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• What would you do if you were asked to recommend on someone you are not professionally satisfied with?

  - by Hila

  Where I live, everyone in the IT business knows just about everyone else. This is why it is quite common here to get a phone call from a recruiter asking for your professional opinion regarding people you've been working with in the past, or to be asked by a friend for a recommendation. This is all nice and well until you are asked to recommend on someone you weren't quite satisfied with professionally. There are several problems I can think about: Recommending on unskilled people is generally inadvisable. It is unprofessional and hurts your reputation. Giving this person a bad recommendation will probably hurt his chances of getting the job, and refusing to recommend on someone is just as bad as giving a bad recommendation. It may be that the new employer will be happy with this person's skills, is it fair to deny this guy of the chance to start a new page and prove himself in a new place? Many times you really like this person and are very uncomfortable with the idea of giving him a bad recommendation or refusing his request to recommend on him. What would you do in each of this cases: If this person asked you to recommend on him personally If you got a phone call from a recruiter asking for your opinion on him Thanks!

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• Which programming language should i choose? (much more info inside) [closed]

  - by Andreas

  I am not completely sure if this is the right place to put this question, but since it's the programming thread I guessed that there's many experienced programmers here. :) Ok, hello! My name is Andreas and I am a 16 years old guy from Norway. For some time now I've wanted to learn a programming language. Six months ago I started learning C++, but quit withing a week due to lack of motivation. The same thing happend only 2 months ago when I tried to learn Lua. I wanted to program mods to the game Garry's mod, and was really motivated. Then I stopped playing the game, and the programming stopped with it. Today though I am ready again. The only difference is that I am not completely sure what I want to do with the language. I only want to create something, and I miss the progress of failing and enduring hard work until I finally solve the problem I've worked on for hours. What I am trying to say is; Is there any program out there that allows me, a complete noob (I didn't learn that much in a week, so I like to call myself a beginner), to create apps, mods or something similar but at the same time being qualified as a first time language? I was thinking of Java, because Android, Minecraft and many other applications and games use it. But I've heard that it is going to be replaced by a program called HTML 5 (whatever that is), is this true? I certainly don't want to spend many hours of my life on something that is useless in a year or two. Hopefully I didn't make this too complicated. I know that it is hard to recommend something when I don't have a goal, but I really don't know what to say. Have a good day kind folks! - Andreas EDIT:* I did not know that this was an off topic question, really sorry!

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• flat files vs. RDBMS database, few read/writes, few changes

  - by Bob Lapique

  I have to handle data from long term (years, decades) climate monitoring stations. The data flow usually starts with raw data (voltages, etc.) plus quality check information (pressure, temperature, flow rate, etc.) generally recorded @ 1Hz. Then, the data are assigned a quality flag (human and/or program), processed (apply calibration curves) and flagged. So, we basically end up with 2 datasets : raw and processed data. New data are typically added once a day (~500Ko/day/instrument). Simultaneous queries are not likely to ever happen. I wanted to go for a RDBMS (we have a MySQL server) and have some experience in database design, but the IT guy keeps telling me that flat files will to the job just as well. I suspect him to try to make his life easier when it comes to backup/upgrade the MySQL. There are not so many links between data, they don't change much, but the quality flags will change. A RDBMS is easier to compare data from different instruments on a "many days" scale, compared to daily text files. Well, what would you advise ? Thanks.

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• Search ranking for important keywords has gone down drastically [duplicate]

  - by Vaivhav

  This question already has an answer here: How to diagnose a search engine ranking drop? 5 answers Firstly, we are a small entrepreneurial team of 3 persons and I am more like an amateur webmaster of the company's website as we cannot really afford a technical guy/department right now. A few weeks earlier, our website traffic and rankings for most keywords decreased overnight. I did a lot of reading henceforth and learned about Penguin 2.1 which people said is the reason for the drop. Something like this had never happened before. Now, I have gone through the entire Google webmaster help section. It says there that if a manual penalty is taken against us, we would notice a message in Manual Actions page. So far, we haven't received any notice from Google for web spam. Some SEO guys I contacted said they found spam links in our backlink profile. I do believe I had mistakenly purchased a cheap link/SEO scheme when I was yet very new to SEO. This was more than a year back but since then we have been legitimate. Moreover, how do I find out which is a spam link and which is not? Our content is all original, refreshing and the best you will find in our niche. We also have a blog but on a different domain (wordpress.com) from where we send out anchored links to our business website. Is this a good thing to do? Now, how should we proceed and recover our traffic/rankings. I tried searching in webmasters for a way to reach google and ask them why the traffic has decreased suddenly, but I couldn't find a contact form or something. Can someone please go through our website and help in making things more clear regarding the reason for the drop, along with a solution. Will really appreciate this as I can't get to figure this out and its taking a lot of time. Vaivhav

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• Ubuntu 12.04 nomodeset fixes boot problem but causes screen resolution to get stuck

  - by Thunder

  I've been searching the askubuntu forum for the past 3 days trying to figure out what's going on with my system and I have tried a lot of things but to no avail. So, I will explain my situation and tell you what I have tried and I hope someone can help me :) I have an: HP Workstation xw4100 Pentium(R) 4 3.00 GHz 1.5 GB RAM NVIDIA Quadro4 380 XGL graphics card It came with Windows XP and I set it up (with WUBI) to dual boot with Ubuntu 12.04 After installation I had the problem that so many people had with it booting to a black screen (mine was actually booting to the terminal basic shell) that is fixed by adding nomodeset into the grub. When I do that, MY screen resolution becomes stuck in 1280x768 (as opposed to 1366x768 before adding nomodeset) (and also, when running XP the best resolution is 1280x720) When I go to "additional drivers" it doesn't show any proprietary drivers, so I manually downloaded them using this command: sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nvidia-current but after rebooting, that made the graphics even worse (now stuck as 800x600) SO I tried to configure the drivers with sudo nvidia-xconfig but that simply created an empty xorg.config file. I found one place where a guy gave information to manually input into the xorg.config file but that had no effect at all. Lastly I tried to install previous versions of the NVIDIA drivers, but they wouldn't even fully install. So now I have just re-installed Ubuntu 12.04 and I either need to find a better solution to the first problem (nomodeset) or get the nouveau driver to correctly configure to work with my nvidia graphics. Thanks for your help ahead of time!

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• Why do programmers write closed source applications and then make them free? [closed]

  - by Ken

  As an entrepreneur/programmer who makes a good living from writing and selling software, I'm dumbfounded as to why developers write applications and then put them up on the Internet for free. You've found yourself in one of the most lucrative fields in the world. A business with 99% profit margin, where you have no physical product but can name your price; a business where you can ship a buggy product and the customer will still buy it. Occasionally some of our software will get a free competitor, and I think, this guy is crazy. He could be making a good living off of this but instead chose to make it free. Do you not like giant piles of money? Are you not confident that people would pay for it? Are you afraid of having to support it? It's bad for the business of programming because now customers expect to be able to find a free solution to every problem. (I see tweets like "is there any good FREE software for XYZ? or do I need to pay $20 for that".) It's also bad for customers because the free solutions eventually break (because of a new OS or what have you) and since it's free, the developer has no reason to fix it. Customers end up with free but stale software that no longer works and never gets updated. Customer cries. Developer still working day job cries in their cubicle. What gives? PS: I'm not looking to start an open-source/software should be free kind of debate. I'm talking about when developers make a closed source application and make it free.

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• Relation between developers and clients

  - by guiman

  Hi everyone, i've been facing a situation at work and i would like to share it with you and tell me: Did you had to do it to? Should a developer be in direct contact wit the client? Or there should be an "adapter" guy that translates client needs in pseudo formal requirements understandable to us? I'm currently working in a small company that its taking care of implementing lots of systems, most of them for goverment institutions, in witch it generally means taking software developted 20 years ago and refurbish them so fit up-to-date needs. The clients generally are very used to them and tend to discourage change (they are in their 50s 60s give or take, so not technologie-friendly in general). As you can imagine, dev-team in most cases starts taking care of relation with clients, generating the documentation needed in this cases (CU usually), assisting to weekly meets to see improvements with clients. As for experience, this is a gold mine for me, because gives a nice perspective on all the aspects of software development, but also some problems rise because, if developers come from mars then client are from venus. So there is a fine gap on the vocabulary/experience/capability-to-interpret-needs that generates an noice in the communication, and some times affecting the final product.

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• Fiction that includes BASIC programs [closed]

  - by Clinton Blackmore

  Back in what must've been the mid-80s, when every microcomputer included BASIC and Choose Your Own Adventure Books were really popular, there were some novels that had BASIC programs listed in the text, for you to type in and further enjoy. For example, as I recall, in one of these books, the adventurers were infiltrating an undersea base (and eventually wiped the bad guy's data storage [I do believe it was a hard drive, even though they were uncommon then]). One of the programs involved a game were you piloted a submarine and had to avoid or shoot sharks. The code was in BASIC; minor changes (such as 'CLS' - 'HOME') had to be made for your specific computer, and it used good old 40-column text-mode to display the action. IIRC, the plot never depended upon the programs. My question is, does anyone else recall these sorts of books? Do you know any titles that I could look for, or of any online? I am toying with the idea of writing a story like this (no, not in BASIC!), and would really like to see how it was done, back in the day.

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• Is it better to specialize in a single field I like, or expand into other fields to broaden my horizons?

  - by Oak

  This is a dilemma about which I have been thinking for quite a while. I'm a graduate student and my topics of interest are programming language design, code analysis, compilation, etc. So far, this field has been very interesting and rewarding for me, so I was thinking about finding a job in that field and continuing to specialize in it. I feel like it's a relatively solid field which won't "get out of style" anytime soon. I've always thought that in such complex fields it's better to be a real expert than just another guy who superficially understand what the experts are talking about. On the other hand, I feel that by specializing this way I really limit my future option. I have always been a strong believer in multidisciplinary approaches to problems. Maybe I should go search for a general programming job in which I could gain experience in other fields, as well as occasionally apply my favorite field for solving problems. Specializing in only one or two fields can prevent me from thinking outside the box and cause stagnation. I would really like to hear more opinions about this choice. The truth is I'm already leaning towards one of the choices, so basic psychology says nothing will change my mind, but I would still love to hear some feedback.

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• Abstract Factory Method and Polymorphism

  - by Scotty C.

  Being a PHP programmer for the last couple of years, I'm just starting to get into advanced programming styles and using polymorphic patterns. I was watching a video on polymorphism the other day, and the guy giving the lecture said that if at all possible, you should get rid of if statements in your code, and that a switch is almost always a sign that polymorphism is needed. At this point I was quite inspired and immediately went off to try out these new concepts, so I decided to make a small caching module using a factory method. Of course the very first thing I have to do is create a switch to decide what file encoding to choose. DANG! class Main { public static function methodA($parameter='') { switch ($parameter) { case 'a': $object = new \name\space\object1(); break; case 'b': $object = new \name\space\object2(); break; case 'c': $object = new \name\space\object3(); break; default: $object = new \name\space\object1(); } return (sekretInterface $object); } } At this point I'm not really sure what to do. As far as I can tell, I either have to use a different pattern and have separate methods for each object instance, or accept that a switch is necessary to "switch" between them. What do you guys think?

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• I have discovered a fundamental truth about TV shows and plots

  - by Steve Loethen

  For years, we have all known (okay, maybe I give people too much credit) that there is a very small finite number of plots.  I propose a project.  Let’s use the blogosphere to catalog those plotlines, and then find and document the episodes of shows that use them, including the show title. As evidence, how many shows have used the following plot line:? The standard “evil twin” plotline?  Once relegated to soaps, it has show up in crime shows, with the twist of DNA.  Step one, concentrate one this one.  Tell me about every show you recall that has used this plot.  I will collect and document the shows on my website (www.loethen.net) and we can build a database of the plots. Step two, what other common themes should I offer up?  How about the bigamist plot line?  The “bad guy was dead” plot line (revenge from the dead"?  The “vast government conspiracy” plotline? Let the games begin….

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• Uninstalling ATI's drivers and installing NVIDIA's?

  - by whydidithavetobreak

  I replaced my card but I'm not sure how to set things up on Ubuntu. When the computer boots, it doesn't start GDM (I think that's what it's called). Instead, it asks me to log in the command line. If I try to do a startx, it tells me there is no AMD device connected or something to that extent. I originally installed the ATI drivers using the GUI. It said that I was using the limited drivers or something to that extent with a popup on the right of one of the taskbars, so I clicked there and updated it. I think it could also be reached by going to system administration restricted drivers or something close to that. I tried installing the nivida drivers by doing a "sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-185" and then doing "sudo modprobe nvidia" and "sudo nvidia-xconfig" as this guy says but that didn't work. Modprobe couldn't find anything related to Nvidia and nvidia-xconfig wasn't an available command for me. Since I wasn't sure how to remove the ATI drivers I did that without messing with them. Not sure if that was a good idea.

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• How to suggest changes as a recently-hired employee ?

  - by ereOn

  Hi, I was recently hired in a big company (thousands of people, to give an idea of the size). They said they hired me because of my rigor and because I was, despite my youngness (i'm 25), experienced as a C/C++ programer. Now that I'm in, I can see that the whole system is old and often uses obsolete technologies. There is no naming convention (files, functions, variables, ...), they don't use Version Control, don't use exceptions or polymorphism and it seems like almost everybody lost his passion (some of them are only 30 years old). I'd like to suggest somes changes but i don't want to be "the new guy that wants to change everything just because he doesn't want to fit in". I tried to "fit in", but actually, It takes me one week to do what I would do in one afternoon, just because of the poor tools we're forced to use. A lot my collegues never look at the new "things" and techniques that people use nowadays. It's like they just given up. The situation is really frustrating. Have you ever been in a similar situation and, if so, what advices would you give me ? Is there a subtle way of changing things without becoming the black sheep here ? Or should I just give up my passion and energy as well ? Thank you. Updates Just in case (if anyone cares): following your precious advices I was able to suggest changes and am now in charge of the team that must create and deploy Subversion :D Thanks to all of you !

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• Database Driven Web Application, C# Front-End and F# Back-End meaning

  - by user1473053

  Hi I am an intern working with ASP.NET. My current task is to make a website which will incorporate some jquery viewing features. This project seems to me will be primarily dealing with reading data from a database and making graphs out of them. This will require me to make custom queries from whatever the client is looking at. I think it is going to be what this guy calls an Ad Hoc Query tool My plan for this is to make it a database-driven website. So I can utilize the jquery dynamic viewing capabilities. I stumbled upon the functional programming paradigm and found F#. I read that because of it's functional programming paradigm, it makes it a good language to do asynchronous functions. I read about how you can use this with LINQ to SQL and how easy it is to make queries without actually putting the query language in. I understand the concept of the MVC design pattern. But I don't understand what they mean about C# being the front-end and F# being the back-end. Can someone clarify this to me? Also what are your thoughts about doing this project in this way? Any comments and thoughts are greatly appreciated. I feel as if learning F# will be a great learning experience for me. My guess is that the F# back-end is like the part where it controls the calls to the database. F# is possibly the model part of the design pattern. And C# is the controller. So HTML, Javascript and Jquery stuff will be my View design pattern. Clarify please?

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• Why is the use of abstractions (such as LINQ) so taboo?

  - by Matthew Patrick Cashatt

  I am an independent contractor and, as such, I interview 3-4 times a year for new gigs. I am in the midst of that cycle now and got turned down for an opportunity even though I felt like the interview went well. The same thing has happened to me a couple of times this year. Now, I am not a perfect guy and I don't expect to be a good fit for every organization. That said, my batting average is lower than usual so I politely asked my last interviewer for some constructive feedback, and he delivered! The main thing, according to the interviewer, was that I seemed to lean too much towards the use of abstractions (such as LINQ) rather than towards lower-level, organically grown algorithms. On the surface, this makes sense--in fact, it made the other rejections make sense too because I blabbed about LINQ in those interviews as well and it didn't seem that the interviewers knew much about LINQ (even though they were .NET guys). So now I am left with this question: If we are supposed to be "standing on the shoulders of giants" and using abstractions that are available to us (like LINQ), then why do some folks consider it so taboo? Doesn't it make sense to pull code "off the shelf" if it accomplishes the same goals without extra cost? It would seem to me that LINQ, even if it is an abstraction, is simply an abstraction of all the same algorithms one would write to accomplish exactly the same end. Only a performance test could tell you if your custom approach was better, but if something like LINQ met the requirements, why bother writing your own classes in the first place? I don't mean to focus on LINQ here. I am sure that the JAVA world has something comparable, I just would like to know why some folks get so uncomfortable with the idea of using an abstraction that they themselves did not write. UPDATE As Euphoric pointed out, there isn't anything comparable to LINQ in the Java world. So, if you are developing on the .NET stack, why not always try and make use of it? Is it possible that people just don't fully understand what it does?

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• Business knowledge in a large financial org?

  - by Victor

  As a programmer working in the finance industry, I recently got a project that is a hedge fund adminsitrative application(used to calculate NAVs, allocate assets etc.) From a business point of view this is a good thing. When we think of our 'next' project, typically the impulse is to think in terms of technology. e.g: 'I want to work on a project that uses SOA/cloud etc etc.' I am interested to know if anyone while career planning also takes into account the business aspect of a future project. i.e. what the application does. So does anybody ever think like this : 'I wish to work on a trading system so I can understand capital markets better.' instead of 'I want to work on a project that uses SOA/cloud etc etc.' I say this because it appears to me in the finance domain, for senior position, good business knowledge pays well. So maybe a guy that knows more business but maybe not so much latest technologies is at an advantage? The rockstar programmer seems more suited for an aggressive startup. Particularly big old finance orgs rarely invest in tech just for the 'cool factor'. No?

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• Best way to update UI when dealing with data synchronization

  - by developerdoug

  I'm working on a bug at work. The app is written in Objective-C for iOS based device, for the iPad. I'm the new guy there and I've been given a hard task. Sometimes, the UIButton text property does not show the correct state when syncing. Basically, when the app is syncing, my UI control would say "Syncing" and when its not syncing it'll display "Updated @ [specific date]". Right now there is a property on the app delegate called "SyncInProgress". When querying / syncing, occurring on background thread, it updates a counter. The property will return a bool checking expression 'counter 0'. There are three states I need to deal with. Sync has started. Sync is updating tables. Sync finished. These items need to occur in order. My coworker suggested to take a state based approach instead of just responding to events. I'm not sure about how to go about that. Would it be best to have the UI receive a notification to determine what state its in or to pull every so often if state changed? Here are two posts that I put on stackoverflow, in the last few days, that relate to this. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11025469/ios-syncing-using-a-state-approach-instead-of-just-reacting-to-events http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11037930/viewcontroller-when-viewwillappear-called-does-not-always-correctly-reflect-stat Any ideas that anyone might have to very much appreciated. Thanks, developerDoug

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• Should I use OpenGL or DX11 for my game?

  - by Sundareswaran Senthilvel

  I'm planning to write a game from scratch (a BIG Game, for commercial purpose). I'm aware that there are certain compute libraries like OpenCL, AMD APP SDK, C++ AMP as well as DirectCompute - both from MS (NOT interested in CUDA) are available in the market. I'm planning to write the game from the scratch, which includes the following engines... Physics Engine AI Engine Main Game Engine (... and if anything is missed). I'm aware that, there are some free physics engine libraries in the market. Not sure about free AI engine libraries. I'm bit confused in choosing between the OpenCL, AMD APP SDK, and C++ AMP libraries (as already mentioned i'm NOT interested in CUDA). I want my game to be published in Windows/Android/Mac OSX. It means it should be a cross-platform game. I will be having "one source code" that i'll compile for various platforms like Windows/Android/Mac OSX, and any others if i missed. Note: Since I'm NOT a Java guy, kindly do NOT suggest me the Java Language. For Graphics language should i use OpenGL or DirectX 11? I have heard that OpenGL runs on a single core, and not sure of DirectX 11. Between OpenGL and DirectX which one should i follow? or else, are there any other graphics language that i need to start with? I want to make use of the parallelism in GPU as well as CPU.

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• Is this a ridiculous way to structure a DB schema, or am I completely missing something?

  - by Jim

  I have done a fair bit of work with relational databases, and think I understand the basic concepts of good schema design pretty well. I recently was tasked with taking over a project where the DB was designed by a highly-paid consultant. Please let me know if my gut intinct - "WTF??!?" - is warranted, or is this guy such a genius that he's operating out of my realm? DB in question is an in-house app used to enter requests from employees. Just looking at a small section of it, you have information on the users, and information on the request being made. I would design this like so: User table: UserID (primary Key, indexed, no dupes) FirstName LastName Department Request table RequestID (primary Key, indexed, no dupes) <...> various data fields containing request details UserID -- foreign key associated with User table Simple, right? Consultant designed it like this (with sample data): UsersTable UserID FirstName LastName 234 John Doe 516 Jane Doe 123 Foo Bar DepartmentsTable DepartmentID Name 1 Sales 2 HR 3 IT UserDepartmentTable UserDepartmentID UserID Department 1 234 2 2 516 2 3 123 1 RequestTable RequestID UserID <...> 1 516 blah 2 516 blah 3 234 blah The entire database is constructed like this, with every piece of data encapsulated in its own table, with numeric IDs linking everything together. Apparently the consultant had read about OLAP and wanted the 'speed of integer lookups' He also has a large number of stored procedures to cross reference all of these tables. Is this valid design for a small to mid-sized SQL DB? Thanks for comments/answers...

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• SQL Azure Book

  - by ScottKlein

  One of the hotest technology topics of the day is Azure. Being a SQL guy, I am all over this technology, especially SQL Azure. So much so that Herve Roggero and I are currently writing a book for APress on SQL Azure. This book will be out in September and will include deep and thorough coverage of SQL Azure, best practices, and how-to's. We are excited about this book and the technology. However, we'd like to hear from you. As we go around evangelizing SQL Azure at user groups, code camps, and SQL Saturday's, we see the range of "heard of it" to "experimenting with it". Very few are actually doing something with Azure. I'd like to know what your concerns/questions are regarding Azure.  More specifically, what functionality do you think is cool as well as what is lacking, and what would be your list of "must have's" to do something with Azure. We hear a lot regarding security concerns, lack of backup/restore, etc. Is there more? Herve and I will be posting frequently as we write to let you know what we find, what is cool, and what you can look forward to. I'm heading to Tech-Ed in June and hopefully will come back with some great things to tell you!

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• SQL Azure Book

  - by ScottKlein

  One of the hotest technology topics of the day is Azure. Being a SQL guy, I am all over this technology, especially SQL Azure. So much so that Herve Roggero and I are currently writing a book for APress on SQL Azure. This book will be out in September and will include deep and thorough coverage of SQL Azure, best practices, and how-to's. We are excited about this book and the technology. However, we'd like to hear from you. As we go around evangelizing SQL Azure at user groups, code camps, and SQL Saturday's, we see the range of "heard of it" to "experimenting with it". Very few are actually doing something with Azure. I'd like to know what your concerns/questions are regarding Azure.  More specifically, what functionality do you think is cool as well as what is lacking, and what would be your list of "must have's" to do something with Azure. We hear a lot regarding security concerns, lack of backup/restore, etc. Is there more? Herve and I will be posting frequently as we write to let you know what we find, what is cool, and what you can look forward to. I'm heading to Tech-Ed in June and hopefully will come back with some great things to tell you!

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• Skip CodedUI Tests, use Selenium for Web Automation

  - by Aligned

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/10/31/skip-codedui-tests-use-selenium-for-web-automation.aspxI recently joined a team that was using Agile Methodologies to create a new product. They have a working beta product after 10 or so 2 week sprints and already had UI’s that had changed several times as they went through iterations of their UI. As a result, the QA team was falling behind with automated tests and I was tasked to help them catch up and expand their tests. The project is a website. I heard many complaints about how hard it is to work with CodedUI (writing our own code, not relying on the recorder as we wanted re-usable and more maintainable code) then it took me 4+ hours to fix one issue. It was hard to traverse the key and debugging the objects with breakpoints… I said out loud “there has to be a better way or a framework the uses jQuery to run through the tests.” Plus it seemed really slow (wait… finding the object … wait… start putting in text…). Plus some tests would randomly fail on the test agents (using the test settings and an automated build, they are run on VMs using Microsoft test agents). Enough complaining. Selenium to the rescue (mostly). The lead QA guy decided to try it out and we haven’t turned back. We are now running tests in Chrome and Firefox and they run a lot faster. We had IE running to, but some of the tests were running fine locally, but hanging on the test agents. I’ll add some hints and lessons learned in a later post.

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• I am not the most logically-organized person. Do I have any chance at being a good 'low-level' programmer?

  - by user217902

  Background: I am entering college next year. I really enjoy making stuff and solving logical problems, so I'm thinking of majoring in compsci and working in software development. I hope to have the kind of job where I can work with implementing / improving algorithms and data structures on a regular basis.. as opposed to, say, a job that's purely concerned with mashing different libraries together, or 'finding the right APIs for the job'. (Hence the word 'low-level' in the title. No, I don't wish to write assembly all day.) Thing is, I've never been the most logically-sharp person. Thus far I have only worked on hobby projects, but I find that I make the silliest of errors ever so often, and it can take me ages to find it. Like anywhere between three hours to a day to locate a simple segfault, off-by-one error, or other logical mistake. (Of course, I do other things in the meantime, like browsing SO, reddit, and the like..) It's not like I'm 'new' to programming either; I first tried C++ maybe five years ago. My question is: is this normal? Should a programmer with any talent solve it in less time? Having read Spolsky's Smart and gets things done, where he talks about the large variance in programming speed, am I near the bottom of the curve, and therefore destined to work in companies that cannot afford to hire quality programmers? I'd like to think that conceptually I'm okay -- I can grasp algorithms and concepts pretty well, I do fine in math and science, although I probably drop signs in my equations more often than the next guy. Still, grokking concepts makes me happy, and is the reason why I want to work with algorithms. I'm hoping to hear from those of you with real-world programming experience. TL;DR: I make many careless mistakes, should I not consider programming as a career?

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• Natural talent vs experience [on hold]

  - by Tord Johansson Munk

  Hi i have a question for you guys if you had a choice of hiring one of two programmers. One of them is a natural born programming talent, he has been programming since he was 14 year old and he has been programming all sorts of things by him self, 3d renders,games,his own frameworks, he is really good at algorithms and problem solving. He is now about 25 years old and is looking for a job after some unchallenged years of college the only experience he has is working on his own/university stuff and some open source project. This guy spends all his free time programming and has several pet projects at home. The other person is a 37 year old career programmer. He has been programming since he graduated from university at the age of 26 and have been working since then. He did not have an interest in programming before university. During his studies he discovered that programming was fun and challenging but it never was a "passion". During his career he mainly worked with "enterprise" platforms such as .net or javaEE. He mainly have done database business applications and thus is lacking skills of the young talent like abstract problem solving or algorithms. But he know the tools he has been using during the years and is reliable and almost always makes his boss happy. He keeps him self updated in the platform and tools he has and is using. But outside the office walls he don't touch any code at all. Witch one would you hire? Would you favor one of them in certain projects? Do you think that if the young talent learns his tools he will be a better programmer than the older one? Would your decision be different if both of them where lacking a degree? or if only one of them was lacking a degree be the old and experienced or the young genius.

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• What are some good tips for a developer trying to design a scalable MySQL database?

  - by CFL_Jeff

  As the question states, I am a developer, not a DBA. I have experience with designing good ER schemas and am fairly knowledgeable about normalization and good schema design. I have also worked with data warehouses that use dimensional modeling with fact tables and dim tables. However, all of the database-driven applications I've developed at previous jobs have been internal applications on the company's intranet, never receiving "real-world traffic". Furthermore, at previous jobs, I have always had a DBA or someone who knew much more than me about these things. At this new job I just started, I've been asked to develop a public-facing application with a MySQL backend and the data stored by this application is expected to grow very rapidly. Oh, and we don't have a DBA. Well, I guess I am the DBA. ;) As far as designing a database to be scalable, I don't even know where to start. Does anyone have any good tips or know of any good educational materials for a developer who has been sort of shoved into a DBA/database designer role and has been tasked with designing a scalable database to support an application like this? Have any other developers been through this sort of thing? What did you do to quickly become good at this role? I've found some good slides on the subject here but it's hard to glean details from slides. Wish I could've attended that guy's talk. I also found a good blog entry called 5 Ways to Boost MySQL Scalability which had some good information, though some of it was over my head. tl;dr I just want to make sure the database doesn't have to be completely redesigned when it scales up, and I'm looking for tips to get it right the first time. The answer I'm looking for is a "list of things every developer should know about making a scalable MySQL database so your application doesn't perform like crap when the data gets huge".

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