apart from the GUI libraries, am I still going to use the standard Java libarary I'm used to? Aka same data structues, same utility classes, etc.? If not, what are the main differences between the libraries I'm used to and the libraries I'll be using? How different is Android development in regard to OO design? Are all of the familiar principles, design patterns, techniques and best pratices just as valid and used? Or is OOP and OOD in Android development significantly different than OO in desktop development? To summarize: apart from GUI design, how different is Java Android development than Java desktop development?

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  • REST API wrapper - class design for 'lite' object responses

    - by sasfrog
    I am writing a class library to serve as a managed .NET wrapper over a REST API. I'm very new to OOP, and this task is an ideal opportunity for me to learn some OOP concepts in a real-life situation that makes sense to me. Some of the key resources/objects that the API returns are returned with different levels of detail depending on whether the request is for a single instance, a list, or part of a "search all resources" response. This is obviously a good design for the REST API itself, so that full objects aren't returned (thus increasing the size of the response and therefore the time taken to respond) unless they're needed. So, to be clear: .../car/1234.json returns the full Car object for 1234, all its properties like colour, make, model, year, engine_size, etc. Let's call this full. .../cars.json returns a list of Car objects, but only with a subset of the properties returned by .../car/1234.json. Let's call this lite. ...search.json returns, among other things, a list of car objects, but with minimal properties (only ID, make and model). Let's call this lite-lite. I want to know what the pros and cons of each of the following possible designs are, and whether there is a better design that I haven't covered: Create a Car class that models the lite-lite properties, and then have each of the more detailed responses inherit and extend this class. Create separate CarFull, CarLite and CarLiteLite classes corresponding to each of the responses. Create a single Car class that contains (nullable?) properties for the full response, and create constructors for each of the responses which populate it to the extent possible (and maybe include a property that returns the response type from which the instance was created). I expect among other things there will be use cases for consumers of the wrapper where they will want to iterate through lists of Cars, regardless of which response type they were created from, such that the three response types can contribute to the same list. Happy to be pointed to good resources on this sort of thing, and/or even told the name of the concept I'm describing so I can better target my research.

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