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• Are there non-programming related activities akin to solving programming problems ?

  - by julien

  I'm talking about particular activities, for which you can draw parallels with the specific kind of reasonning needed when solving programming problems. Counter examples are activities that would help in almost any situation, like : take a shower or any other, somewhat passive activities, which are only helpful in triggering this sort of asynchronous problem solving our brain does exercise, because you brain simply works better when you're fit EDIT : It seems this question was quite misunderstood. I wasn't asking about what you can do when stuck on a problem but rather, what kind of activities you have in you spare time that you think help you, more or less directly, solving programing problems.

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• Could someone break this nasty habit of mine please?

  - by MimiEAM

  I recently graduated in cs and was mostly unsatisfied since I realized that I received only a basic theoretical approach in a wide range of subjects (which is what college is supposed to do but still...) . Anyway I took the habit of spending a lot of time looking for implementations of concepts and upon finding those I will used them as guides to writing my own implementation of those concepts just for fun. But now I feel like the only way I can fully understand a new concept is by trying to implement from scratch no matter how unoptimized the result may be. Anyway this behavior lead me to choose by default the hard way, that is time consuming instead of using a nicely written library until I hit my head again a huge wall and then try to find a library that works for my purpose.... Does anyone else do that and why? It seems so weird why would anyone (including me) do that ? Is it a bad practice ? and if so how can i stop doing that ?

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• How to improve testing your own code

  - by Peter

  Today I checked in a change on some code which turned out to be not working at all due to something rather stupid yet very crucial. I feel really bad about it and I hope I finally learn something from it. The stupid thing is, I've done these things before and I always tell myself, next time I won't be so stupid... Then it happens again and I feel even worse about it. I know you should keep your chin up and learn from your mistakes but here's the thing: I try to improve myself, I just don't see how I can prevent these things from happening. So, now I'm asking you guys: Do you have certain groundrules when testing your code?

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• I studied electrical engineering. Can I work as a developer? [closed]

  - by FailedDev

  A while ago I finished my Msc in Electrical Engineering and started working as an engineering consultant where I mostly do development work. I am good at picking up languages/technologies tools. I have fiddled with C/C++/C#/perl/ant/bash/html/css etc. Although I have never had a complain for my work, rather the contrary, I just feel that some day, someone will ask me a real hard task which would maybe seem rather trivial for a computer scientist but hard for me. Should I read/do something to become a better developer. Should I pick up a book about design patterns or algorithms for example? Is this normal that I have this kind of "fear"? Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this question. Please notify me so I can close it if this is the case.

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• School vs Self-Taught [duplicate]

  - by Joan Venge

  This question already has an answer here: Do I need a degree in Computer Science to get a junior Programming job? [closed] 8 answers Do you think university is a good learning environment or is it better to be autodidact? [closed] 3 answers Do you think formal education is necessary to gain strong programming skills? There are a lot of jobs that aren't programming but involves programming, such as tech artists in games, fx tds in film for example. I see similar patterns in the people I work where the best ones I have seen were self-taught, because of being artists primarily. But I also see that while the software, programming knowledge is varied and deep, hardware knowledge is very basic, including me, again due to lack of formal education. But I also work with a lot of programmers who possess both skills in general (software and hardware). Do you think it's necessary to have a formal education to have great programming skills? Would you think less of someone if he didn't have a degree in computer science, or software engineering, etc in terms of job opportunities? Would you trust him to do a software engineering job, i.e. writing a complex tool? Basically I feel the self-taught programmer doesn't know a lot of things, i.e. not knowing a particular pattern or a particular language, etc. But I find that the ability to think outside the box much more powerful. As "pure" programmers what's your take on it?

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• How is programming affected by spatial aptitude?

  - by natli

  The longer I work on a project, the less clear it becomes. It's like I cannot seperate various classes/objects anymore in my head. Everything starts mixing up, and it's extremely hard to take it all apart again. I start putting functions in classes where they really don't belong, and make silly mistakes such as writing code that I later find was 100% obsolete; things are no longer clearly mappable in my head. It isn't until I take a step back for several hours (or days somtimes!) that I can actually see what's going on again, and be productive. I usually try to fight through this, I am so passionate about coding that I wouldn't for the life of me know what else I could be doing. This is when stuff can get really weird, I get so up in my head that I sort of lose touch with reality (to some extent) in that various actions, such as pouring a glass of water, no longer happen on a concious level. It happens on auto pilot, during which pretty much all of my concious concentration (is that even a thing?) is devoted to borderline pointless problem solving (trying to seperate elements of code). It feels like a losing battle. So I took an IQ test a while ago (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale I believe it was) and it turned out my Spatial Aptitude was quite low. I still got a decent score, just above average, so I won't have to poke things with a stick for a living, but I am a little worried that this is such a handicap when writing/engineering computer programs that I won't ever be able to do it seriously or professionally. I am very much interested in what other people think of this.. could a low spatial aptitude be the cause of the above described problems? Maybe I should be looking more along the lines of ADD or something similar, because I did get diagnosed with ADD at the age of 17 (5 years ago) but the medicine I received didn't seem to affect me that much so I never took it all that serious. Sorry if I got a little off topic there, I know this is not a mental help board, the question should be clear; How is programming affected by spatial aptitude? As far as I know people are born with low/med/high spatial aptitude, so I think it's interesting to find out if the more fortunate are better programmers by birth right.

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• Being a good mentee - a protégé.

  - by marked

  The complement of the Being a good mentor question. I work with many very senior people that have vast amounts of knowledge and wisdom in Software, Engineering and our business domain. What are some tips for gaining as much knowledge from them? I don't want to take up too much of their time, but also want to take full advantage of this since it really could help develop my skills. What are some good questions to get the conversation rolling in a sit down mentor/mentee session? Some of the people providing mentorship have little experience in this area, so it would help to be able to lead some of these discussions.

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• How to write efficient code in spite of heavy deadlines

  - by gladysbixly

  Hi all, I am working in an environment wherein we have many projects with strict deadlines on deliverables. We even talk directly to the clients so getting the jobs done and fast is a must. My issue is that i'd always write code for the first solution that comes to my mind, which of course I thought as best at that moment. It always ends up ugly though and i'd later realize that there are better ways to do it but can't afford to change due to time restrictions. Are there any tips by which I could make my code efficient yet deliver on time?

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• How to avoid mediocre CV.

  - by QriousCat

  Though in every project we (testers) face different set challenges, when it comes to CV, more or less we have same responsibilities. For example responsibilities like understanding requirements, preparing and executing test cases, creating defects, liaising with dev, BA teams will be repeated for every project we involve. If we keep writing same responsibilities for every role, CV becomes mediocre and a yarn. In fact most of the testing resumes I have come across are like that. How do I avoid repetition of responsibilities in my resume and make it more interesting? If this is not the correct forum for this question let me know. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

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• Doing practice jobsearch/technical interviews?

  - by Beekguk

  I graduated college last year & I've never gone through the interview process - my current programming position evolved out of projects I did in school, but in a few months I'm making a clean break and moving across the country so I'm going to have to face a "grown-up" jobsearch. I'm kind of scared of technical interviews - I think I'm pretty good at my job and my hobby programming projects ... but what if it turns out I'm part of that group that thinks they're qualified, but really just cause despair at the state of education in the hearts of interviewers? So, I'm thinking of doing a "practice" job hunt in my current city to get an idea of what it's like and what kind of experience/expertise employers are really looking for. Is this a dick move ethically (applying to/interviewing for jobs I can't take)? If so, is there another good way to prepare for technical interviews, especially those little trick puzzle-type questions?

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• What is the best way to find a python google app engine coach?

  - by David Haddad

  i'm a software engineer and have been building Google App Engine apps with Python for about a year. I have a pretty good familiarity with the main concepts: web app framework, modeling, queues, memcache, django templates, etc. Where I think I'm lacking is in methodology. Architecting the app, using git for versioning, designing an writing unit tests. I'm totally convinced to incorporate these practices in my development style, and have started reading up on them. However I've learned that I'm a much faster learner when I have someone experienced to ask questions to and interact with. IRC channels and forums like stack overflow are great. But sometimes you want something more dynamic that produces results faster. So my question is how can a person find an experienced engineer that is familiar with the technologies he uses and that is willing to give them a couple of hours of Skype coaching sessions per week in return for an hourly fee...

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• Working with a company as a Junior Developer [closed]

  - by user1601973

  We all have started our careers in some way or other. Well, I am a college student based in North America & I am doing my second internship with the same company with which I did my first internship. I came back here because people here were helpful always and supportive. But it just happened today, and I wanted to share this on SO. Well since I started I have been doing documentation and that kind of stuff only as compared to my first internship in which I actually worked along with the developers & learned so many things. Well, I was in a conversation with my Team lead, and he asked me if I completed that particular work or not? Well, That particular work had slipped from my mind. He was indeed I kind of pissed, and said "You don't have to worry about it, I will figure out". Well, I felt so bad and was about to literally cry. I stopped my lunch and then went on to complete that work. I always ask for work in office, and I always try to be an asset for whoever I am working but this was the first time that it happened. What are your thoughts on this and should I apologise or not? I think I should.

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• How necessary is it to learn JavaScript before jQuery?

  - by benhowdle89

  In my opinion, when I looked at JavaScript, it looked like not my cup of tea. When I came across jQuery, I loved it. I sat and watched Nettuts+ 15 days of jQuery screencasts, 1 year later and now I'm fairly confident I wouldn't develop a website without including jQuery's library. I have never felt this has held me back but my question is, will this come back and bite me in the ass one day, the fact that I didn't have a solid JavaScript foundation before jumping feet first into one of its best (if not the best) frameworks? Did anyone else take this approach?

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• How to convince my boss to improve code quality?

  - by Vimvq1987

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

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

  - by Eyewan

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

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• What are the most important programming skills you need to improve as a team Leader or project manager?

  - by Aba Dov

  I decided to ask this question after I read the valuable answers to the great question What is the single most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills? and after attending Ad Burns "Secrets of a rock star programmer". It made me think about me and what programming skills I try to improve. I came to realize that there should be a difference in the programming skills you try to improve as developer and the programming skills you should improve as a team leader or project manager. My question is: What are the most important programming skills you need to improve as a team Leader or project manager? What would you recommend to others that want to improve?

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• Plug-in based software design

  - by gekod

  I'm a software developer who is willing to improve his software design skills. I think software should not only work but have a solid and elegant design too to be reusable and extensive to later purposes. Now I'm in search of some help figuring out good practices for specific problems. Actually, I'm trying to find out how to design a piece of software that would be extensible via plug-ins. The questions I have are the following: Should plug-ins be able to access each others functionality? This would bring dependencies I guess. What should the main application offer to the plug-ins if I want to let's say develop a multimedia software which would play videos and music but which could later on get functionality added over plug-ins that would let's say be able to read video status (time, bps, ...) and display it. Would this mean that the player itself would have to be part of the main program and offer services to plug-ins to get such information or would there be a way to develop the player as a plug-in also but offer in some way the possibility to other plug-ins to interact with it? As you see, my questions are mainly for learning purposes as I strive to improve my software development skills. I hope to find help here and apologize if something is wrong with my question.

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• Where to train while earning to be a Web Programmer

  - by user3295525

  Good day everyone. I'm a fresh graduate of Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and I really love coding in web. But my skills are not that high that's why I want to train while earning in a company but there are so few companies that offer it here. Web Programming is a passion for me and i really love it that's why i want to enhance my skills for my self and for the benefit of the company that will hire me. Do you have any suggestions or recommendations that I can use because I really need a mentor cause my self studying is in limit now. Good day everyone and God bless. P.S. I really love web programming.

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• Is using ELSE bad programming?

  - by dave.b

  I've often come across bugs that have been caused by using the ELSE construct. A prime example is something along the lines of: If (passwordCheck() == false){ displayMessage(); }else{ letThemIn(); } To me this screams security problem. I know that passwordCheck is likely to be a boolean, but I wouldn't place my applications security on it. What would happen if its a string, int etc? I usually try to avoid using ELSE, and instead opt for two completely separate IF statements to test for what I expect. Anything else then either gets ignored OR is specifically handled. Surely this is a better way to prevent bugs / security issues entering your app. How do you guys do it?

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• How should I study programming languages?

  - by gcc

  I am a student of computer engineering. I have never done any programming before, and as you can understand, I don't know how to study it or how to make my own programs. My English is weak [edited for clarity - ed], and so if you don't like the choices I list, please feel free to provide others. How should I study? How should I learn programming languages? Study completely from a book. Don't study from a book, just try writing code. A mix of the two; study from a book, then try writing code. Study half the book, then write the code by hand on paper. Listed to the teacher, then try to solve general problems (those not from any specific chapter).

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• App Development books for intermediate level

  - by 0cool

  This question seems to be asked previously on this site but the audience targeted are different. I am an Engineering student who knows Python, C and familiar with Java(learning now; good at fundamentals) & HTML. Now, I want to develop facebook & Android apps. I went through their respective documentations but couldn't really understand and thought to search for beginner books but they have been written from too basic. (There is an beginner's android book for from APress for people who have no idea of programming). My problem is, I am unable to find the right book to learn. Either they are for beginners or for experts... For guys like me, can anyone point out a good book?

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• How to Deliberately Practice Software Engineering?

  - by JasCav

  I just finished reading this recent article. It's a very interesting read, and it makes some great points. The point that specifically jumped out at me was this: The difference was in how they spent this [equal] time. The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice — the uncomfortable, methodical work of stretching your ability. This article (if you care not to read it) is discussing violin players. Of course, being a software engineer, my mind turned towards software ability. Granted, there are some very naturally talented individuals out there, but time and time again, it is those folks who stretch their abilities through deliberate practice that really become exceptional at their craft. My question is - how would one go about practicing the "scales" of software engineering and computer science? When I practice the piano, I will spend more of my time on scales and less on a fun song. How can I do the same in developing software? To head off early answers, I don't feel that "work on an open source project," and similar answers, is really right. Sure...that can improve your skills, but you could just as easily get stuck focusing on something that is unimportant to your craft as a whole. It can become the equivalent of learning "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and never being able to play Chopin. So, again, I ask - how would you suggest that someone deliberately practice software engineering?

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• problems with studying algorithms

  - by rookie

  hello everyone, I'm currently studying computer science at the Institute, and I have some problems with course which is named Algorithms, I've just begun to study it, but I'm already feeling, that I'm going to fail it, my problem is that while understanding different algorithms on graphs I need to keep in my mind a lot of info, and usually I can't do it, I forget some points of the exercise or can't proceed to final result, I'm very desperate about it cause I like programming very much. Did somebody feel the same while studying in the University? thanks in advance for any help P.S. I began to program only two years ago, may it be the problem?

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• What are the most common stumbling blocks when it comes to learning programming, in order of difficulty?

  - by blueberryfields

  I seem to remember that linked lists, recursion, pointers, and memory management are all good examples of stumbling blocks - places where the aspiring programmer typically ends up spending significant time trying to understand a concept before moving on and improving, and many end up giving up and not improving. I'm looking for a complete/comprehensive list of these types of stumbling blocks, in rough estimated order of difficulty to learn, with the goal of making sure that an educational program for programmers is structured to properly guide students through them Is this information available somewhere? Ideally, the difficulty to learn will be measured in some sort of objective manner (ie, % of students which consistently fail to learn the concept) What sources are most appropriate for obtaining this information?

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• How can I make myself better at programming working at a shi* job ?

  - by Scrooge

  I recently graduated with an Engineering degree in Computer Science, but my employer (a mid-sized software company) is not using my logical and programming skills. I want to move to a better opportunity but how do I do that since my experience here is not going to count as much? How do I get a better programming job? The worst part is that I am still reading from books (and not writing code myself) even after I have started working. They are paying me a standard entry level Indian IT job rate but I really dont care. It's not worth it. Please advise as to how I can do something worthwhile. (I have studied C++; Core Java; Ruby On Rails ..made a couple of academic projects but no relevant practical real world experience). Just to make things easier .. let me list a few basic queries How I get better at programming without a good project at my company? Please suggest projects where I can learn to write practical code (platform doesn't matter) Best place to take part in open source development? Is it possible that I earn slightly more while I learn? (apart from my sh** job I mean) What kind of practical projects are best suited for me? (ie for an entry level programmer)

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