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• Pair programming business logic with a non-IT person

  - by user1598390

  Have you have any experience in which a non-IT person works with a programmer during the coding process? It's like pair programming, but one person is a non-IT person that knows a lot about the business, maybe a process engineer with math background who knows how things are calculated and can understand non-idiomatic, procedural code. I've found that some procedural, domain-specific languages like PL/SQL are quite understandable by non-IT engineers. These person end up being co-authors of the code and guarantee the correctness of formulas, factors etc. I've found this kind of pair programming quite productive, this kind of engineer user feel they are also "owners" and "authors" of the code and help minimize misunderstanding in the communication process. They even help design the test cases. Is this practice common ? Does it have a name ? Have you had similar experiences ?

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• how do I write a functional specification quickly and efficiently

  - by giddy

  So I just read some fabulous articles by Joel on specs here. (Was written in 2000!!) I read all 4 parts, but Im looking for some methodical approaches to writing my specs. Im the only lonely dev, working on this fairly complicated app (or family of apps) for a very well known finance company. I've never made something this serious, I started out writing something like a bad spec, an overview of some sorts, and it has wasted a LOT of my time. Ive also made 3 mockup-kinda-thingies for my client so I have a good understanding of what they want. Also released a preview (a throw away working app with the most basic workflow), and Ive only written and tested some of the very core/base systems. I think the mistake Ive been making so far is not writing a detailed spec, so Im getting to it now. So the whole thing comprises of An MVC website (for admins & data viewing) 2 Silverlight modules (For 2 specific tasks) 1 Desktop Application Im totally short on time, resources and need to get this done quick, also, need to make sure these guys read it up equally quick and painlessly. So how do I go about it, Im looking for any tips, any real world stuff, how do you guys usually do it? Do you make a mock screenie of every dialog/form/page? Im thinking of making a dummy asp.net web forms project, then filling in html files in folders and making it look like my mvc url structure. Then having a section in the spec for the website and write up a page for every URL Ive got with a screenie. For my win forms app, Ive made somewhat of a demo Win Form project, would I then put in a dialog or stucture everything as I would in the real app and then screen shot it?

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• Will HTML5/JS Eventually Replace All Client Side Languages? [closed]

  - by Shnitzel

  I'm just wondering about the future of it all. IMHO, there are 4 forces that define where technology goes: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Adobe. It looks like in Apple's iPhone/iPad iADs can now be programmed in HTML5. So does that mean HTML5 will eventually replace objective-c? Also, Microsoft has now shifted it's focus from WPF/Silverlight to HTML5 and I assume Visual Studio 2011 will be all about tooling support for HTML5. Because that's what Microsoft do. (Tools). In a few months IE9 the last major browser will support HTML5. Similarly Adobe is getting on the HTML5 bandwagon and allows to export flash content to HTML5 in their latest tools. And we all know how much in bed Google is with html5. Heck, their latest Operating System (Chrome OS) is nothing but a big fat web browser. Apps for Mobile (i.e., iPhone, Android, WM7) are very hard for a company to program especially for many different devices (each with their own language) so I'm assuming this won't last too long. I.e., HTML5 will be the unifying language. Which is somewhat sad for app developers because now users will be able to play the "cool" html5 apps for free on the web and it'll be hard to charge for them. So are strongly-typed languages really doomed, and in the future, say 5-10 years, will client side programming only be in HTML5? Will all of us become javascript programmers? :) Because the signs are sure pointing that way...

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• Intelligence as a vector quantity

  - by Senthil Kumaran

  I am reading this wonderful book called "Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming" by Peter Seibel and I am at part wherein the conversation is with Joshua Bloch and I found this answer which is an important point for a programmer. The paragraph, goes something like this. There's this problem, which is, programming is so much of an intellectual meritocracy and often these people are the smartest people in the organization; therefore they figure they should be allowed to make all the decisions. But merely the fact they are the smartest people in the organization does not mean that they should be making all the decisions, because intelligence is not a scalar quantity; it's a vector quantity. Here at the last sentence, I fail to get the insight which is he trying to share. Can someone explain it in a little further as what he means by a vector quantity, possibly trying to present the same insight. Further down, I get the point that he is not taking about having an organization where non-technical people (sometimes clueless) can be managers of the technical people for some reason that they can spend more time to write emails well, because the very next statement following the above paragraph was. And if you lack empathy or emotional intelligence, then you shouldn't be designing APIs or GUIs or languages. I understand that he is saying that in Software engineering, programmers should know how the users will see their product and design for them. I felt the above paragraph was very interesting.

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• Where to find clients?

  - by Zenph

  My main area: web development. Of course, I don't expect anybody give away their 'gold mine' or whatever but I am struggling to see where I should be advertising my services. I have one other developer I work with and we have a lot of happy clients - on freelance websites. Thing is, freelance websites just seem to suck the life out of you when you're being out-bidded by ridiculous rates. I want to attract customers who are more concerned about quality and accountability than price. Any suggestions at all? I'm so lost with this. EDIT: Added bounty of 200 - all of my 'reputation'. EDIT: Added second bounty of 50 I did hear of a novel idea. Do work for an opensource project and get featured in their 'trusted developers' section, if they have one. Input?

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• How to get paid and figure out if I want to keep this client [migrated]

  - by Heiner Fawkes

  I have a client who is not paying on time, but it looks like the specifics don't match similar questions on this SE site. I got a call from a client I did website work for years ago. I had not done this kind of work for many years and frankly I'm not sure I want to now, but nevertheless about a month ago I agreed to bring his website, SEO, social media, and overall marketing for his small business up to speed. Why? He has told me many times how I'm the most honest, most well-informed contractor he's had experience with. And I personally kind of like him too. So I started working on an hourly basis. I sent one very small invoice and got paid. Then we talked a whole lot about all sorts of feature he would like me to implement. I started that work, and sent a second invoice on the first of the month (one of my two stated billing days). I didn't get paid. On every invoice it states that I charge a whopping ten percent per week late. I sent many voicemails and emails asking to please let me know what's going on with payment, and didn't get replies. Then the 15th of the month rolled around (which I stated initially as one of my invoicing dates). Since I hadn't been paid for the last invoice, I simply didn't send him an invoice at that time but emailed him and said that I will combine it with the next scheduled invoice for this reason (probably a bad idea I realize). Eventually he sent a portion of the invoice payment. I emailed back to let him know that he's three weeks late and what the remaining balance is. Finally we got in touch via phone. He basically told me that he thought I hadn't done all of the work I said I did. He looked at the page source code and it didn't look complete to him. I explained why his perception would be different and what work I had done as specified. He accepted this and said that part of the reason he didn't pay in full is that he's been swamped with personal family stuff, and part of the reason is that he didn't think I did all the work. That struck me as pretty weird. He also expressed concern that he has no idea now how much all the changes he has asked for are going to cost. And once again, he told me how honest and high-quality my services are compared to others he has dealt with. He also said he would pay me more (but not all) of the now three weeks overdue invoice that day. I didn't receive any payment. Basically this is how the client relationship strikes me: He's not good at communication. He's very busy and English isn't his first language. He almost never replies to emails but phone calls are fine. He's asked me to avoid emails for communication and I've asked him to please use email. He might not have enough money to afford all the things he has asked for. But so far I have been working for an hourly fee (which is quite high). He also has started paying monthly for hosting and social media services from me. What seems very abnormal is for a client to be so overdue on payments and to actually withhold payment of an invoice without any communication because he didn't think the work was done. I told him that I will send dollar estimates of each module of remaining work so that we can decide which ones are the highest priority if he cannot afford them all. I also reiterated that in the future if he has doubts about the work or an inability to pay, he must contact me immediately to say so. I basically plan to state the following to him: I would like to work for him and help his business. I also have sympathy for his recent family difficulties. I am happy to figure out payment plans that would work better for him, but first I need to be paid in full for all outstanding invoices, especially given that I skipped one of them just to be nice. The most crucial thing I need is communication about any problems with my work or his ability to pay. Once again, he heeds to pay in full immediately before we negotiate anything else. Does the above seem like an appropriate communication? Is anything missing from it? Is anything I'm doing here really abnormal?

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• Demonstrate bad code to client?

  - by jtiger

  I have a new client that has asked me to do a redesign of their website, an ASP.NET Webforms application that was developed by another consultant. It seemed straight-forward (it never is) but I took a look at the code to make sure I knew what I was in for. This application was not written well. At all. It is extremely vulnerable to SQL Injection attacks, business logic is spread throughout the entire application, a lot of duplication, and dead end code that does nothing. On top of that, it keeps throwing exceptions that are being smothered, so it all appears to be running smoothly. My job is to simply update the html and css, but much of the html is being generated in business logic and would be a nightmare for me to sort everything out. My estimates on the redesign were longer than the client was aiming for, and they are asking why so long. How can I explain to my client just how bad this code is? In their mind, the application is running great and the redesign should be a quick one-off. It's my word against the previous consultant, so how can I actually give simple, concrete examples that a non-technical client would understand?

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• how do I write a functional spec quickly and efficiently

  - by giddy

  So I just read some fabulous articles by Joel on specs here. (Was written in 2000!!) I read all 4 parts, but Im looking for some methodical approaches to writing my specs. Im the only lonely dev, working on this fairly complicated app (or family of apps) for a very well known finance company. I've never made something this serious, I started out writing something like a bad spec, an overview of some sorts, and it has wasted a LOT of my time. Ive also made 3 mockup-kinda-thingies for my client so I have a good understanding of what they want. Also released a preview (a throw away working app with the most basic workflow), and Ive only written and tested some of the very core/base systems. I think the mistake Ive been making so far is not writing a detailed spec, so Im getting to it now. So the whole thing comprises of An MVC website (for admins & data viewing) 2 Silverlight modules (For 2 specific tasks) 1 Desktop Application Im totally short on time, resources and need to get this done quick, also, need to make sure these guys read it up equally quick and painlessly. So how do I go about it, Im looking for any tips, any real world stuff, how do you guys usually do it? Do you make a mock screenie of every dialog/form/page? Im thinking of making a dummy asp.net web forms project, then filling in html files in folders and making it look like my mvc url structure. Then having a section in the spec for the website and write up a page for every URL Ive got with a screenie. For my win forms app, Ive made somewhat of a demo Win Form project, would I then put in a dialog or stucture everything as I would in the real app and then screen shot it?

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• What are your advice, methods, or practices to take out the most from a day on-site at a customer?

  - by Stephane

  We just deployed a large software that affects the way the user work-day looks like in many aspects. It changes a lot of things in the way they interact between eachothers. The developers of the team are taking rounds and spending one day at the customer's site to understand better what is a typical day for our user, and the learning process they go through. In this context, what How would you approach that day, what kind of questions do you ask, how do you observe the user. Are there defined practices that exist? Also what wouldn't you do? Did you have some bad experience out of this?

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

  - by WeaklyTyped

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

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• Where to find clients who are willing to pay top dollar for highly reliable code?

  - by Robin Green

  I'm looking to find clients who are willing to pay a premium above usual contractor rates, for software that is developed with advanced tools and techniques to eliminate certain classes of bugs. However, I have little experience of contracting, and relatively few contacts. It's important to state that the kind of tools and techniques I'm thinking of (e.g. formal verification) are used commercially extremely rarely, as far as I'm aware. There is kind of a continuum of approaches to higher reliability, with basic testing and basic static typing at one end and full-blown formal verification at the other, but the methods I'm thinking of are towards the latter end of the spectrum.

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• How to break the "php is a bad language" paradigm? [closed]

  - by dukeofgaming

  PHP is not a bad language (or at least not as bad as some may suggest). I had teachers that didn't even know PHP was object oriented until I told them. I've had clients that immediately distrust us when we say we are PHP developers and question us for not using chic languages and frameworks such as Django or RoR, or "enterprise and solid" languages such as Java and ASP.NET. Facebook is built on PHP. There are plenty of solid projects that power the web like Joomla and Drupal that are used in the enterprise and governments. There are frameworks and libraries that have some of the best architectures I've seen across all languages (Symfony 2, Doctrine). PHP has the best documentation I've seen and a big community of professionals. PHP has advanced OO features such as reflection, interfaces, let alone that PHP now supports horizontal reuse natively and cleanly through traits. There are bad programmers and script kiddies that give PHP a bad reputation, but power the PHP community at the same time, and because it is so easy to get stuff done PHP you can often do things the wrong way, granted, but why blame the language?. Now, to boil this down to an actual answerable question: what would be a good and solid and short and sweet argument to avoid being frowned upon and stop prejudice in one fell swoop and defend your honor when you say you are a PHP developer?. (free cookie with teh whipped cream to those with empirical evidence of convincing someone —client or other— on the spot) P.S.: We use Symfony, and the code ends being beautiful and maintainable

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• Dealing with "I-am-cool-and-you-are-dumb" manager [closed]

  - by Software Guy

  I have been working with a software company for about 6 months now. I like the projects I work on there and I really like all the people there except for 1 guy. That guy is technically smart, and he is a co-founder of the company. He is an okay guy in person (the kind you wouldn't want to care about much) but things get tricky when he is your manager. In general I am all okay but there are times when I feel I am not being treated fairly: He doesn't give much thought to when he makes mistakes and when I do something similar, he is super critical. Recently he went as far as to say "I am not sure if I can trust you with this feature". The detais of this specific case are this: I was working on this feature, and I was already a couple of hours over my normal working hours, and then I decided to stop and continue tomorrow. We use git, and I like to commit changes locally and only push when I feel they are ready. This manager insists that I push all the changes to the central repo (in case my hard drive crashes). So I push the change, and the ticket is marked as "to be tested". Next day I come in, he sits next to me and starts complaining and says that I posted above. I really didn't know what to say, I tried to explain to him that the ticket is still being worked upon but he didn't seem to listen. He interrupts me in-between when I am coding, which I do not mind, but when I do that same, his face turns like this :| and reacts as if his work was super important and I am just wasting his time. He asks me to accumulate all questions, and then ask him altogether which is not always possible, as you need a clarification before you can continue on a feature implementation. And when I am coding, he talks on the phone with his customers next to me (when he can go to the meeting room with his laptop) and doesn't care. He made me switch to a whole new IDE (from Netbeans to a commercial IDE costing a lot of money) for a really tiny feature (which I later found out was in Netbeans as well!). I didn't make a big deal out of it as I am equally comfortable working with this new IDE, but I couldn't get the science behind his obsession. He said this feature makes sure that if any method is updated by a programmer, the IDE will turn the method name to red in places where it is used. I told him that I do not have a problem since I always search for method usage in the project and make sure its updated. IDEs even have refactoring features for exactly that, but... I recently implemented a feature for a project, and I was happy about it and considering him a senior, I asked him his comments about the implementation quality.. he thought long and hard, made a few funny faces, and when he couldn't find anything, he said "ummm, your program will crash if JS is disabled" - he was wrong, since I had made sure it would work fine with default values even if JS was disabled. I told him that and then he said "oh okay". BUT, the funny thing is, a few days back, he implemented something and I objected with "But that would not run if JS is disabled" and his response was "We don't have to care about people who disable JS" :-/ Once he asked me to investigate if there was a way to modify a CMS generated menu programmatically by extending the CMS, I did my research and told him that the only was is to inject a menu item using JavaScript / jQuery and his reaction was "ah that's ugly, and hacky, not acceptable" and two days later, I see that feature implemented in the same way as I had suggested. The point is, his reaction was not respectful at all, even if what I proposed was hacky, he should be respectful, that I know what's hacky and if I am suggesting something hacky, there must be a reason for it. There are plenty of other reasons / examples where I feel I am not being treated fairly. I want your advice as to what is it that I am doing wrong and how to deal with such a situation. The other guys in the team are actually very good people, and I do not want to leave the job either (although I could, if I want to). All I want is respect and equal treatment. I have thought about talking to this guy in a face to face meeting, but that worries me that his attitude might get worse and make things more difficult for me (since he doesn't seem to be the guy who thinks he can be wrong too). I am also considering talking to the other co-founder but I am not sure how he will take it (as both founders have been friends forever). Thanks for reading the long message, I really appreciate your help.

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• Preventing possible burnout in a junior dev, or perhaps I'm not doing enough?

  - by m.edmondson

  I'm a software developer with 5 years experience over 3 companies. Within the last year a junior (brand new to the industry) has started at my current employer. I believe he is an excellent developer, who always delivers and is skilled as solving complex problems. However I'm slightly concerned that he is possibly applying himself too much for the following reasons: He begins work approximately 2 hours before most (and is expected) In his free time he has developed an application that was clearly months worth of work that is specific to our employer I and the team are completely greatful for all he is doing, and is clearly an asset to our team. However I'm worried that this is not sustainable. I can almost see that he has the same enthusiasm that I had when I began coding for work, however over the years I've realised that extra curricular work not only doesn't progress your career, but eats into your all important free time. The question I'm asking is: Should I advise him to take things a bit more slowly? Or perhaps I need to learn from him and do more for my employer out of hours?

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• How to dissuade a customer who just learned a technology and wants to use it everywhere?

  - by MainMa

  My customer recently discovered what is URL Rewriting, without completely understanding what it is, how it works and the pros and cons of it. Now, he asks for lots of strange changes in actual requirements of current projects and changes in old projects in order to implement what he believes is URL Rewriting. On one hand, I'm annoyed being asked to do things which doesn't make any sense instead of doing real work. On the other hand, I can't tell my customer that he doesn't understand anything in the subject despite his interest in it. I think many people have had situations when their manager or their customer just learned a new buzzword or a new technology, and he loved it so much than he wanted to use it in every project, everywhere, rewrite the whole codebase just to use this new thing, etc. Also, I've recently read something related on Programmers.SE where people told about their experiences when there was a huge buzz around XML, and some managers would ask to introduce XML in every project just to show to everyone that they have used it. So those who have been in similar situation, how have you managed it?

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• How to justify technology choice to customer?

  - by suslik

  When freelancing / contracting a customer will typically specify functional requirements, acceptance criteria, etc, and the implementation details are in the developer's hands. As a developer your technology choice is a balancing act between what you are most familiar with, technologically what the right tool appears to be, ease of finding coders with this skill and their expense, and a few other factors. I'm in a situation where I have evaluated my options and selected a somewhat obscure open source technology that I believe will get me there faster, easier, and be more maintanable in the long term. It's different, but I think that that is what the requirements call for. The customer has inquired about what I'm going to use to build the solution, and now they are concerned because they've never heard of it before. The reasons for my choice are mostly technical, whereas the customer isn't (but they know some buzzwords!). Explaining these technical reasons will not be easy, and I am not sure if that is the right way to approach this situation anyway. And that's my question: what is the right way to approach this situation so as to cause the least amount of headache for everyone involved?

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• New website - best practice for requirements specs? [closed]

  - by Alex K.

  Possible Duplicate: Extracting user requirements from a person who does not know how to express himself As a hobby freelancer I'm new to this. I've never had a non-technical client before explain to me what his future website is supposed to do. A person wants me to make a website for him and he basically explained to me what's it about. However, he's not a technical person and he just doesn't understand what I need to know and how to properly describe/explain it to me. When I ask him how a user is supposed to submit an entry to the website he told me "He fills out a form.", which is not really helping me. This was just an example, it goes on for other sections of the website as well which are a lot harder to explain. The website will be aimed at a specific professional user demographic and I have no clue about their profession and how their industry works. I tried to find some good Product Requirements Document templates on Google but none of them really seemed like they could help him understand how to write it so I can understand what he wants/needs. Can somebody please give me a hint on how to deal with such non-technical clients?

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• To refund or not to refund this client?

  - by Mahalia Samuels

  I'd really appreciate your advice on an ongoing project. I presented my client with a proposal and design samples which he approved, and he paid in full instead of the 50% upfront deposit as I'd given him a generous discount. He was then slow in furnishing me with some of the content, but once we did, he expected the website to be finished immediately which was not possible. Because he needed it done urgently, we agreed to try to get it done about 10 working days after the content was provided, but the developer who was helping me let me down. The next week, I completed the website myself and uploaded it to the server on a Friday afternoon. He then calls and texts me on following Sunday while I'm at church to say it's not online (there was probably a problem with his browser). The next morning, I received an email from him demanding a full refund within two days because he couldn't see the website (even though it was live, and I tested it on multiple browsers, a different computer and my phone), and he called me shouting at me because he couldn't access it. Finally when he was able to access it, he was unhappy with a certain detail regarding the slideshow which I began fixing and which was done the next day. He then referred me to another website and said he wanted it to look similar but not identical to it in terms of the layout. He also now wanted to add more features which were not in the original design. I got a designer to work on a new design which I sent to him for review, which if approved would be completed by 15 October, and he approved it last Thursday. He then called me yesterday to say that he wanted to change the design - he only approved it out of impatience. He now wants the website to be more similar to the other website he referred me to and he wants it done before the 15th! Then, he says to me that other people have done websites for him in three days - website's he's complained to me about for lacking dimension because they were just premium themes, whereas we'd designed and coded from scratch. I'm thinking of finishing the website but refunding him in full (or at least the refundable 50%) less domain registration and other non-refundable amounts, just to avoid further escalation of this matter and having him call me next week and say he wants to change it again. These are the applicable terms and conditions as laid out in the agreement: Total amount due for this project is Amount A. Client shall pay Consultant a deposit of Amount B (50% of total amount due for project) in advance before any work commences on the Project. The balance is due within 7 working days of completion of project. Deposit is non-refundable. Should client opt to host elsewhere, applicable transferral fee of Amount C will apply. Estimated project completion time frame is 14 to 30 days from the date Client furnishes Consultant with Brief and all other required media and data, provided that Client has made payment to secure the project. Consultant will make every effort to meet agreed upon due dates. The Client should be aware that failure to submit required information or materials, or last minute changes and excessive changes may cause subsequent delays. Client delays could result in significant delays in delivery of finished work. Major changes in client input or direction or brief will be charged at normal rates. Any work the Client wishes Consultant to create, which is not specified in the attached Proposal will be considered an additional service. Client agrees to pay Consultant for any additional expenses or additional services not included in the attached quotation and proposal if requested by the Client. Web design credit in the name of the Consultant, and link to Consultant’s website shall be placed on the footer of the final Website. Either party may terminate this Agreement by giving 7 days written notice to the other of such termination. In the event that Work is postponed or terminated at the request of the Client, Consultant shall have the right to bill pro rata at full rates for work completed through the date of that request, while reserving all rights under this Agreement. If additional payment is due, this shall be payable within seven days of the Client's written notification to stop work. In the event of termination, the Client shall also pay any expenses incurred by Consultant and the Consultant shall own all rights to the Work. Advice please?

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• Large enterprise application - clients wish to use duplicate e-mails addresses?

  - by Alex Key

  I'd like to know people's opinions, reactions to clients and technical work arounds (if applicable), to the issue of an enterprise application where a client wishes to use duplicate e-mail addresses? To clarify, when I say duplicate e-mail addresses I mean within the same client system, having multiple users that have the same e-mail address. So not just using generic e-mail addresses but using the e-mail address of another user. e.g. Bob Jenkins: [email protected] James Jeffery: [email protected] Context To give this some further context, in the e-learning sector it is common that although all staff in an organisation must complete e-learning - they may not have their own e-mail address so they choose to use their managers e-mail address. Albeit against good practice in public sites... it's a requirement we've over and over again where an organisation is split between office based staff and perhaps e.g. staff in a warehouse. Where problem lies Mr Steak, good point, the problem lies in password resets and perhaps in situations where semi-personal information could be sent (not confidential enough to worry about the insecurities of email). Perhaps reminders for specific system actions, which would be confusing for the unintended party to see (if perhaps misreading the e-mail's intended recipient) Possible solutions System knowing the difference between a "for the attention of" and direct to the person e-mails, including this in the body text. Using alternative communication such as SMS Simply not having e-mails sent to people who are not the intended recipient. Providing an e-mail service ourselfs (not really viable for a corporate IT dept) Thoughts?

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• What to answer to a customer who asks which one of two equivalent technologies must be used?

  - by MainMa

  As a freelancer, I am often asked by my customers what they must choose between similar elements, neither of which being better than another. Examples: “Do I need my e-commerce website be in PHP or ASP.NET?” “Do I need to host this ordinary web service in Cloud or use an ordinary hosting service?” “Which one is better for my new website: MySQL or Oracle?” etc. There is maybe at most 1% of cases where the choice is relevant, and there is a real, objective reason to use one over another, based on the precise metrics and studies. In all other cases, it doesn't matter at all. It is totally, completely irrelevant, either because there are no implications¹, or because those implications are too small to be taken in account², or, finally, because it's impossible to predict those implications³. If you know one thing and not another one, the answer to those questions is easy: “You can either write the application in C# or Java, both being probably equivalent in your case. Note that I'm a C# developer, so if you choose Java, I would not be able to work on your project and you would need to find another freelancer.” When you know both technologies, you can't answer that. In this case, how to explain to the customer that the question he asks is subject to flamewar and has no real consequences on his project? In other words, how to explain that you've chosen to use one technology rather than an equivalent one for the reasons related to human resources, without giving the impression to be unprofessional or to not care about the project? ¹ Example: Is MySQL better (worse?), performance-wise, compared to Oracle, for a personal website which will be accessed by, oh, let's be optimistic, two people per day? ² Example: for a given project, I was asked to asset if Windows Azure hosting would be cheaper than the hosting of the same application on a well-known ASP.NET hosting provider. The cost revealed to be exactly the same. ³ Example: your customer have an idea of a future application (the idea itself being extremely vague). There is no business plan, no requirements, nothing at all. Just an idea. You are asked if Java is better than C# for this app. What do you answer?

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• How can I give my client "full access" to their PHP application's MySQL database?

  - by Micah Delane Bolen

  I am building a PHP application for a client and I'm seriously considering WordPress or a simple framework that will allow me to quickly build out features like forums, etc. However, the client is adamant about having "full access" to the database and the ability to "mine the data." Unfortunately, I'm almost certain they will be disappointed when they realize they won't be able to easily glean meaningful insight by looking at serialized fields in wp_usermeta, etc. One thought I had was to replicate a variation on the live database where I flatten out all of those ambiguous and/or serialized fields into something that is then parsable by a mere mortal using a tool as simple as phpMyAdmin. Unfortunately, the client is not going to settle for a simple backend dashboard where I create the custom reports for them even though I know that would be the easiest and most sane approach.

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• How to deal with a valuable person going in all directions?

  - by JVerstry

  I am working with someone producing user content to be included in a software application. He is not a coder, but rather an expert in his field, sharing the knowledge. His contribution, taken piece by piece is great, but he goes in all directions and has issues producing work sequentially. He works on 25 pieces of content at the same time, and as soon as he reads something 'interesting', he wants to rewrite some of his stuff to improve the quality of it. He does not converge naturally. He collects tons of informations, produces some valuable stuff, but in a completely unstructured way. We addressed this issue with him some time ago and in order to try to solve it, we created a document with the 100 items he had to fill. Problem is, it does not seem to work very well. How to deal with those people and collect information? I was thinking about a new technique: ask him to send his bits, out of order, little by little, as soon as they are ready, and keep a list of what remains to be done, and show him that list to give him direction. This situation is stressing the hell out of me. If his production was not good, I would not be trying so hard to make this work. If you have experience to share, it is welcome.

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• Is there a canonical source supporting "all-surrogates"?

  - by user61852

  Background The "all-PK-must-be-surrogates" approach is not present in Codd's Relational Model or any SQL Standard (ANSI, ISO or other). Canonical books seems to elude this restrictions too. Oracle's own data dictionary scheme uses natural keys in some tables and surrogate keys in other tables. I mention this because these people must know a thing or two about RDBMS design. PPDM (Professional Petroleum Data Management Association) recommend the same canonical books do: Use surrogate keys as primary keys when: There are no natural or business keys Natural or business keys are bad ( change often ) The value of natural or business key is not known at the time of inserting record Multicolumn natural keys ( usually several FK ) exceed three columns, which makes joins too verbose. Also I have not found canonical source that says natural keys need to be immutable. All I find is that they need to be very estable, i.e need to be changed only in very rare ocassions, if ever. I mention PPDM because these people must know a thing or two about RDBMS design too. The origins of the "all-surrogates" approach seems to come from recommendations from some ORM frameworks. It's true that the approach allows for rapid database modeling by not having to do much business analysis, but at the expense of maintainability and readability of the SQL code. Much prevision is made for something that may or may not happen in the future ( the natural PK changed so we will have to use the RDBMS cascade update funtionality ) at the expense of day-to-day task like having to join more tables in every query and having to write code for importing data between databases, an otherwise very strightfoward procedure (due to the need to avoid PK colisions and having to create stage/equivalence tables beforehand ). Other argument is that indexes based on integers are faster, but that has to be supported with benchmarks. Obviously, long, varying varchars are not good for PK. But indexes based on short, fix-length varchar are almost as fast as integers. The questions - Is there any canonical source that supports the "all-PK-must-be-surrogates" approach ? - Has Codd's relational model been superceded by a newer relational model ?

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• Charging by the hour/project

  - by thesam18888

  This is related to a question I asked earlier - How to end a relationship with a client without pissing them off? What are your obligations when charging by the hour vs charging by project? If you agree to take on a project, give a rough estimate that it might take 10 days for you to work on and charge £X per hour - are you obligated to work for free after those 10 days are up and you have still not managed to complete your project due to unanticipated issues? What if you have delivered the project but bugs are found - should you fix these bugs for free if the 10 days are up or should you charge your client? Also, for the above project, what should be the result when you start on the project, but after the 10 days for whatever reason you have to give up and tell your client that you cannot do it anymore? I realise that this does nothing to build your reputation and relationship with the client but are you obligated to pay back the money paid to you or do you just deliver the half/nearly completed source code and help them find someone else to complete it? The reason I am asking the above questions is because I am very new to freelancing and would like to know how to deal with the above situations if they ever crop up. Thanks!

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• What individual needs to be aware when signing a NDA with client?

  - by doNotCheckMyBlog

  I am very new to IT industry and have no prior experience. However I came into contact with a party who is gear to build a mobile application. But, they want me to sign NDA (No Disclosure Agreement). The definition seems vague, The following definitions apply in this Agreement: Confidential Information means information relating to the online and mobile application concepts discussed and that: (a) is disclosed to the Recipient by or on behalf of XYZ; (b) is acquired by the Recipient directly or indirectly from XYZ; (c) is generated by the Recipient (whether alone or with others); or (d) otherwise comes to the knowledge of the Recipient, When they say otherwise comes to the knowledge of the recipient. Does it mean if I think of any idea from my own creative mind and which is similar to their idea then it would be a breach of this agreement? and also is it okay to tell to include application name in definition as currently to me it sounds like any online of mobile application concept they think I should not disclose it to anybody. "Confidential Information means information relating to the online and mobile application concepts discussed and that:" I am more concerned about this part, Without limiting XYZ’s rights at law, the Recipient agrees to indemnify XYZ in respect of all claims, losses, liabilities, costs or expenses of any kind incurred directly or indirectly as a result of or in connection with a breach by it or any of its officers, employees, or consultants of this Agreement. Is it really common in IT industry to sign this agreement between client and developer? Any particular thing I should be concerned about?

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