There are days (at least in my life) when you are sooo tired but you must finish the program, build the release, ship the product, etc. I'm talking about loong nights full of coffee, 4-hour sleep-time and a whole lot of work to be done. How do you keep yourself productive in such days?

Why do code examples (mostly tutorials) use the names "Foo" and "Bar" so often? It is almost a standard. For example: void foo(char* bar) { printf("%s", bar); }

I was watching something on TV the other day and sat in disbelief as someone said something to the effect of, "I wish we could round up all of the people who made mistakes and punish them." That statement floored me. Punishing malevolence is one thing (preferably by immediate dismissal), but puni...

OK, to cut a long story short: I recently got moved on to a project, due for release about a month ago. The project was borked. The project is still not ready for release, although the customer is convinced otherwise. I have been working stupid hours trying to clean up the mess (read a naughty ...

I have my moments of inspiration like many others -- most of them bad, with a few diamonds in the rough. Is it possible to monetize those diamonds with stakeholders or entrepreneurs without actually being the person to handle development and technical? Any avenues that you can recommend would be ...

I'm a college student studying programming, and I feel like the whole picture isn't coming together. I just don't get it. I can write code and do all of my assignments just fine, but I feel like I'm missing something. Anyways my question to experienced programmers. Did you feel like you were mi...

Where should the line be drawn between maintenance and new features? The Oxford English Dictionary defines maintenance as: (7.a) The action of keeping something in working order, in repair, etc.; the keeping up of a building, institution, body of troops, etc., by providing means for equipmen...

Where I work, we employ a consultant to do a considerable amount of work for us to hold us over until we can hire/train more staff. He has been working with us for quite a long time now, and he has always had this strange habit of leaving his initials on EVERYTHING he touches, as if its his sort ...

I am trying to get a sense of what tools people are using for system modeling? Right now I use: Data Modeling - Erwin System Architecture - Visio UML - Visio I have been looking for a good freeware data modeling tool that can rival Erwin, but haven't found anything yet. I have always wonder...

I'm currently working on a asp.net web form project by myself. How much time should i spend per feature, UI or backend...etc.? Currently i feel like i spend way too much time on little detail. Should i focus on the overall and just build the whole app and come back to the UI or little detail late...

What is there to do when the lead developer is convinced the project will fail? This happened to me recently on a project, and I wound up losing my job, because I spoke up. In a little over a month, I had successfully improved a prototype, using a UI framework I had no prior experience with. S...

I really need any programming project idea to implement (any language) that fits as an educational project. I'm the leader of a small programming team in a community aiming at teaching, so I need to use this project as a way of teaching them different stuff about programming and different techni...

I notice, in C# i use very short variable names EVERYWHERE. My code is polluted with foreach(var (v|f|i) in SOMETHING) for(int (i|n|z)=0 var (ret|r) = blah(); ... return ret; var sw = new StringWriter(); using(var r = cmd.ExecuteNonQuery()) { while(r.Read()) { r.GetSomething(3) ...