Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with softwaredevelopment

Is there a website that tracks information about companies that have offshored information technology jobs?

cosmic.osmo — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:25:50 -0800

Is there a website that tracks information about companies that have offshored information technology jobs? I'm looking for a website that tracks companies that have offshored information technology jobs, and that can provide information about the locations and sizes of their offshore offices.

I've seen references to one at techsunite.org from around 2004, but it appears to be defunct.

Help me with job titles associated with software development

Pontifex — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:04:50 -0800

Which jobs should I be searching for a stepping stone in the world of software development and eventually project management? Fresh out of college the depression started.

I have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. I attempted to find some work in my area, but couldn't find anything in the way of "Junior Programmer / Software Engineer". I found some work eventually (3 months for a minimum wage service job) and have since found a relatively stable job that has nothing to do with my degree.

Now that I have some months on my resume, I'm looking around for software work in California. I'm starting in the North State and moving more steadily south, the first large city I'll be looking into is Sacremento.

I would like to have work that would provide me credible experience for developing software. Since I haven't any real world experience (Falling into the catch 22 of most intro jobs needing experience, etc) I'd like to start with an industry tangentially related to software development so that I can show some work toward real experience.

Instead of focusing on development work exclusively, I'd like to start with QA / Software testing work. I believe I could learn a lot about software development: Techniques, processes, culture, political realities of the work place, networking, etc. I also believe that such work could prepare me for an introduction into project management; Coupled with future software development work.

What sorts of job titles should I be searching for to maximize my return value for this type of work?

I also need a sanity check. In your experience does this plan provide the returns I'm looking for? Is there some other tangentially related field of software development that I should be investigating in parallel?

How do you avoid hard coding SQL statements in PHP?

secret.osha — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:00:01 -0800

Is there a good way to prevent hard coding of insert/update sql statements in PHP? I'm writing a data-driven PHP application. In several cases, there is a large SQL table, and different users are responsible for submitting different fractions of the data (i.e. Alice submits 3 of a row's fields, Bob submits 4 other ones). There are also cases where the web application modifies all the fields in a row. I've been hard coding the INSERT and UPDATE statements for each form handler which feels like bad design (especially if new database fields are added in the future). Does anyone have experience with this type of problem? Any good solutions?

Writing software on contingency?

SirOmega — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:49:30 -0800

Developing software on contingency - how much should I ask for? I'm going to be writing some software on contingency (I get a percentage of the income from the sales) and I cant really figure out what to ask for. It probably wouldn't take me too long to do (a week or two). Not a whole lot of unique talent is required for the project.

My guess is 30%, but I feel its a little too low. The company is small - one f/t person (founder), plus a bunch of p/t consultants as needed (myself included). I was also thinking about a two-tiered system, under some dollar amount its 20% and above a certain dollar amount (if we strike it rich) its 40%.

Fantastic software development blogs?

giggleknickers — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 07:32:21 -0800

I have Kathy Sierra withdrawal. What blog should I read instead? In my opinion, Kathy Sierra's blog was the best on the web. I've been waiting and waiting in hopes that she would resume it, but it isn't looking likely. Can anyone recommend any blog on software development that are similar?

How do I get software development projects?

zavulon — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:31:06 -0800

I'm a software developer who's tired of corporate 9-to-5 and wants to quit my job, and support myself by working on programming projects while focusing on building my dream business. But how do I get my foot in the door on (not "need a small website") software projects without really having a network of connections? I've been working as a programmer/analyst at a large corporation for a few years now, and would consider myself pretty good (honestly ;-) ). However, over the last couple of years I've been getting more and more tired of the stuffy corporate atmosphere... and I have dreams of starting my own business.

I've had a few ideas, but what I found is I just don't have the time to concentrate on them properly... Doing software development after a 10 hour work day into the wee hours of the morning just doesn't work for me :-( So what I want to do is quit my corporate job, pick up freelance software dev projects, and work just enough to support myself - maybe 5 hours a day - while I concentrate on working on my dream.

The only problem is - it looks like it's very hard to get a foot in the door to get software dev projects. Sites like guru.com focus mostly on small websites - my experience is more with enterprise Java apps. So ideally, I'd like to get bigger projects, for either one person or a small team (I have a couple of friends who are in a similar position). But how do I get in the door without having connections?

What's the market for Mac software like?

mpls2 — Wed, 28 May 2008 06:47:40 -0800

What does the market for Mac software look like? I'm researching Mac software development opportunities, and I'm looking for info on the current state of the market (including general articles/statistics and sites of successful indie Mac developers). Also, I'm curious about what others think about how the iPhone, the growth in Mac market share, and the fact/possibility of businesses switching to Mac will drive growth.

I'm especially interested in anecdotes along the lines of "Here's what's happening in my company/university/industry."

Thanks!

Examples of large software systems built with well-known open source components?

mausburger — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:23:47 -0800

Can you think of examples of large or important software systems built with well-known open source components? I could use them in the introduction of a paper that I'm writing. I'm trying to write an paper on "opportunistic software development." (For what it's worth, I didn't coin the term. There was a recent call for articles from IEEE Software magazine on this topic.) It would help bolster my case if I could give some impressive examples.

Opportunistic software development involves grabbing a bunch of components and writing glue or wrapper code to cobble them together, rather than writing everything from scratch. While few systems have been built purely from scratch-- there were function libraries even in the "old" days-- the claim is that this is occurring on a scale not seen before, due in part the availability of open source code. Intuitively, I think this is true, because it's common practice among the graduate students that I see around me. Do you know of any commercial, production systems that either does something interesting, is big, or important that was built using open source code as components.

Bonus points, if there's an article about the system. Don't worry if there isn't, just point me in the right direction and I'll track down a citation. Thanks, Mefites!

Project Manager ain't happy, ain't nobody happy

syzygy — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:42:16 -0800

Good online resources for help with writing procedures and creating flowcharts? One of my main roles in my current job is project manager for a growing team of software developers and testers. The larger my team grows, and the more complex the project grows, the more I feel the need to have some procedures in place.

Right now I need to define a procedure (or set of procedures) that covers issue life cycle for new development and bugs and making daily internal test builds.

I'm having a hard time striking a balance between depth and breadth, on the one side, and readability on the other. I'd like to make sure the guys don't have to read too many different documents, but I also don't want to produce a 100 page document.

I'd also like for the docs that I do make to be well indexed, so everyone knows where to look in order to find out what needs to be done next, and how to do it.

Are there any good online resources that can help me out with this task? Are there any good boilerplate procedures online that I can use as guidelines?

How do you write great help docs?

Palaverist — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:16:09 -0800

What are good resources for improving online help and user documentation? I'm interested in the conceptual side here, not the software tools. What I'm looking for is books, articles or examples that provide guidelines and insight into how to write top-notch software user documentation, including online help and user guides.

Structuring a FOSS Support Contract

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:59:40 -0800

A very successful business has just decided to build their next mission critical application using free open source tools developed by my small little consulting company. They want to contract with us for ongoing support and improvements. How should we structure the deal? Our tools are highly complex and represent decades of development. This isn't something they could duplicate, and it would be difficult for them to find other people to maintain it.

If their product is successful, they will make hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars. This is not an exaggeration.

That said, we don't expect to get rich and don't want to gouge them. I'm more wondering how structure the deal. How do you factor in (a) actual work, (b) guaranteed response time, (c) commitment to keep people around who know how to do this stuff, etc? What's the overall shape, and what details should we include? I'd appreciate any pointers to other similar situations, as well.

By the way, we aren't interested in being acquired. It doesn't make sense for a number of reasons. We want to continue our general consulting and FOSS development, and have this gig be part of our business, helping sustain us.

Explaining how to report a bug

gwint — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 07:44:43 -0800

I'm having a few non-technical people test a webapp. What's the best one pager you've seen that explains the proper way to report a bug to a developer?

How should I continue with my open source web app idea?

Foci for Analysis — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 21:42:54 -0800

I've have this idea for an open source web application project. Currently, there isn't much more than sketches, light research and ideas resulting from my own experiences of using similiar products. I would like to do something real out of this but the scope of the project is far too big for me alone. What should I do next? I've been thinking about involving more people just to get things started. But how do I find passionate coders, designers, security nerds, tech writers, testers, etc? Are there any special sites you would recommend? I don't want to find people who can implement an idea I have, rather, I want to gather a bunch of talented people who togeher figure out the scope and goal of the project and do something fun and useful. I have this vision of eventually turning the project into a startup so that the people involved can get paid (atleast the core team) for their work, but that's far into the future.

My background is in cs/it, so I've a good understanding of software/web development. I'm, however, not really a developer but more of an /interaction design/usability type of person who's curious about most aspects of software development.

Can't we negotiate?

Netzapper — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:34:37 -0800

After only a week or so of job search, I've been offered a software development position at a little startup that does almost exactly what I want to do. Seriously, I cannot imagine a more ideal group to work for. I'm supposed to contact them next week to discuss terms and salary. However, during the interview, some of the statements seemed to imply that they didn't have the budget to satisfy my requested salary. I really want to work for these folks, but don't want to sell myself short. Can you think of creative suggestions I might make during negotiations to make up the difference? This is my first Job, although I have a good deal of non-industrial experience in what I'm doing. I asked for $50k, set a minimum of $40k, and suspect an offer in the low 40's. The benefits aren't great (nor comprehensive), since the company is still so small.

Equity isn't an option at this point. They apparently aren't set up to offer it currently. There was some talk of the possibility of stock options when they go public, but it didn't sound like it would help me pay the bills in the short run.

A friend of mine suggested profit sharing. Since I'd be responsible for a defined, and new, product for them, it seems reasonable that I ask for a percentage of profit made on that until they go public and I can buy into the company.

Any ideas? I don't want to have to walk away just because I couldn't offer alternatives during negotiation. Also, I realize that I may be borrowing trouble, but I just want to have some ideas to offers if it turns out suboptimally.

(And, if you're from the company in question, take this as a sign that I want to work for you and that I'm seeking a mutually beneficial situation.)

Funding Open Source Development

alms — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 11:34:12 -0800

I'm looking for examples of open source projects that were funded in advance by contributions and pledges from interested users. Some associates and I developed an award-winning niche software development tool many years ago. This tool still has a somewhat active user base, although it is no longer being commercially maintained.

We have gotten together and received rights to a portion of the tool, which we have released as open source. We'd now like to update the rest of it, all in open source. To do this, we'll need funding for a handful of people for approximately a year.

We have interest from some users who could fund a significant portion of this. We could approach more of the users directly and/or make a public appeal for fund pledges.

I am looking for models where this has been attempted in the past, both successfully and unsuccessfully.

(Note: we also have a consulting business where we use the tool ourselves. The income from that will partly fund the ongoing development, but we are looking for direct funding as well.)

Success Factors for Iterative Development

sexymofo — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 04:57:32 -0800

What are the success factors in implementing an iterative software development process? What are some of the key ingredients that make an iterative development process successful? What are the corporate culture factors that enable/restrain iterative development? Are there certain team dynamics required for success? Are there signs during the process that predict success or failure? What are the distinguishing characteristics of iterative and agile development? Or are they synonymous?

Alternatives to SourceForge?

knave — Wed, 17 May 2006 14:31:09 -0800

Alternatives to SourceForge? Our open source project has been using SourceForge for project hosting for the past few years. The last 6 months, maybe more, have been real painful. CVS is down a lot, and when it's up, its behavior is quirky (segfaults, missing history, etc.). We're concerned about having all our code stored in an unreliable place.

I noticed there is BerliOS.de, and GNU Savannah. Are there others we should be looking at? Which is the best of them?

What are some good software development/open source blogs?

TunnelArmr — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 10:49:25 -0800

What are the best software development/open source blogs? I'm trying to find the most useful/influential blogs read by the software development community, ranging from really detailed code-level blogs to ones that muse on the general trials and tribulations of the development process. I'm also interested in blogs on open source topics. I've been using all the various searches and indexes, but I have a pretty small list, and my gut tells me that there must be a big blog presence for these kinds of topics. If you're into those topics, what blogs do you read? If you're not, do you know of any that other people read?

and it begins...

devilsbrigade — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 16:35:59 -0800

DevFilter: For those of you who have started large-scale software development projects, what worked during the initial design & framework stages? Did UML->C++ work for the class framework? Was UML remotely worth it (my first instinct is no, but I've never done a project this big before). Other ideas? Things you'd do differently next time?

trac?

lilboo — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 14:33:02 -0800

Is anyone out there using this? How do you like it?

Ethical to markup off-shored services?

Flem Snopes — Fri, 20 May 2005 04:42:20 -0800

My small company has been working on a relatively significant time and materials-based software development project for the past three months. We still have three months more of this to go. At any rate, because we don't have the expertise in house nor do we really have the need to build up a QA area (this is a one off project), we are looking into off-shoring the testing of the application. Is it ethical to markup the offshored hourly tester rates? My partners think it is, but I really can't think of why it would be. More background on this is that we're being paid in the $100/hour range for the architecture, business process engineering, spec and development work. But the offshore tester (in Russia) will be charging us $22-$25 an hour for their services. Because we are getting paid our regular rate to manage the vendor (oversee their development of test cases, help them configure the test bed, do bug triage), I think we should pass through the base cost of the vendor to the client without any markup. Am I a sucker, or are there reasons to justify even a slight (10-15%) markup? The only possible reason I can think of is just having to take on the receivables risk in financing the float, if our client pays late, but seems to me that we could handle that by providing for penalties for late payment. Any advice would be appreciated.

Software Development Methodology

kenaman — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 03:30:15 -0800

Software Development Methodology/Process. I am seeking advice/resources/experiences which could improve a small software company's ability to deliver quality software on time and on budget and the lives of the people who work there. [+] I work for a company which has no defined development process in place. Requirements are scant and often oral, timelines are unrealistic, quality is low, testing sporadic, documentation rare, hours long and morale low. Some feel that it is a lost cause that we will simply continue firefighting until we are engulfed. I am more optomistic and believe that there is an opportunity to improve things which I would like to take. While not strictly within my remit I have been encouraged to look at 'quality'/'process' within the company. I have read about ISO 9000-3, CMM and DSDM and they all sound great but I feel I would benefit from some independent advice from experience on the matter. I don't exactly what question to ask. So I will just ask a few and trust that you can tell me some answers to those and other questions I should have asked.

What have other's experiences of similar situations?
Do you believe change is possible? How can it be achieved?
What methodologies have you see in practice in small (or any size) companies?
How does one translate the ideal of the theory to the reality of a small company finding it's way?

I would really appreciate the help/advice.