Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
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.
Related
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I need to write the backend for an event ticket selling system. Some companies would connect to the service in order to check for ticket availability in certain venues, book tickets and so on.
Reading about Erlang I though it could be a good choice since the system will have to support high concurrency, high availability but I don't know If it's a good choice for this problem domain.
Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks!
Erlang could be a good choice, yes, it sounds like something it would do a very good job.
But it's going to be hard for anyone here to be of much value for your decision, as you should also consider the knowledge level of the team, time & budget constraints, etc.
Ultimately, the best people to help you make this decision are the people in your team.
I suggest you take a look at OTP's finite state machines as I think it suits perfectly a ticket booking system.
I believe you can find a lot of examples either in the doc or on the web.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I have a decent amount of programming experience, and I just do not know where to start to learn this.
I've done the tutorials on apple's site, and looked at some other examples, but there is just so much stuff you need to know, that I'm feeling kind of lost.
I understand the whole MVC thing, I understand and know objective c, I just know all the general stuff, but when writing an app I just miss a lot of knowledge and I'm constantly unsure about how to do certain things.
Is it just a matter of keep going at it? Are there any really good books? Any really good online resources?
And again: it's really about just getting to know the ins and outs of all the frameworks and different objects and stuff
For someone in your position, the two words you need to know are Ray and Wenderlich.
For beginners I would really recommend to watch Paul Hegarty's Stanford iPhone development courses.
See:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/developing-apps-for-ios-hd/id395605774?mt=10
His courses are one of the most clear and effective courses I've ever seen.
EDIT:
New (iOS 7 courses):
https://itunes.apple.com/si/course/developing-ios-7-apps-for/id733644550
Watch few intro videos, read few intro articles. Plenty of them online. And build something. Repeat.
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
It's been 20 years since I learned any coding and things are very different now. After playing with cakephp and yii, I decided on ROR. I'm having a blast!
My question is not so much about ROR, but the best way to learn anything.
I started learning ROR and found out about version control and git. That was interesting and lead me to a few days of really learning it. I got back to rails and found out about RVM. That too was really interesting and I spent a couple days learning that. It goes on and on like this. I almost obsess about every new thing I learn.
The real question: Is it better to learn just enough to get by in the beginning and go back later and learn the intricacies of your tools or is it better to really learn each tool as you go?
Hope this makes sense as it is more of a philosophical question than a technical one.
Thanks
I don't think you should learn whatever you are most interested in at the moment because this can easily get out of hand...
I suggest a more focused approach to learning. Pick a real project with a goal (it should be challenging, but still realistic). Then learn along the way to reach your goal. Try not to learn stuff that's not directly related, and make sure you learn everything that you need to come up with a really good, simple solution. When done, pick next goal and repeat.
I think you should learn whatever you are most interested in at the moment.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm having a difficult time retaining the programming skills I'm actively trying to learn in an effort to apply for a junior developer position.
What I'm finding is that I can easily master isolated topics (for example, details about how Java's Container classes work and the different ways to sort a given container), but I find that when I move on to new topics I forget maybe 80% of what I learned (a few months down the road).
Sure, with good notes, I can get back up to speed much more quickly, but my question to those of you who are already in the professional field - is this common (this constant need to re-learn things you once felt you'd never forget)? If so, how do you get around it? Should I accept that I'll probably only be an expert in the narrow domain that I currently use on a day to day basis?
My father always said:
You don't need to know everything, you
only need to know where to look it up
(roughly translated).
Going with your example, if you find you need to sort a collection very often you will remember after you've done it a few times, if you don't do it for a long time you will forget it again. That's perfectly normal imo.
So what I'm trying to say is there is no point in knowing stuff off the top of your head if you don't use it anyway as long as you know where you can look it up if you need it again.
I hope that made sense.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
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.