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• Learning good OOP design & unlearning some bad habits

  - by Nick

  I have been mostly a C programmer so far in my career with knowledge of C++. I rely on C++ mostly for the convenience STL provides and I hardly ever focus on good design practices. As I have started to look for a new job position, this bad habit of mine has come back to haunt me. During the interviews, I have been asked to design a problem (like chess, or some other scenario) using OOP and I doing really badly at that (I came to know this through feedback from one interview). I tried to google stuff and came up with so many opinions and related books that I don't know where to begin. I need a good through introduction to OOP design with which I can learn practical design, not just theory. Can you point me to any book which meets my requirements ? I prefer C++, but any other language is fine as long as I can pick-up good practices. Also, I know that books can only go so far. I would also appreciate any good practice project ideas that helped you learn and improve your OOP concepts. Thanks.

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• Is it possible to procure venture capital based on in-progress ideas? [migrated]

  - by Clay Shannon

  I hope this is not the wrong forum for this question, but I can't find one in the Stack Exchange "family" that would be more appropriate. I have ideas for two web sites which I think will be quite popular (they are totally unrelated to each other). I am a programmer, and a "creative" (photographer, author, musician). So I have the "vision" as well as the technical know-how to bring these websites into being. My "problem" is that I'm champing at the bit to complete them, and don't have much time to work on them (being employed fulltime, etc.) If I continue to work on them in my so-called spare time, it will probably be a year or more before they are both done. If I was in a position to work on them fulltime (IOW, if I had a "silent partner" willing to invest enough money that I could quit my job), I could have them complete in about three months. I would be willing to partner with somebody or some group who would back me financially in this way. My vision/work combined with their monetary investment could bring about "great things" or at least moderately great things. I know you can "crowd fund" startups and so on, but for that you need to expose your idea. My ideas are not something I would want to make public, as somebody might "steal" them. I'm willing to discuss them with serious individual potential investors, though (provided they were willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement). Does anybody have any recommendation on how I might find a suitable partner[s] for this/these ventures?

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• Who should be the architect in an agile project?

  - by woni

  We are developing the agile way for a few months now and I have some troubles understanding the agile manifesto as interpreted by my colleagues. The project we are developing is a framework for future projects and will be reused many times in the next years. Code is only written to fulfill the needs of the current user story. The product owner tells us what to do, but not how to do it. What would be right, in my opinion, because he is not implicitly a programmer. The project advanced and in my eyes it messed up a little bit. After I recognized an assembly that was responsible for 3 concerns (IoC-Container, communication layer and project internal things), I tried to address this to my colleagues. They answered that this would be the result of applying YAGNI, because know one told them to respect that functionalities have to be split up in different assemblies for further use. In my opinion no one has to tell us that we should respect the Separation of Concerns principle. On the other side, they mentioned to prefer YAGNI over SoC because it is less effort to implement and therefore faster and cheaper. We had changing requirements a lot at the beginning of the project and ended up in endless refactoring sessions, because to much has to be adapted. Is it better to make such rather simple design decisions up front, even there is no need in the current situation, or do we have to change a lot in the later progress of the project?

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• Installing Ubuntu on Asus G75VW (UEFI)

  - by user101653

  You all are my last hope... help! I bought an Asus G75VW from Best Buy. It has the new UEFI BIOS instead of the old style BIOS (1980's) and has Windows 8 preinstalled. I cannot get the G75VW to install Ubuntu 12.10 in EFI mode. I did get Ubuntu to load if I changed the BIOS to CSM and the computer sees and installs Ubuntu in "legacy mode". I attempted boot repair, and Ubuntu will load after 1 minute but as legacy BIOS only. If I changed the BIOS to UEFI "Binary is whitelisted" is displayed and I get a purple screen. My goal... keep my preinstalled Windows 8 on internal drive bay 1 and install Ubuntu 12.10 on internal drive bay 2... and somehow make a choice on which to choose. I am at a loss. I am a software programmer, but I am very bad at understanding BIOS and partitioning. Any ideas? Has anyone done what I want to do. This is a full second day on my "issue"! If I cannot get Ubuntu installed, I'm returning the laptop. And "wait" until these obstacles of UEFI/EFI and properly handled to allow people to load EFI based Ubuntu without a hitch. Thanks, Dave

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• Why job postings always looking for "rockstars?"

  - by Xepoch

  I have noticed a recent trend in requesting programmers who are rockstars. I get it, they're looking for someone who is really good at what they do. But why (pray) make the reference to a rockstar? Do these companies really want these traits as a real rockstar? Party all night and wake up to take care of quick business in the morning? Substance abuse, Narcissism with celebrity, Compensation well exceeding their management, Excellent at putting on a short-lived show, Entertainment instead of value, 1 hit (project) wonders or single-genre performers, Et cetera What is wrong with Senior or Principal Software Engineer who has an established and proven passion for the business? Rather do we mean quite the opposite, someone who: rolls up the sleeves and gets to work, takes appropriate direction and helps influence teams, programs in lessons' learned and proper practices, provides timely communication to the whole team, can code and understand multiple languages, understands the science and theory behind computation, Is there a trend to diversify the software engineering ranks? How many software rockstars can you hire before your band starts breaking up? Sure, there are lots of folks doing this stuff on their own, maybe even a rare few who do coding for show, but I wager the majority is for business. I don't see ads for rockstar accountants, or rockstar machinists, or rockstart CFOs. What makes the software programmer and their hiring departments lean towards this kind of job title?

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• Putting DSMD into Remission

  - by Justin Greenwood

  As a programmer with over ten years of professional experience, I've often suffered from DSMD (distraction surplus/motivation deficit) disorder. I know I'm not alone. Many of my colleagues have shared their experiences with this productivity cancer to me in support groups or in moments of inebriated intimacy. Often, I observe friends unknowingly surrendering to it - sitting at their computer, cycling through the same set of web sites (blogs, facebook, youtube, news providers, wikipeida, etc.), over and over again. Intermittently, they get up, take a walk around the office, make small talk with their colleagues, get another cup of coffee, then sit down and start the cycle all over again. It is completely controlled by the subconscious mind and will destroy your ability to get into that groove you used to live in back in your better days. Programming requires extended periods of focused attention, and this type of behavior will really kill productivity and in the end, when deadlines are near, launch your stress level to near emotional breakdown levels.DiagnosisThe best way to diagnose infection is to completely disconnect your devices from the internet while working. If you find yourself launching web browsers every minute or so, then you're down with the sickness.TreatmentA few techniques I've found that will help send this ailment into regression are as follows:Segment your day into two to three hour work segments. For example: 9:00-11:00, 1:00-3:00, 3:30-5:00.Define a few small one to two hour tasks you want to accomplish in your day. Assign each of those tasks to one of the short work segments.If possible, turn off the internet and any other distractions during these work segments (at least until you regain control of your browsing habits) - this includes instant messaging and email. You can check your email and waste time surfing in the hours between work segments.Reward yourself on productive days with a beer or whatever butters your muffins.

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• How to add a new developer to the team

  - by lortabac

  I run a small company composed of only 2 developers. For one of our clients we are building a very big application, whose development has gone on for 1.5 years. Now this client has found an important sponsorship, and they are organizing some events related to this project, so we have a deadline in 2 months and we can't miss it. We are thinking of adding a new developer to the team, and I am wondering what we can do to help his integration. This is the situation: We are approaching the threshhold of Brooks's law, the point when adding new developers will be counter-productive. The application is relatively well designed, but the implementation is chaotic in some points (especially older code). There are unit tests only for more recent code. When this project started, we didn't have the habit of doing tests. Documentation and comments are incomplete. The application is both large and complex. The client has written down almost every detail about his project, in a very clear and "programmer-friendly" way. Is it a good idea to add a person now? If so, what can we do in order to help the new developer integrate into the team?

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• TDD with SQL and data manipulation functions

  - by Xophmeister

  While I'm a professional programmer, I've never been formally trained in software engineering. As I'm frequently visiting here and SO, I've noticed a trend for writing unit tests whenever possible and, as my software gets more complex and sophisticated, I see automated testing as a good idea in aiding debugging. However, most of my work involves writing complex SQL and then processing the output in some way. How would you write a test to ensure your SQL was returning the correct data, for example? Then, say if the data wasn't under your control (e.g., that of a 3rd party system), how can you efficiently test your processing routines without having to hand write reams of dummy data? The best solution I can think of is making views of the data that, together, cover most cases. I can then join those views with my SQL to see if it's returning the correct records and manually process the views to see if my functions, etc. are doing what they're supposed to. Still, it seems excessive and flakey; particularly finding data to test against...

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• How often is seq used in Haskell production code?

  - by Giorgio

  I have some experience writing small tools in Haskell and I find it very intuitive to use, especially for writing filters (using interact) that process their standard input and pipe it to standard output. Recently I tried to use one such filter on a file that was about 10 times larger than usual and I got a Stack space overflow error. After doing some reading (e.g. here and here) I have identified two guidelines to save stack space (experienced Haskellers, please correct me if I write something that is not correct): Avoid recursive function calls that are not tail-recursive (this is valid for all functional languages that support tail-call optimization). Introduce seq to force early evaluation of sub-expressions so that expressions do not grow to large before they are reduced (this is specific to Haskell, or at least to languages using lazy evaluation). After introducing five or six seq calls in my code my tool runs smoothly again (also on the larger data). However, I find the original code was a bit more readable. Since I am not an experienced Haskell programmer I wanted to ask if introducing seq in this way is a common practice, and how often one will normally see seq in Haskell production code. Or are there any techniques that allow to avoid using seq too often and still use little stack space?

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• Multiplayer online game engine/pipeline

  - by Slav

  I am implementing online multiplayer game where client must be written in AS3 (Flash) to embed game into browser and server in C++ (abstract part of which is already written and used with other games). Networking models may differ from each other, but currently I'm looking toward game's logic run on both client and server parts but they're written on different languages while it's not the main problem. My previous game (pretty big one - was implemented with efforts of ~5 programmers in 1.5 years) was mainly "written" within electronic tables as structured objects with implemented inheritance: was written standalone tool which generated AS3 and C++ (languages of platforms to which the game was published) using specified electronic tables file (.xls or .ods). That file contained ~50 tables with ~50 rows and ~50 columns each and was mainly written by game designers which do not know any programming languages. But that game was single-player. Having declared problem with my currently implementing MMO, I'm looking toward some vast pipeline, where will be resolved such problems like: game objects descriptions (which starships exist within game, how much HP they have, how fast move, what damage deal...) actions descriptions (what players or NPCs can do: attack each other, collect resources, build structures, move, teleport, cast spells) - actions are transmitted through server between clients influences (what happens when specified action applied on specified object, e.i "Ship A attacked Ship B: field "HP" of Ship B reduced by amount of field "damage" of Ship A" Influences can be much more difficult, yes, e.i. "damage is twice it's size when Ship has =5 allies around him in a 200 units range during night" and so on. If to be able to write such logic within some "design document" it will be easily possible to: let designers to do their job without programmer's intervention or any bug-prone programming validate described logic transfer (transform, convert) to any programming language where it will be executed Did somebody worked on something like that? Is there some tools/engines/pipelines which concernes with it? How to handle all of this problems simultaneously in a best way or do I properly imagine my tasks and problems to myself?

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• Making money from a custom built interpreter?

  - by annoying_squid

  I have been making considerable progress lately on building an interpreter. I am building it from NASM assembly code (for the core engine) and C (cl.exe the Microsoft compiler for the parser). I really don't have a lot of time but I have a lot of good ideas on how to build this so it appeals to a certain niche market. I'd love to finish this but I need to face reality here ... unless I can make some good monetary return on my investment, there is not a lot of time for me to invest. So I ask the following questions to anyone out there, especially those who have experience in monetizing their programs: 1) How easy is it for a programmer to make good money from one design? (I know this is vague but it will be interesting to hear from those who have experience or know of others' experiences). 2) What are the biggest obstacles to making money from a programming design? 3) For the parser, I am using the Microsoft compiler (no IDE) I got from visual express, so will this be an issue? Will I have to pay royalties or a license fee? 4) As far as I know NASM is a 2-clause BSD licensed application. So this should allow me to use NASM for commericial development unless I am missing something? It's good to know these things before launching into the meat and potatoes of the project.

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• Flash Player for IPTV

  - by Le Mystique

  Hi All, We have to design a flash player for three video sources of IPTV. Educational videos on the system that can be played on demand. (VOD or Video on Demand local) Streaming videos available on different websites that can be played on demand (VOD or Video on Demand remote) IPTV live streaming video feed Videos from three sources have to be played within single flash player that we need to design. There are 2 basic requirements: For the two VOD types, we have to provide the pause and play functionality. For IPTV, pause and play is not required, However, channel switching time is critically important here. The user should get the program behaviour as close to TV experience as possible. This means channel switching should be fast. To provide this, buffering of video is required for multiple channels. Now the questions is, is this possible? If yes, how? Secondly, what skill set (e.g. action script 3.0 , flash 10) should the flash programmer have to be able to design this? Thirdly is it as simple as making a normal FLV player? Or is it a more complex job?

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• Worthless Anti-Spam (What can we learn)

  - by smehaffie

  I recently can across a site that had a “anti-spam” field at the bottom of the entry from.  The first issue I had with it was that at 1280X800 you could not read the value you were suppose to enter (see below).  You tell me, should you enter div, dlv, piv, or plv. But even worse than not being readable at high resolutions is the fact that the programmer who coded it really did not understand what this was used for.  An anti-spam (aka: catpcha) entry field should not be able to be read by looking at the HTML DOM object (so entry of value cannot be scripted).  In this case the value is simply a disabled text input filed that has the value you need to type.  So a hacker would simply need to search for text input field named “spam2” and then they could flood the site with spam. 1: <td> 2: <label> 3: <input name="spam1" type="text" class="small" id="spam1" size="6" maxlength="3" /> 4: <input name="spam2" type="text" class="small" id="spam2" value="plv" 5: disabled="disabled" size="6" maxlength="3" /> 6: * <span class="small">- Anti-SPAM key - please enter matching value</span> 7: </label> 8: </td>   There are some things to learn from this example: 1) Always make sure you understand why you are coding a feature/function for any program you write.  Just following the requirements without realizing the “why” will sooner or later come back to bite you.  I think the above example appears to be an example of this. 2) Always check how the screen appears in different resolutions.  In this case it was pretty much unreadable in 1280x800, but you could read it in 800X600 (but most people I know do not have their resolution set that low).  Lucky for me I could “View Source” and get the value I needed to enter.

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• I've been told that Exceptions should only be used in exceptional cases. How do I know if my case is exceptional?

  - by tieTYT

  My specific case here is that the user can pass in a string into the application, the application parses it and assigns it to structured objects. Sometimes the user may type in something invalid. For example, their input may describe a person but they may say their age is "apple". Correct behavior in that case is roll back the transaction and to tell the user an error occurred and they'll have to try again. There may be a requirement to report on every error we can find in the input, not just the first. In this case, I argued we should throw an exception. He disagreed, saying, "Exceptions should be exceptional: It's expected that the user may input invalid data, so this isn't an exceptional case" I didn't really know how to argue that point, because by definition of the word, he seems to be right. But, it's my understanding that this is why Exceptions were invented in the first place. It used to be you had to inspect the result to see if an error occurred. If you failed to check, bad things could happen without you noticing. Without exceptions every level of the stack needs to check the result of the methods they call and if a programmer forgets to check in one of these levels, the code could accidentally proceed and save invalid data (for example). Seems more error prone that way. Anyway, feel free to correct anything I've said here. My main question is if someone says Exceptions should be exceptional, how do I know if my case is exceptional?

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• How to manage Areas/Levels in an RPG?

  - by Hexlan

  I'm working on an RPG and I'm trying to figure out how to manage the different levels/areas in the game. Currently I create a new state (source file) for every area, defining its unique aspects. My concern is that as the game grows the number of class files will become unmanageable with all the towns, houses, shops, dungeons, etc. that I need to keep track of. I would also prefer to separate my levels from the source code because non-programmer members of the team will be creating levels, and I would like the engine to be as free from game specific code as possible. I'm thinking of creating a class that provides all the functions that will be the same between all the levels/areas with a unique member variable that can be used to look up level specifics from data. This way I only need to define level/area once in the code, but can create multiple instances each with its own unique aspects provided by data. Is this a good way to go about solving the issue? Is there a better way to handle a growing number of levels?

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• Which pattern is best for large project

  - by shamim

  I have several years of software development experience, but I am not a keen and adroit programmer, to perform better I need helping hands. Recently I engaged in an ERP project. For this project want a very effective structure, which will be easily maintainable and have no compromise about performance issue. Below structures are now present in my old projects. Entity Layer BusinessLogic Layer. DataLogic Layer UI Layer. Bellow picture describe how they are internally connected. For my new project want to change my project structure, I want to follow below steps: Core Layer(common) BLL DAL Model UI Bellow picture describe how they are internally connected. Though goggling some initial type question’s are obscure to me, they are : For new project want to use Entity framework, is it a good idea? Will it increase my project performance? Will it more maintainable than previous structure? Entity Framework core disadvantages/benefits are? For my project need help to select best structure. Will my new structure be better than the old one?

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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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• Am I an idealist?

  - by ereOn

  This is not only a question, this is also a call for help. Since I started my career as a programmer, I always tried to learn from my mistakes. I worked hard to learn best-practices and while I don't consider myself a C++ expert, I still believe I'm not a beginner either. I was recently hired into a company for C++ development. There I was told that my way to work was "against the rules" and that I would have to change my mind. Here are the topics I disagree with my hierarchy (their words): "You should not use separate header files for your different classes. One big header file is both easier to read and faster to compile." "Trying to use different headers is counter-productive : use the same super-set of headers everywhere, and enforce the use #pragma hdrstop to hasten compilation" "You may not use Boost or any other library that uses nested directories to organize its files. Our build-machine doesn't work with nested directories. Moreover, you don't need Boost to create great software." One might think I'm somehow exaggerated things, but the sad truth is that I didn't. That's their actual words. I believe that having separate files enhance maintainability and code-correctness and can fasten compilation time by the use of the proper includes. Have you been in a similar situation? What should I do? I feel like it's actually impossible for me to work that way and day after day, my frustration grows.

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• Estimate angle to launch missile, maths question

  - by Jonathan

  I've been working on this for an hour or two now and my maths really isn't my strong suit which is definitely not a good thing for a game programmer but that shouldn't stop me enjoying a hobby surely? After a few failed attempts I was hoping someone else out there could help so here's the situation. I'm trying to implement a bit of faked intelligence when the A.I fires it's missiles at a target in a 2D game world. By predicting the likely position the target will be in given it's current velocity and the time it will take the missile to reach it's target. I created an image to demonstrate my thinking: http://i.imgur.com/SFmU3.png which also contains the logic I use for accelerating the missile after launch. The ship that fires the missile can fire within a total of 40 degree angle, 20 either side of itself, but this could likely become variable. My current attempt was to break the space between the two lines into segments which match the targets width. Then calculate the time it would take the missile to get to that location using the formula. So for each iteration of this we total up the values and that tells us the distance travelled, ad it would then just need compared to distance to the segment. startVelocity * ((startVelocity * acceleration)^(currentframe-1) So for example. If we start at a velocity of 1f/frame with an acceleration of 0.1f the formula, at frame 4, would be 1 * (1.1^3) = 1.331 But I quickly realized I was getting lost when trying to put this into practice. Does this seem like a correct starting point or am I going completely the wrong way about it? Any pointers would help me greatly. Maths really isn't my strong suit so I get easily lost in these matters and don't even really know a good phrase to search for with this. So I guess in summary my question is more about the correct way to approach this problem and any additional code samples on top of that would be great but I'm not averse to working out the complete code from helpful pointers.

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• Need help with ColdFusion and ASP.NET site [closed]

  - by Michael Stone

  To begin, I wasn't too sure how to title this.. I've got a few questions. First off, I've got a very big site that's in ColdFusion and we've been migrating to ASP.NET C# 4.0 the last 8 months. I've got a team of 7 programmers and no one can seem to figure out these answers, not even our senior C# programmer. We're using Team Foundation Server and we can't figure out how to only push up one small change at time. Right now we're stuck to publishing the entire site and it's causing serious issues. We've currently got the site as a Project and not a Website. We're wondering if that's one issue. I actually think it might be a problem. We're also dealing with an issue where we can't access our regular folders with relative paths. So we're first developing our admin side in .NET and We've got our regular site and then we've got another site within that for our .NET admin tools. By site, I'm referring to them actually being Sites in IIS. This also creates a problem for us when we're creating tools that upload images and want to store them and access them from our parent Site. I'd very much appreciate any advice on how to go about this in the most standardized way. So what I'm hoping for is advise on: -Publishing and managing a site/project in Team Foundation Server. Being able to push up one fix at a time if needed would be GREAT! -Any help figuring out the issuing referencing folders from my .NET child site to my parent ColdFusion site using regular relative paths. "/a/images/b/" would be nice nice instead of only being able to do "/b/images/" We're using ColdFusion 8, C# Asp.NET 4.0/Entity Framework/POCO Templates, and a Windows 2008 R2 Server. Thank you in advance for any help.

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• Am I programming too slow?

  - by Jonn

  I've only been a year in the industry and I've had some problems making estimates for specific tasks. Before you close this, yes, I've already read this: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/648/how-to-respond-when-you-are-asked-for-an-estimate and that's about the same problem I'm having. But I'm looking for a more specific gauge of experiences, something quantifiable or probably other programmer's average performances which I should aim for and base my estimates. The answers range from weeks, and I was looking more for an answer on the level of a task assigned for a day or so. (Note that this doesn't include submitting for QA or documentations, just the actual development time from writing tests if I used TDD, to making the page, before having it submitted to testing) My current rate right now is as follows (on ASP.NET webforms): Right now, I'm able to develop a simple data entry page with a grid listing (no complex logic, just Creating and Reading) on an already built architecture, given one full day's (8 hours) time. Adding complex functionality, and Update and Delete pages add another full day to the task. If I have to start the page from scratch (no solution, no existing website) it takes me another full day. (Not always) but if I encounter something new or haven't done yet it takes me another full day. Whenever I make an estimate that's longer than the expected I feel that others think that I'm lagging a lot behind everyone else. I'm just concerned as there have been expectations that when it's just one page it should take me no more than a full day. Yes, there definitely is more room for improvement. There always is. I have a lot to learn. But I would like to know if my current rate is way too slow, just average, or average for someone no longer than a year in the industry.

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• Graduating soon with a computer science degree, but have unique circumstances [closed]

  - by Donnie

  I joined the Navy in 1998, and was admitted into Nuclear Power Training. I got my electrician's mate certificate, but was put on medical hold when I was in Nuclear Power Training. I was sent to the Naval Hospital, and received a medical (honorable) discharge in the middle of 2000. I decided to stay at home and raise my son, and my girlfriend worked. a few years ago, I decided that I want to work as a programmer, so I went to college and will soon be graduating with a degree in computer science. I hope to finish with a relatively high GPA, 3.8 or 3.9. My question is this: How much, if any, of my Navy experience should I put on my resume? And how do I explain my nine year gap as a stay at home dad? Do I even try to explain it? I know recent college graduates typically have no experience, but obviously I'm not the typical college graduate. Will my long absence from working, or my relatively short duration in the Navy hurt my chances? Should I just put the college on my resume, and hope that HR thinks I'm younger than I am? Obviously, then, my age would show at the interview and there would be questions. Any help is appreciated.

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• Getting started on Large Projects

  - by Mercfh

  So I just graduated from my College with a B.S. in Comp. Science (although it was a good school, we're the only accredited CS department in our state.....for w/e that means lol) I feel like im a decent programmer, not amazing....but not terrible. Anyways I got my first job about 2 weeks ago, it's a pretty entry level job: firmware development/tester (I know I know people look down on testers...but I gotta start somewhere). Anyways there isn't a whole lot of coding to be had right now (mostly simple stuff) but here soon I have the option of helping out with development (which is what I want to do) Thing is....I have NEVER worked on a huge project. I mean in school sure we had "group" projects but nothing really big. So I'm not super familiar with HUGE classes and such (main language was C++)....Is this something I'll just get used to with time? Some fellow students were used to that with internships and such...but I never got that chance. My job was mostly a "one man job" kinda thing. Mostly little things. Plus in class we never did huge projects anyways. So how do you guys I guess "plan" out these things? Do you use a whiteboard and plan out classes and such....or what. Also...another worry of mine is that I have to use google......ALOT for examples of code, because sometimes I just don't get how something works. Is this normal? It makes me feel sorta.....stupid I guess. I mean "technically" i've had 4-5 years coding experience......but it really only feels like I had 2 years of REAL experience. If that makes any sense? Thanks

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• What are some good resources for creating a game engine in XNA?

  - by Glasser

  I'm currently a student game programmer working on an indie project. We have a team of eleven people (five programmers, four artists, and two audio designers) aboard, all working hard to help design this game. We've been meeting for months now and so far we have a pretty buffed out Game Design Document as well as much audio/visual concept art. Our programmers are itching to progress on our own end. Each person in our programming team is well versed in C++, but is very familiar with C#. We have enough experience and skill that we're confident that we will be successful with our game, and we're looking to build our own game engine in XNA as it seems like it would be worth our time and effort in the end. The game itself will be a 2D beat 'em up style game to be released over xbox live and the PC. It's play style will be similar to that of Castle Crashers or Scott Pilgrim vs The World. We want to design the game engine to allow us to better implement our assets into the game as well as to simplify the creation of design elements/mechanics. Currently between our programmers, we have books such as "XNA 4.0" and "Game Coding Complete, Third Edition," but we'd still like more information on both XNA and (especially) building a game engine from scratch. What are any other good books, websites, or resources we could use to further map out and program our game engine?

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• General List of Common Programming Errors

  - by javamonkey79

  As one journey's from apprentice to journeyman to master I've noticed that one accumulates a list of best practices for things they've been bitten by. Personally, I write most of my stuff in java & SQL so my list tends to be slated towards them. I've accumulated the following: When doing list removal, always reverse iterate Avoid adding items to a list you are currently iterating on Watch out for NullPointerExceptions Now, I know there are language specific "common errors" links out there like this one. And I'm also aware of the pragmatic programmer tips, Martin Fowler's "code smells". Does anyone know of any good lists out there of things like I've listed above (re: list removal, adding items, etc). My guess is that there are some good QA folks out there that can probably throw me a bone here. I'm not looking for things the compiler can catch - I'm looking for common things that cause bugs. In the event that there isn't a list out there already then I welcome posting your own findings here. Thanks in advance!

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