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• The environment that is uniquely Oracle by Phillip Yi

  - by Nadiya

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In the past month, I have been given the exclusive opportunity to hire a Legal graduate/intern for Oracle’s in-house Legal Counsel based here in North Ryde, Sydney. Whilst talking to various applicants, I am asked the same, broad question – what are we looking for? Time and time I have spoken about targeting the best, or targeting the best fit. I am an advocate of the latter, hence when approaching this question I answer very simply – ‘we are looking for the individual, that will fit into the culture and environment that is uniquely Oracle’. So, what is the environment/culture like here at Oracle? What makes Oracle so unique and a great place to work, especially as a graduate? Much like our business model, we are forward and innovative thinkers – we are not afraid to try new things, whether it is a success or failure. We are all highly driven, motivated and successful individuals – Oracle is a firm believer that in order to be driven, motivated and successful, you need to be surrounded by like minded people. And last, we are all autonomous and independent, self starters – at Oracle you are treated as an adult. We are not in the business of continually micro managing, nor constantly spoon feeding or holding your hand. Oracle has an amazing support, resource and training network – if you need support, extra training or resources it is there for your taking. And of course, if you do it on your own accord, you will learn it much quicker. For those reasons, Oracle is unique in its environment – we ensure and set up everyone for success. With such a great working environment/culture, why wouldn’t you choose Oracle? /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Career Advice: finding challenging work in software and web development

  - by dianovich

  Having left my physics degree early, I started out in the realm of web design / front end web development and was able to get work quite quickly. I moved on to spend a chunk of my time on servers and gained experience with frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal, then the likes of Codeigniter and CakePHP and became comfortable in Debian-based and RHEL/CentOS environments. I ventured in to iOS development and published a couple of native apps to the app store too! I have started to spend a good deal of my time writing Python and have invested a little time in Django. The problem is, I still spend a fair chunk of my time doing more front end web development (writing markup and CSS for site themes, design-lead JavaScript, small applications for which application architecture and software engineering are relatively unimportant or too time consuming to invest in) in my job. What I want to do is really exercise the systematic/logical portion of my brain and tackle challenging problems on a daily basis. I want to have to care about big-oh running times, modularity in software, DRY, performance tuning and development methodologies. I want to work for a firm whose clients say: "Yes, these things are important to us and we'll pay you to get them right." But it is difficult: I have no formal training and am potentially becoming a jack of all trades. Not that being a jack of many trades is necessarily a bad thing, but the scope of work I find myself involved in is far too broad. And, there are only so many hours in a day outside of work! My question is: where do I go from here? I am starting to work on a few open source projects and have started to publish content to my blog. But this isn't likely to make it past the recruitment consultants and HR departments of many-a-firm. And I do not, for example, work in a team that practices agile methodologies, so how do I get work in such a team to gain experience? While I have been responsible for implementing version control and some solid working practices into our current environment, there is only so far I can go in this context. What would convince you that i'm worth taking a risk? What would convince you that i'll have caught up the other guys in your employ in next to no time?

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• A new name for unit tests

  - by Will

  I never used to like unit testing. I always thought it increased the amount of work I had to do. Turns out, that's only true in terms of the actual number of lines of code you write and furthermore, this is completely offset by the increase in the number of lines of useful code that you can write in an hour with tests and test driven development. Now I love unit tests as they allow me to write useful code, that quite often works first time! (knock on wood) I have found that people are reluctant to do unit tests or start a project with test driven development if they are under strict time-lines or in an environment where others don't do it, so they don't. Kinda like, a cultural refusal to even try. I think one of the most powerful things about unit testing is the confidence that it gives you to undertake refactoring. It also gives new found hope, that I can give my code to someone else to refactor/improve, and if my unit tests still work, I can use the new version of the library that they modified, pretty much, without fear. It's this last aspect of unit testing that I think needs a new name. The unit test is more like a contract of what this code should do now, and in the future. When I hear the word testing, I think of mice in cages, with multiple experiments done on them to see the effectiveness of a compound. This is not what unit testing is, we're not trying out different code to see what is the most affective approach, we're defining what outputs we expect with what inputs. In the mice example, unit tests are more like the definitions of how the universe will work as opposed to the experiments done on the mice. Am I on crack or does anyone else see this refusal to do testing and do they think it's a similar reason they don't want to do it? What reasons do you / others give for not testing? What do you think their motivations are in not unit testing? And as a new name for unit testing that might get over some of the objections, how about jContract? (A bit Java centric I know :), or Unit Contracts?

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• Can't fix broken packages

  - by AWE

  I am too dumb but determined to use Ubuntu that I paid a professional to install it for me (dualboot 11.10 with Win7). When I came home I got a lot of things from the software center. Skype did not have a download button so I googled it and Ubuntu help told me to do this: sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ $(lsb_release -sc) partner" and then this: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install skype The terminal told me "that this is potentially harmful..." but I thought it was Ubuntu language meaning "are you sure?" Now the computer is mute. Items cannot be installed or removed until the package catalog is repaired, so I want to repair it but the package operation fails. "sudo aptitude -f install" - command not found Synaptic package manager tells me that I have two broken packages, libc6 and libc6-dev so I do this: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade which tells me to do this: sudo apt-get -f install that ends up like this: Can't exec "locale": No such file or directory at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Encoding.pm line 16. Use of uninitialized value $Debconf::Encoding::charmap in scalar chomp at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Encoding.pm line 17. Preconfiguring packages ... dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable. dpkg: error: 1 expected program not found in PATH or not executable. Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin. E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2) When fixing broken packages in synaptic package manager I get this: Preconfiguring packages ... dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable. dpkg: error: 1 expected program not found in PATH or not executable. Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin. E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2) A package failed to install. Trying to recover: dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable. dpkg: error: 1 expected program not found in PATH or not executable. Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin. I want to become a linux geek but it is harder than I thought. Please help!

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• Networking Guidelines

  - by ACShorten

  One of the things I have noticed in my years in IT is the changes in networking. In the past networking was pretty simple with the host name and name resolution (via DNS) being pretty simple. Some sites still use this simple networking setup. These days, more complex name resolution, proxies, firewalls, demarcation nd virtualization, can make networking more complex. This can cause issues when installing products with in built networking that can frustrate even seasoned veterans. I have put together a few basic guidelines to hopefully help along with product installation and getting a product to operate in a somewhat complex network setup. All the components of the product (including the infrastructure) need to communicate via a network (even it is within a local machine/host). Ensure any host names referred to within configuration files are accessible via your networking setup. This may mean defining the hosts to the machines, to the DNS for name resolution and even your firewall to allow machines to communicate within your network. Make sure the ports used for any of the infrastructure are accessible (even through your firewall) and are unique within the host. Host duplication can cause the product to fail on startup as the port is already in use. If there are still issues, consider using localhost as your host name. I have used this in so many situations that I tend to use it now as a default anytime I install anything myself. Most Oracle products suggest to use localhost when using dynamic host or dynamic IP addresses and this is no different for the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. If you do use localhost then installing a Loopback Adapter for the operating system is recommended to force networking to a minimum. Usually localhost resolves to 127.0.0.1. When using multiple network connections, especially in a virtualized environment, ensure the host and ports used are relevent for the network cards you have setup. One of the common issues is finding the product is using a vierualized network card only to find that it is not setup for correct networking. If you are using the batch component, do not forget to ensure that the multicast protocol is enabled on your host and that the multicast address and port number specified are valid and accessible from all machines in the batch cluster (if clustering used). The same advice applies if you are using unicast where each host/port combination should be accessible. Hopefully these basic networking recommendations will help minimize any networking issues you might encounter.

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• Solving Inbound Refinery PDF Conversion Issues, Part 1

  - by Kevin Smith

  Working with Inbound Refinery (IBR)  and PDF Conversion can be very frustrating. When everything is working smoothly you kind of forgot it is even there. Documents are cheeked into WebCenter Content (WCC), sent to IBR for conversion, converted to PDF, returned to WCC, and viola your Office documents have a nice PDF rendition available for viewing. Then a user checks in a bunch of password protected Word files, the conversions fail, your IBR queue starts backing up, users start calling asking why their document have not been released yet, and your spend a frustrating afternoon trying to recover and get things back running properly again. Password protected documents are one cause of PDF conversion failures, and I will cover those in a future blog post, but there are many other problems that can cause conversions to fail, especially when working with the WinNativeConverter and using the native applications, e.g. Word, to convert a document to PDF. There are other conversion options like PDFExportConverter which uses Oracle OutsideIn to convert documents directly to PDF without the need for the native applications. However, to get the best fidelity to the original document the native applications must be used. Many customers have tried PDFExportConverter, but have stayed with the native applications for conversion since the conversion results from PDFExportConverter were not as good as when the native applications are used. One problem I ran into recently, that at least has a easy solution, are Word documents that display a Show Repairs dialog when the document is opened. If you open the problem document yourself you will see this dialog. This will cause the conversion to time out. Any time the native application displays a dialog that requires user input the conversion will time out. The solution is to set add a setting for BulletProofOnCorruption to the registry for the user running Word on the IBR server. See this support note from Microsoft for details. The support note says to set the registry key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, but since we are running IBR as a service the correct location is under HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT. Also since in our environment we were using Office 2007, the correct registry key to use was: HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Options Once you have done this restart the IBR managed server and resubmit your problem document. It should now be converted successfully. For more details on IBR see the Oracle® WebCenter Content Administrator's Guide for Conversion.

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• Missing Indexes DMV Report, 3 billion Impact!

  - by Tara Kizer

  We’ve been having some major performance issues with one of the applications that I support.  The database is on SQL Server 2005 and is about 150GB in size.  We’ve identified a couple of issues already on the database side.  The first issue is that some query (or maybe several queries) is getting a bad execution plan at some point in time during the day.  When it occurs, database performance comes to a grinding halt.  We know it’s a bad execution plan as running DBCC FREEPROCCACHE immediately resolves the problem system-wide.  As we have not yet identified the problematic query, we’ve put a temporary solution in place that frees the procedure cache on an hourly basis via a SQL Agent job.  This is not ideal, but it is getting us through the day without a major problem.  We are actively working on identifying the problematic query and hope to disable the SQL Agent job soon. Earlier this week, we had a major slowdown for one of the processes of this application.  I was unable to find any database performance issues, but I continued to investigate it.  One of things that I typically do when investigating database performance issues is run the “Missing Indexes DMV Report” (that’s what I call it at least).  When analyzing the output of that report, I immediately dismiss anything under 1 million “Impact” as I want to target the “low-hanging fruit” initially.  When I ran the report earlier this week, I was shocked to find a suggested index with an impact of over 3 billion! Do I win a prize for the highest impact?  Has anyone seen a value higher than mine?  My exact value was 3154284120.67765. The performance issue from earlier this week ended up being an application problem, but it also brought to light a much needed index.  I had previously seen this index come up in that report but always with a much lower impact.  I had never considered it as the index’s selectivity is very low.  It’s a composite index with three columns.  The first column is not selective, the first two columns are not selective, and the three columns together are not selective.  In fact, no matter how I order it, the index will not be selective at all.  I briefly discussed this with Kimberly Tripp, and she said that this was okay for covering indexes.  Selectivity is irrelevant for a covering index.  She indicated that she’s even created indexes with gender as the first column in the index.  I’ve got lots to learn still!

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• Repository and Ticket management in a Windows Environment

  - by saifkhan

  I’ve been using AxoSoft’s bug tracking application for a while, although and excellent piece of software I had some issues with it ·         It was SLOOOW (both desktop and web). I don’t care what Axosoft says, I tired multiple servers etc. I’ve been long enough in this field to tell you when something is not right with an app. ·         The cost! It’s not feasible for a small team.   I must say though, that they have some nice features which are not commonly found on other bug tracking software. I wouldn’t go on to list any here. I would prefer you download and try their app and see for yourself. In my quest to find a replacement, I tried a few. The successor had to satisfy the following ·         A 99.99% Windows Environment. ·         Bug Tracking. ·         Ticket Management (power users and project managers can open tickets on projects). ·         Repository (I decided to merge bug tracking and repository to get my team to be more productive). ·         Unlimited users. ·         Cost. Being the head of IT security for the firm I work for, making the decision to move data offsite was a hard decision to make, but turned out to be one I am not regretting so far. My choice was down to Altassian JIRA and codebaseHQ. I ended up going with the latter… (I still love the greenhopper from Altassian…its freaking cool!) CodebaseHQ is nice and simple and has all the features I needed. I’ve been using them for a few months now and very happy. Their pricing…well, see for yourself. I was also able to get our SVN data… (Yes, SVN! I don’t go near the Visual Sourcesafe thing…it’s not that safe (pardon the pun). I am hearing some nice things about TFS 2010) over to codebaseHQ. We use VisualSVN to access repositories. …so if you are a Windows developer (or team) codebaseHQ is worth checking out!

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• Slow Start For Passbook

  - by David Dorf

  Like many others, I pre-ordered my iPhone 5 then downloaded iOS 6 to my antiquated iPhone 4.  I decided the downgrade in mapping capabilities was worth access to Passbook, Apple's wallet of sorts that holds loyalty cards, tickets, and coupons.  To my disappointment, Passbook didn't work.  When it goes to the iTunes Store, it can't connect.  After a little research, I read that you can change the date on the iPhone to the future (I did March 2013), and then it will connect.  A list of apps that support Passbook are shown, some of which were already on my iPhone and others that required downloading.  Even when I put the date back on "automatic," things continued to work.  Not sure why. Anyway, even once I got into iTunes and made sure I had some of the apps downloaded, it wasn't clear what the next step was (gimme a break, its Friday afternoon).  Every time I opened Passbook, it sent me to the "Apps for Passbook" page on iTunes.  I tried downloading one of the suggested apps that I didn't already have (Walgreens).  The app's icon has a "new" stripe across the icon.  I launched it and it said it had Passbook integration. So I needed to login or signup with the loyalty program.  After figuring out what my username and password already was, it then offered to add the loyalty card to Passbook, which I accepted.  Now when I flip over to Passbook, I can see the loyalty card there.  I guess I need to go into each app to "push" cards into Passbook. People seem to be using it.  Twenty-four hours after iOS 6 was released, Sephora had 20,000 users of Passbook. Starbucks says they'll be integrated to Passbook by the end of the month, and Target is already offering coupons via Passbook.  After a few more retailers get on board, Apple may not need to consider NFC.

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• Unit Testing TSQL

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I went through a period of time where I spent a lot of effort figuring out how to set up unit tests for TSQL. It wasn't easy. There are a few tools out there that help, but mostly it involves lots of programming. well, not as much as before. Thanks to the latest Down Tools Week at Red Gate a new utility has been built and released into the wild, SQL Test. Like a lot of the new tools coming out of Red Gate these days, this one is directly integrated into SSMS, which means you're working where you're comfortable and where you already have lots of tools at your disposal. After the install, when you launch SSMS and get connected, you're prompted to install the tSQLt example database. Go for it. It's a quick way to see how the tool works. I'd suggest using it. It' gives you a quick leg up. The concepts are pretty straight forward. There are a series of CLR commands that you use to configure a test and the test assertions. In between you're calling TSQL, either calls to your structure, queries, or stored procedures. They already have the one things that I always found wanting in database tests, a way to compare tables of results. I also like the ability to create a dummy copy of tables for the tests. It lets you control structures and behaviors so that the tests are more focused. One of the issues I always ran into with the other testing tools is that setting up the tests might require potentially destructive changes to the structure of the database (dropping FKs, etc.) which added lots of time and effort to setting up the tests, making testing more difficult, and therefor, less useful. Functionally, this is pretty similar to the Visual Studio tests and TSQLUnit tests that I used to use. The primary improvement over the Visual Studio tests is that I'm working in SSMS instead of Visual Studio. The primary improvement over TSQLUnit is the SQL Test interface it self. A lot of the functionality is the same, but having a sweet little tool to manage & run the tests from makes a huge difference. Oh, and don't worry. You can still run these tests directly from TSQL too, so automation has not gone away. I'm still thinking about how I'd use this in a dev environment where I also had source control to fret. That might be another blog post right there. I'm just getting started with SQL Test, so this is the first of several blog posts & videos. Watch this space. Try the tool.

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• How to recover from finite-state-machine breakdown?

  - by Earl Grey

  My question may seems very scientific but I think it's a common problem and seasoned developers and programmers hopefully will have some advice to avoid the problem I mention in title. Btw., what I describe bellow is a real problem I am trying to proactively solve in my iOS project, I want to avoid it at all cost. By finite state machine I mean this I have a UI with a few buttons, several session states relevant to that UI and what this UI represents, I have some data which values are partly displayed in the UI, I receive and handle some external triggers (represented by callbacks from sensors). I made state diagrams to better map the relevant scenarios that are desirable and alowable in that UI and application. As I slowly implement the code, the app starts to behave more and more like it should. However, I am not very confident that it is robust enough. My doubts come from watching my own thinking and implementation process as it goes. I was confident that I had everything covered, but it was enough to make a few brute tests in the UI and I quickly realized that there are still gaps in the behavior ..I patched them. However, as each component depends and behaves based on input from some other component, a certain input from user or some external source trigers a chain of events, state changes..etc. I have several components and each behave like this Trigger received on input - trigger and its sender analyzed - output something (a message, a state change) based on analysis The problem is, this is not completely selfcontained, and my components (a database item, a session state, some button's state)...COULD be changed, influenced, deleted, or otherwise modified, outside the scope of the event-chain or desirable scenario. (phone crashes, battery is empty phone turn of suddenly) This will introduce a nonvalid situation into the system, from which the system potentially COULD NOT BE ABLE to recover. I see this (althought people do not realize this is the problem) in many of my competitors apps that are on apple store, customers write things like this "I added three documents, and after going there and there, i cannot open them, even if a see them." or "I recorded videos everyday, but after recording a too log video, I cannot turn of captions on them.., and the button for captions doesn't work".. These are just shortened examples, customers often describe it in more detail..from the descriptions and behavior described in them, I assume that the particular app has a FSM breakdown. So the ultimate question is how can I avoid this, and how to protect the system from blocking itself? EDIT I am talking in the context of one viewcontroller's view on the phone, I mean one part of the application. I Understand the MVC pattern, I have separate modules for distinct functionality..everything I describe is relevant to one canvas on the UI.

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• SQL SERVER – Use ROLL UP Clause instead of COMPUTE BY

  - by pinaldave

  Note: This upgrade was test performed on development server with using bits of SQL Server 2012 RC0 (which was available at in public) when this test was performed. However, SQL Server RTM (GA on April 1) is expected to behave similarly. I recently observed an upgrade from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2012 with compatibility keeping at SQL Server 2012 (110). After upgrading the system and testing the various modules of the application, we quickly observed that few of the reports were not working. They were throwing error. When looked at carefully I noticed that it was using COMPUTE BY clause, which is deprecated in SQL Server 2012. COMPUTE BY clause is replaced by ROLL UP clause in SQL Server 2012. However there is no direct replacement of the code, user have to re-write quite a few things when using ROLL UP instead of COMPUTE BY. The primary reason is that how each of them returns results. In original code COMPUTE BY was resulting lots of result set but ROLL UP. Here is the example of the similar code of ROLL UP and COMPUTE BY. I personally find the ROLL UP much easier than COMPUTE BY as it returns all the results in single resultset unlike the other one. Here is the quick code which I wrote to demonstrate the said behavior. CREATE TABLE tblPopulation ( Country VARCHAR(100), [State] VARCHAR(100), City VARCHAR(100), [Population (in Millions)] INT ) GO INSERT INTO tblPopulation VALUES('India', 'Delhi','East Delhi',9 ) INSERT INTO tblPopulation VALUES('India', 'Delhi','South Delhi',8 ) INSERT INTO tblPopulation VALUES('India', 'Delhi','North Delhi',5.5) INSERT INTO tblPopulation VALUES('India', 'Delhi','West Delhi',7.5) INSERT INTO tblPopulation VALUES('India', 'Karnataka','Bangalore',9.5) INSERT INTO tblPopulation VALUES('India', 'Karnataka','Belur',2.5) INSERT INTO tblPopulation VALUES('India', 'Karnataka','Manipal',1.5) INSERT INTO tblPopulation VALUES('India', 'Maharastra','Mumbai',30) INSERT INTO tblPopulation VALUES('India', 'Maharastra','Pune',20) INSERT INTO tblPopulation VALUES('India', 'Maharastra','Nagpur',11 ) INSERT INTO tblPopulation VALUES('India', 'Maharastra','Nashik',6.5) GO SELECT Country,[State],City, SUM ([Population (in Millions)]) AS [Population (in Millions)] FROM tblPopulation GROUP BY Country,[State],City WITH ROLLUP GO SELECT Country,[State],City, [Population (in Millions)] FROM tblPopulation ORDER BY Country,[State],City COMPUTE SUM([Population (in Millions)]) BY Country,[State]--,City GO After writing this blog post I continuously feel that there should be some better way to do the same task. Is there any easier way to replace COMPUTE BY? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• What type of interview questions should you ask for "legacy" programmers?

  - by Marcus Swope

  We have recently been receiving lots of applicants for our open developer positions from people who I like to refer to as "legacy" programmers. I don't like the term "old" because it seems a little prejudiced (especially to HR!) and it doesn't accurately reflect what I mean. We are a company that does primarily .NET development using TDD in an Agile environment, we use Git as a source control system, we make heavy use of OSS tools and projects and we contribute to them as well, we have a strong bias towards adhering to strong Object-Oriented principles, SOLID, etc, etc, etc... Now, the normal list of questions that we ask doesn't really seem to apply to applicants that are fresh out of school, nor does it seem to apply to these "legacy" programmers. Here is how I (loosely) define a "legacy" programmer. Spent a significant amount of their career working almost exclusively with Assembly/Machine Languages. Primary accomplishments include work done with TANDEM systems. Has extensive experience with technologies like FoxPro and ColdFusion It's not that we somehow think that what we do is "better" than what they do, on the contrary, we respect these types of applicants and we are scared that we may be missing a good candidate. It is just very difficult to get a good read on someone who is essentially speaking a different language than you. To someone like this, it seems a little strange to ask a question like: What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface? Because, I would think that they would almost never know the answer or even what I'm talking about. However, I don't want to eliminate someone who could be a very good candidate in their own right and could be able to eventually learn the stuff that we do. But, I also don't want to just ask a bunch of behavioral questions, because I want to know about their technical background as well. Am I being too naive? Should "legacy" programmers like this already know about things like TDD, source control strategies, and best practices for object-oriented programming? If not, what questions should we ask to get a good representation about whether or not they are still able to learn them and be able to keep up in our fast-paced environment? EDIT: I'm not concerned with whether or not applicants that meet these criteria are in general capable or incapable, as I have already stated that I believe that they can be 100% capable. I am more interested in figuring out how to evaluate their talents, as I am having a hard time figuring out how to determine if they are an A+ "legacy" programmer or if they are a D- "legacy" programmer. I've worked with both.

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• Network Your Computers & Devices: Step by Step

  - by The Geek

  If you’re looking for a great book to help you learn more about Windows home networking, there’s a new book on the market by our good friend Ciprian, and published by none other than Microsoft Press. Note: our friend Ciprian has been a guest contributor here on How-To Geek in the past, and he’s not only a geek that knows what he’s talking about, he’s also one of the more honest and decent people I’ve worked with. In his spare time, he runs the 7 Tutorials web site. The Book One of the great things about this book is that you aren’t limited to just Windows networking—it also explains how to connect Windows 7, XP, Vista, Mac OS X, and even Linux on the same network and share folders and devices between them. Everything in the book is written in a typical How-To Geek step-by-step format, with plenty of screenshots and pictures to help you through the process. Book Outline If you’re going to be spending some money on the book, you probably want to know what it’s all about, and since the Amazon page doesn’t give, well, much information at all, here’s the entire outline for you: Setting Up a Router and Devices Setting User Account on All Computers Setting Up Your Libraries on All Windows 7 Computers Creating the Network Customizing Network Sharing Settings in Windows 7 Creating the Homegroup and Joining Windows 7 Computers Sharing Libraries and Folders Sharing and Working with Devices Streaming Media Over the Network and the Internet Sharing Between Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 Computers Sharing Between Mac OS X and Windows 7 Computers Sharing Between Ubuntu Linux and Windows 7 Computers Keeping the Network Secure Setting Up Parental Controls Troubleshooting Network and Internet Problems It’s a great book, with loads of information, and compared to most tech books isn’t very expensive—only $19.79 for the paperback and $9.99 for the Kindle version. Well worth it, and hey, it’s an official Microsoft Press book—written by a How-To Geek guest author. Network Your Computers & Devices Step by Step [Amazon] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC 2011 International Space Station Calendar Available for Download (Free) Ultimate Elimination – Lego Black Ops [Video] BotSync Enables Secure FTP File Synchronization on Android Devices Enjoy Beautiful City Views with the Cityscape Theme for Windows 7 Luigi Installs Any OS on Google’s Cr-48 Notebook DIY iPad Stylus Offers Pen-Based Interaction on the Cheap

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• 25 Secrets for Faster ASP.NET: the Eagle has landed!

  - by Michaela Murray

  On Friday we launched our new free eBook, 25 Secrets for Faster ASP.NET Applications! Heading for 1000 of you have picked it up already, but if you haven’t got your copy yet, you can grab it from http://www.red-gate.com/25secrets. It’s the follow up to the wildly successful 50 Ways to Avoid, Find and Fix ASP.NET Performance Issues, which we released back in January this year (you can download from www.red-gate.com/50ways). Once again, we collected tips from some of the smartest brains in the ASP.NET community, but this time around, we’ve covered the latest stuff in the .NET framework – async/await, Web API, and more. Houston, we have a winner… In my original blogpost, I offered a Microsoft Surface as a prize for the best tip. Now, after some serious deliberation, our judges have settled on a winner. By a unanimous verdict, the prize goes to… (wait for it!) … Jeffrey Richter, for this cheeky number, Tip #1 in the new book: Want to build scalable websites and services? Work asynchronously One of the secrets to producing scalable websites and services is to perform all your I/O operations asynchronously to avoid blocking threads. When your thread issues a synchronous I/O request, the Windows kernel blocks the thread. This causes the thread pool to create a new thread, which allocates a lot of memory and wastes precious CPU time. Calling xxxAsync method and using C#’s async/await keywords allows your thread to return to the thread pool so it can be used for other things. This reduces the resource consumption of your app, allowing it to use more memory and improving response time to your clients. Congratulations Jeffrey! Of course, I also owe a massive thank you to everyone who’s been involved in the book, especially all the authors. It’s a real treat to work with a developer community that’s so keen to collaborate and to share their hard-won nuggets of performance knowhow. If you haven’t read it yet, I can’t recommend it highly enough. You can get it for free at www.red-gate.com/25secrets The full backstory for both eBooks: https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2012/11/15/application-performance-the-best-of-the-web/ https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2012/11/27/application-performance-episode-2-announcing-the-judges/ https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2013/01/25/free-ebook-50-ways-to-avoid-find-and-fix-asp-net-performance-issues/ https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2013/03/22/50-ways-to-avoid-find-and-fix-asp-net-performance-issues-the-next-generation/

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• NRF Big Show 2011 -- Part 2

  - by David Dorf

  One of the things I love about attending NRF is visiting the smaller booths to see what new innovative ideas have sprung up. After all, by watching emerging technologies we can get a sense of how the retail experience might change. After NRF I'm hoping to write a post on what I found, if anything, so be sure to check back. At the Oracle Retail booth we'll be demonstrating some of the aspects of the changing retail experience. These demos use a mix of GA and experimental components. Here are some highlights: 1. Checkin We wrote a consumer iPhone app we call Store Gateway that lets consumers access information from the store. They'll start by doing a checkin when they arrive that will alert the store manager via another iPhone app we wrote called Mobile Manager. Additionally, we display a welcome messaging using Starmount's digital sign. 2. Receive Offers There are three interaction points where a store can easily make an offer to a consumer: checkin, product scans, and checkout. For this demo we're calling our Universal Offer Engine at checkin to determine the best offer for this particular consumer. This offer is then displayed on the consumer's phone as well as on the digital sign. 3. Scan Products To thwart consumers from scanning product barcodes, we used Store Inventory Management to print QRCodes on shelf label then provided access to a scanner in the Store Gateway iphone app. When the consumer scans the shelf label they are shown product information provided by the retailer. 4. Checkout While we don't have a NFC-enabled mobile phone, we have a NFC chip that can attach to a phone. We're using this to checkout using a reader provided by ViVOTech. Tap the phone on the reader, and the POS accesses the customer#, coupons, and payment information. This really speeds the checkout process. 5. Digital Receipt After the transaction is complete, a digital copy of the receipt is sent to Intuit's QuickReceipts where consumers to store all their digital receipts. There's even an iPhone app that provides easy access to the receipts. This covers about half of what what we'll be showing, so be sure to stop by. I'll also be talking about how mobile is impacting the retail experience at the Wednesday morning session NRF Mobile Retail Initiative: a Blueprint for Action. See you at the Big Show!

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• Part 1 Basic Webtrends REST Examples

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  In this entry I just want to cover some examples of how to connect to Webtrends DX Web Services.  The DX Web Services use REST as the architecture, providing simple URI based end points to connect to.  With the Webtrends SDK you can connect to these services with your account information.  Here are the basic steps to retrieve a profile list, the reports from one of those profiles, and then the report you want from that report list. First step is to create a Webtrends User. WebTrends.Sdk.Account.User webtrendsUser = new Account.User(); webtrendsUser.UserName = username; webtrendsUser.Password = password; webtrendsUser.AccountName = account; After you create the Webtrends User, simple request a profile list by getting list of ProfileDefinition Objects. List<WebTrends.Sdk.Profile.ProfileDefinition> profiles = WebTrends.Sdk.Factory.NavigationFactory.BuildListing(webtrendsUser); Next you will want to grab a report based on the profile you are in and your credentials. List<WebTrends.Sdk.Report.ReportDefinition> reports = WebTrends.Sdk.Factory.NavigationFactory.BuildListing(profiles[i], webtrendsUser); In the code above, i would equate to the specific profile you want from the retrieved list of profiles in the profiles list.  The common scenario is that one has pulled the profiles into a drop down, combo, or list box that the user can select.  Then when the user selects the specific profile that profile object can then be used to pull the List of ReportDefinitions. Once we have the report definitions, all sorts of criteria can be added together to query for a specific report.  This is also were things can get a little tricky.  For instance, take a look at the code below. WebTrends.Sdk.Factory.ReportFactory.CreateDimensionalReport( report.ID.ToString(), profiles[i].ID.ToString(), "2010m01", webtrendsUser); The CreateDimensionalReport takes 4 parameters for this particular overload.  The report ID, profile ID, the Webtrends Date Format, and the Webtrends User Object.  There are a number of other overloads available within this factory's method that allow for passing the specific REST URI, and other criteria to retrieve the report of your choice.  In the near future we will be adding some more to this method also, which will provide more flexibility without needing to use the full REST URI. I will have more on this, so all you Coders out there using Webtrends DX Services, I hope this is helpful!  Enjoy. Original Entry

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• How to TDD test that objects are being added to a collection if the collection is private?

  - by Joshua Harris

  Assume that I planned to write a class that worked something like this: public class GameCharacter { private Collection<CharacterEffect> _collection; public void Add(CharacterEffect e) { ... } public void Remove(CharacterEffect e) { ... } public void Contains(CharacterEffect e) { ... } } When added an effect does something to the character and is then added to the _collection. When it is removed the effect reverts the change to the character and is removed from the _collection. It's easy to test if the effect was applied to the character, but how do I test that the effect was added to _collection? What test could I write to start constructing this class. I could write a test where Contains would return true for a certain effect being in _collection, but I can't arrange a case where that function would return true because I haven't implemented the Add method that is needed to place things in _collection. Ok, so since Contains is dependent on having Add working, then why don't I try to create Add first. Well for my first test I need to try and figure out if the effect was added to the _collection. How would I do that? The only way to see if an effect is in _collection is with the Contains function. The only way that I could think to test this would be to use a FakeCollection that Mocks the Add, Remove, and Contains of a real collection, but I don't want _collection being affected by outside sources. I don't want to add a setEffects(Collection effects) function, because I do not want the class to have that functionality. The one thing that I am thinking could work is this: public class GameCharacter<C extends Collection> { private Collection<CharacterEffect> _collection; public GameCharacter() { _collection = new C<CharacterEffect>(); } } But, that is just silly making me declare what some private data structures type is on every declaration of the character. Is there a way for me to test this without breaking TDD principles while still allowing me to keep my collection private?

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• After 10 Years, MySQL Still the Right Choice for ScienceLogic's "Best Network Monitoring System on the Planet"

  - by Rebecca Hansen

  ScienceLogic has a pretty fantastic network monitoring appliance.  So good in fact that InfoWorld gave it their "2013 Best Network Monitoring System on the Planet" award.  Inside their "ultraflexible, ultrascalable, carrier-grade" enterprise appliance, ScienceLogic relies on MySQL and has since their start in 2003.  Check out some of the things they've been able to do with MySQL and their reasons for continuing to use MySQL in these highlights from our new MySQL ScienceLogic case study. Science Logic's larger customers use their appliance to monitor and manage  20,000+ devices, each of which generates a steady stream of data and a workload that is 85% write. On a large system, the MySQL database: Averages 8,000 queries every second or about 1 billion queries a day Can reach 175,000 tables and up to 20 million rows in a single table Is 2 terabytes on average and up to 6 terabytes "We told our customers they could add more and more devices. With MySQL, we haven't had any problems. When our customers have problems, we get calls. Not getting calls is a huge benefit." Matt Luebke, ScienceLogic Chief Software Architect.? ScienceLogic was approached by a number of Big Data / NoSQL vendors, but decided against using a NoSQL-only solution. Said Matt, "There are times when you really need SQL. NoSQL can't show me the top 10 users of CPU, or show me the bottom ten consumer of hard disk. That's why we weren't interested in changing and why we are very interested in MySQL 5.6. It's great that it can do relational and key-value using memcached." The ScienceLogic team is very cautious about putting only very stable technology into their product, and according to Matt, MySQL has been very stable: "We've been using MySQL for 10 years and we have never had any reliability problems. Ever." ScienceLogic now uses SSDs for their write-intensive appliance and that change alone has helped them achieve a 5x performance increase. Learn more>> ScienceLogic MySQL Case Study MySQL 5.6 InnoDB Compression options for better SSD performance Tuning MySQL 5.6 for Great Product Performance - on demand webinar Developer and DBA Guide to MySQL 5.6 white paper Guide to MySQL and NoSQL: The Best of Both Worlds white paper

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• An update on using Rosetta Stone: Studio now isn't very useful and is not great value as an add-on option

  - by Greg Low

  I had a surprisingly large number of responses from my previous posting about learning Chinese. An update for those considering Rosetta Stone (www.rosettastone.com) for Chinese, Spanish or any other language that they offer:I had to renew my "Studio" subscription today and it's now a much worse deal than it was.It's now $75 for 6 months for Studio sessions. Online classes used to be 45 mins. Recently they reduced them to 20 mins. Given how often people have connection issues, etc. that 20 mins can disappear very quickly.They've also reduced the number you can attend. You used to be able to have 2 scheduled at any point in time. Now they limit you to 2 "group sessions" per month during the period. (You can pay for additional private sessions). The combination of these two changes now makes it much less useful. Two x 20 min sessions per month is an almost meaningless amount of practice. They also now automatically change you to auto-renew when you subscribe. They tell you where to remove this auto-renewal but the first 4 or 5 times that I went into that screen, no such option appeared. Later, an option did appear and I used it.Overall, things just aren't what they used to be at Rosetta Stone. It's now pretty hard to recommend the Studio option where it was a no-brainer before.FURTHER UPDATE: <sigh>Even after I renewed, I could not even connect to their "new" service. Although the system processed the renewal, it still tells me it's expired. My online chat person "Siva S" tells me that the problem is that I've purchased all 5 levels of the program. I can't wait till they explain to me how making an extra purchase from them stops me from logging on. Siva told me that they had "renewed" the program. I'd have to speak to Customer Care; they aren't available and then disconnected himself. Impressive (not).Their website is now full of issues too. It insists that my billing address is in the USA, even though it pretends to accept changes to it.Overall, it's gone from something that could be recommended (with some limitations) to now being an app to avoid. That's a pity as I liked much of it before.

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• Using runtime checking of code contracts in Visual Studio 2010

  - by DigiMortal

  In my last posting about code contracts I introduced how to check input parameters of randomizer using static contracts checking. But you can also compile code contracts to your assemblies and use them also in runtime. In this posting I will show you simple example about runtime checking of code contracts. NB! If you want to play with code and try out things described here feel free to download example solution. if you are speaker and want to use this solution as a part of your sessions then feel free to do so, but don’t forget to refer me and this blog as source of this solution. And please let me know about your session. As a speaker I am very interested about it. :) To see how code contracts are checked at runtime we have to enable runtime checking from project properties. Make sure you have checked the box “Perform Runtime Contract Checking” and make sure you select “Full” from dropdown. These parts are in red box on the screenshot below. Visual Studio 2010 settings for code contracts. Runtime Checking is turned on and checks are made only in public surface. Click on image to see it at original size.  Save project settings. Then compile code and run it. As soon as code execution hits the call to GetRandomFromRangeContracted() exception is thrown. If you are not currently playing with solution referred above take a look at the following screenshot. Visual Studio 2010 runtime checking of code contracts. Exception of type ContractException is thrown when contract is violated. Click on image to see it at original size.  The exact type of exception is ContractException and it is defined in System.Diagnostics.Contracts.__ContractsRuntime namespace. In our example the message of exception is following: "Precondition failed: min < max  Min must be less than max" Besides the description we inserted for the case contract violation the message also contains violated contract type. In this case the type of contract is Precondition. Conclusion Using runtime checking of code contracts enables you to take code contracts with your code and have them checked every time when your methods are called. This way you can assure that all conditions are met to run method or exception is thrown and calling system has to handle the situation.

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• Getting up and started with the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta 2

  - by mbcrump

  Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta 2 was released on 6/29/2011. Are you ready for it? If not then let my guide help you get your system prepared and go through a few new features. Download links: Web Installer of Windows Phone 7.1 Beta 2 SDK ISO Image of Windows Phone 7.1 Beta 2 SDK - (723 MB) To get started you are going to need to remove the previous version of your Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta 1.   This kicks off the process of uninstalling the Beta.   Once it is uninstalled then you are going to want to grab the bits from: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26648. The only thing your interested in here is the vm_web2.exe.   Make sure before you start that Zune is not running or you will get this error message like this one and have to restart from scratch. Now just go through your normal Install Screens. It should be installed and ready to go: A couple of things to note: 1) When creating a new phone application you now have several new templates to choose from as shown below. I welcome this addition because I’m a firm believer that we need more templates in order to get more people started. 2) Once you select an application template you can now pick which version of the Windows Phone platform that you wish to target: 3) If you created a WP7 7.1 Beta 1 project that it will still work properly in WP7 7.1 Beta 2. 4) You now have access to the search app icon. Once pressed then you will see something like this: 5) Under Settings –> Applications. You now have background tasks. 6) You will notice that the Web Browser looks a little different with the URL now located at the bottom of the screen and completely removing the “add”, “favorites” and “tabs” icon. Those icons are now moved to the menu bar.   That is it for my “Getting up and going with the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta 2”. I hope you enjoyed it and please feel free to subscribe to my feed or follow me on Twitter.   Subscribe to my feed

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• Advantages and disadvantages of building a single page web application

  - by ryanzec

  I'm nearing the end of a prototyping/proof of concept phase for a side project I'm working on, and trying to decide on some larger scale application design decisions. The app is a project management system tailored more towards the agile development process. One of the decisions I need to make is whether or not to go with a traditional multi-page application or a single page application. Currently my prototype is a traditional multi-page setup, however I have been looking at backbone.js to clean up and apply some structure to my Javascript (jQuery) code. It seems like while backbone.js can be used in multi-page applications, it shines more with single page applications. I am trying to come up with a list of advantages and disadvantages of using a single page application design approach. So far I have: Advantages All data has to be available via some sort of API - this is a big advantage for my use case as I want to have an API to my application anyway. Right now about 60-70% of my calls to get/update data are done through a REST API. Doing a single page application will allow me to better test my REST API since the application itself will use it. It also means that as the application grows, the API itself will grow since that is what the application uses; no need to maintain the API as an add-on to the application. More responsive application - since all data loaded after the initial page is kept to a minimum and transmitted in a compact format (like JSON), data requests should generally be faster, and the server will do slightly less processing. Disadvantages Duplication of code - for example, model code. I am going to have to create models both on the server side (PHP in this case) and the client side in Javascript. Business logic in Javascript - I can't give any concrete examples on why this would be bad but it just doesn't feel right to me having business logic in Javascript that anyone can read. Javascript memory leaks - since the page never reloads, Javascript memory leaks can happen, and I would not even know where to begin to debug them. There are also other things that are kind of double edged swords. For example, with single page applications, the data processed for each request can be a lot less since the application will be asking for the minimum data it needs for the particular request, however it also means that there could be a lot more small request to the server. I'm not sure if that is a good or bad thing. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of single page web applications that I should keep in mind when deciding which way I should go for my project?

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• Using lookahead assertions in regular expressions

  - by Greg Jackson

  I use regular expressions on a daily basis, as my daily work is 90% in Perl (legacy codebase, but that's a different issue). Despite this, I still find lookahead and lookbehind to be terribly confusing and often unreadable. Right now, if I were to get a code review with a lookahead or lookbehind, I would immediately send it back to see if the problem can be solved by using multiple regular expressions or a different approach. The following are the main reasons I tend not to like them: They can be terribly unreadable. Lookahead assertions, for example, start from the beginning of the string no matter where they are placed. That, among other things, can cause some very "interesting" and non-obvious behaviors. It used to be the case that many languages didn't support lookahead/lookbehind (or supported them as "experimental features"). This isn't the case quite as much, but there's still always the question as to how well it's supported. Quite frankly, they feel like a dirty hack. Regexps often already are, but they can also be quite elegant, and have gained widespread acceptance. I've gotten by without any need for them at all... sometimes I think that they're extraneous. Now, I'll freely admit that especially the last two reasons aren't really good ones, but I felt that I should enumerate what goes through my mind when I see one. I'm more than willing to change my mind about them, but I feel that they violate some of my core tenets of programming, including: Code should be as readable as possible without sacrificing functionality -- this may include doing something in a less efficient, but clearer was as long as the difference is negligible or unimportant to the application as a whole. Code should be maintainable -- if another programmer comes along to fix my code, non-obvious behavior can hide bugs or make functional code appear buggy (see readability) "The right tool for the right job" -- I'm sure you can come up with contrived examples that could use lookahead, but I've never come across something that really needs them in my real-world development work. Is there anything that they're really the best tool for, as opposed to, say, multiple regexps (or, alternatively, are they the best tool for most cases they're used for today). My question is this: Is it good practice to use lookahead/lookbehind in regular expressions, or are they simply a hack that have found their way into modern production code? I'd be perfectly happy to be convinced that I'm wrong about this, and simple examples are useful for examples or illustration, but by themselves, won't be enough to convince me.

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• TDD vs. Productivity

  - by Nairou

  In my current project (a game, in C++), I decided that I would use Test Driven Development 100% during development. In terms of code quality, this has been great. My code has never been so well designed or so bug-free. I don't cringe when viewing code I wrote a year ago at the start of the project, and I have gained a much better sense for how to structure things, not only to be more easily testable, but to be simpler to implement and use. However... it has been a year since I started the project. Granted, I can only work on it in my spare time, but TDD is still slowing me down considerably compared to what I'm used to. I read that the slower development speed gets better over time, and I definitely do think up tests a lot more easily than I used to, but I've been at it for a year now and I'm still working at a snail's pace. Each time I think about the next step that needs work, I have to stop every time and think about how I would write a test for it, to allow me to write the actual code. I'll sometimes get stuck for hours, knowing exactly what code I want to write, but not knowing how to break it down finely enough to fully cover it with tests. Other times, I'll quickly think up a dozen tests, and spend an hour writing tests to cover a tiny piece of real code that would have otherwise taken a few minutes to write. Or, after finishing the 50th test to cover a particular entity in the game and all aspects of it's creation and usage, I look at my to-do list and see the next entity to be coded, and cringe in horror at the thought of writing another 50 similar tests to get it implemented. It's gotten to the point that, looking over the progress of the last year, I'm considering abandoning TDD for the sake of "getting the damn project finished". However, giving up the code quality that came with it is not something I'm looking forward to. I'm afraid that if I stop writing tests, then I'll slip out of the habit of making the code so modular and testable. Am I perhaps doing something wrong to still be so slow at this? Are there alternatives that speed up productivity without completely losing the benefits? TAD? Less test coverage? How do other people survive TDD without killing all productivity and motivation?

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