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I'm currently working at home, but it's not always an ideal environment for coding. Where do you go when you need a quiet place to work for several hours.
earplugs or noise cancelling headphones
An unpopular coffee shop.
(I suppose I could try a co-working facility, but they always seem so sterile and officelike.)
I used to work from home, and it was fine until my youngest learned to walk then it was all over. Since then my company found some free space that is reserved for startups. if you are a new company there's a lot of great resources out there to tap into especially if you're near a decent university.
Otherwise, I've found that any place with wifi, and an outlet will work. Just be sure to bring your ipod, and if you have a pair of noise cancelling headphones then you can tune out just about anything.
Try and find coworking facilities in your area. They generally provide adhoc on demand office space to people such as your self. Here in Seattle there is a place called Startpad that offers this service just to programmers. Otherwise a university library might be a good choice.
Take pen and paper and travel to the woods. Well, at least this works if you don't need to code right away or have a laptop.
My home is pretty quiet so that usually works for me. Libraries have hot spots though. Maybe check yours out?
My room. This way I can have my music, silence or whatever else I take interest to at the time.
My den. With my desk, my chair, my computers, my keyboard, and my monitors setup exactly how I like them. When needed, there is also my door and my music.
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This may be a generic question but still i need suggestion/guidance on which design pattern or architecture to follow for developing this app.
The app is for premium users(for iPhone) on airport and will be able to access the internet at higher speed and on multiple devices simultaneously.
I'm planning to go for Singleton,Factory,MVC patterns and client-server architecture for the app.
What-all things do i need to re-think and then design the app or are above patterns sufficient to go ahead ?
thanks
It seems bizarre to come up with a list of patterns to use before you look at what your app is actually going to do. This is not how you use design patterns.
The way to use patterns: When you have a problem, and you think about how to solve it, you try to find out whether your problem fits a well-known pattern and adapt that pattern to your problem. Or you figure out that it doesn't fit any well-known pattern, and then you solve the problem without using any pattern.
This is like going to a shop buying blue and yellow paint, and then deciding what parts of your home you want to paint. You do it the other way round. You decide what needs painting, then you decide what would be a nice colour, then you buy the colour. You don't buy the paint first. You don't decide on design patterns first.
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Something like galaga! I have no idea where to start. I know how to program, I have an environment to make the game, and I can create all the pixel/tiles on the screen. I just don't really know where to go after that. I've looked online for help but with no luck.
Any feedback is much appreciated!
A great alternative would be to use Löve2D, it is a game framework that uses Lua as its programming language and it is very easy to use.
No matter what language you code in, I would start by making a diagram describing the game flow. If you break it into small pieces, you'll find yourself following that process as you start to code.
Ask yourself:
What is happening in the game? (Aliens attacking a single ship)
What is the object of the game? (Destroy each successive wave of aliens without getting nuked.)
What controls are necessary to accomplish this? (firing button, movements, any specials you might incorporate.)
what sorts of power-ups / extra lives will be available and when?
What is the reward schema (more points / power-ups for higher-level kills, etc.)
What is the derivative increase in difficulty? (is it linear - gets a bit harder each level or, does it get increasingly difficult by greater amounts as you pass levels - also, do you want to build in respite levels where it chills for a level or two.)
Hopefully, you get the idea - just chop up the project into bite-sized chunks before you write your first line, follow your process, and adjust as necessary - a couple of hours of planning could save you many hours of dithering while trying to code a project you have not really defined for yourself.
I hope this helps
~b
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For the last few years I've been working as a self-employed software developer. Doing various gigs as they came my way. For the most part I've been fairly lucky, as my own personal network has yielded all the work I need to sustain myself and then some. As I said, I've been lucky to get all my contracts, I haven't had to put any real effort into finding work yet.
Although I'm currently employed, I'm unhappy and thinking about moving on.
My question is for the experienced self-employed contractors, how did you find your contracts? Are recruiters/headhunters/agencies helpful? What is the best way to expand your professional network? Can the internet be useful?
Thanks for the tips
Craigslist, network with former co-workers. Stay away from rent-a-slave and elame sites. They will only waste your time and frustrate you (I want a youtube/facebook/amazon clone for under $500).
Local is better. Clients love to have you come onsite and talk with them.
It will take a bit but after a while, you will find enough clients who keep you busy and you won't have time to look for new ones :D.
Start off moonlighting so you can keep the lights on and the internet paid while this ramp up happens.
Good luck!
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Once a week we have a half hour session where we talk about a few features in our application or explain a customer question to our employees(sales, support, technical services, and development). This session is to teach our employees the application we sell and to help them improve the service to our customers. Once every two weeks, this session is mandatory. Unfortunately, some of our employees do not take this too seriously.
How can we, as developers, gain more involvement from the rest of the company? And make them understand the application we're building, selling and supporting more?
Ask them to present the topic in front of you after some days from the session day.
Another good way is to make them suggest new features and modifications in the project.
If you have any hidden "tricks" or "easter eggs" in your application then start showing them one every week.
Make it interesting and tell them how a trick can help a customer.
Couple of points:
Make them feel important. Give them direct input using proper questions, even if you need to resort to analogies.
Speak with them, not at them. When people are being lectured there's a natural instinct to not take any notice.
Use analogies for things they do not understand, and again, give them direct input.
The main goal is giving the person a stake in the project. If they do not have anything valuable in the project (even an opinion that led to a feature classes in here), they will not care.
You can't get any more involvement from your employees because subconsciously they know they will not get any more benefits through exercise of extra involvement.
Reasons?
They may not agree with your development strategy or with your customer relationship model. So they feel as they don't really belong here.
Their work will not profit from any extra insight, so for them it's a waste of time
They don't get paid enough so they are at a minimum accepted performance
They have other personal problems in mind and don't want to take extra mental burden during their working hours
They long since learned the company does not care about their opinion and improvement ideas, so they shut down their involvement service
They're that kind of people that are not interested in being involved (hire strategy issue)
Recognized anything? Then you know what to fix.
The important thing to understand that you should not just cure the disease but the reasons of its emergence. You may threaten people with some punishment actions if they don't get involved. You may play to emulate the need for their involvement. It will work for a brief time then fade out. Until you get to the origin of the problem, nothing will help.
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The single most effective thing I have done to improve my soft skills is to take an acting class.
What is the single most effective thing you have done to improve your soft skills?
Related questions:
What is the single most effective
thing that you have done to improve
your programming skills?
Advice
to improve programmer communication
skills
Better appreciating just quite how dumb I really am.
Starting from the perspective of assuming that you're misunderstanding what's going on helps a lot.
Started answering questions here - the ability to explain complex things in a way other people can understand them is very useful.
Not to be a smart-arse. People don't like smart-arses.
If you think you are right and everyone else is sure you are wrong, just agree and continue being right. Trying to argue it out just results in a negative outcome when people are not open to persuasion or are being stubborn.
The best way to improve your soft skills is to use your soft skills. Put on a lunch time seminar for your fellow work mates. Nothing too scary, just pick a technology that you think could be introduced in house to make things work more efficiently, put together a five minute presentation and set some time aside for questions and discussion afterwards. You might even start a trend, one day a week a different person can talk about something that interests them.
It's a tie between volunteering as newsletter editor for a local artists' group, and joining a small local theatrical dance group.
A few years ago I attended a workshop about communication. And one thing that I learned there and I will never forget was: Try to understand why people act as they act, try to understand their motivation doing things as they do. That helped me a lot, especially in managing the management...
I took a teaching course and have been doing a lot of teaching.
Where I work currently has some material about improving one's Emotional Intelligence which is something that has been quite beneficial for me as it helps demystify some of how the world works.
In terms of not learning something, working on making small talk and being a bit more laid back has also improved my skills as not everyone wants every little thing analyzed to death and beyond.