Marjan Venema

4,299 reputation

21423

bio	website	bjmsoftware.com
	location	Netherlands
	age	51
visits	member for	2 years, 8 months
	seen	7 hours ago
stats	profile views	454

Software developer since 1985. Started in Cobol, moved via Clipper/VB to Delphi. Delphi developer since 1998. Work(ed) both self-employed and employed.

Questions

When you ask a question, show your effort, provide all the details that will help someone to help you and be precise.

Answers

When you answer a question, don't just paste your code. Your answers will be much better when you explain why your code is doing what it does and how it achieves the asker's goal. It makes it a whole lot easier to follow along. As it is I am much more inclined to up-vote answers that have explanatory text about what the code is doing and why it is written as it is.

Answers that just contain links aren't likely to get an up-vote from me either

	4,299 reputation	bio	website	bjmsoftware.com	visits	member for	2 years, 8 months
21423 badges		location	Netherlands		seen	7 hours ago

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Jul 11	comment	How do you handle bug tracking in a manner friendly to programmers and non-technical staff? Gatekeeper is good solution. But the Gatekeeper may want to use the same bugtracking software to keep track of everything reported to him/her. We have solved that by defined different "projects": "Idea's" where anyone can enter something; "Service desk" where all customer reports come in; ...; and the "Software Suite" which is the list development works from.
Jul 7	comment	Is Displaying Degree In Office Appropriate? You should be proud of your degree, but that in itself is no reason to display it. I think there is more to this than you mention. Ask yourself what reason you really have for even wanting to display it. Are you looking for recognition? A pat on the back for having achieved what you did? If so, why is that important to you? A medical doctor would display his/her degrees perhaps to convince his/her patients that (s)he is qualified to treat them. Are you trying to convince visiting customers of your competency? Why? Wouldn't they simply assume that you are competent because you were hired?
Jul 7	comment	How do you test software that is time sensitive? if you have software installed with a(n evaluation) license for a limited time, tinkering with the clock may trigger them to block their execution.
Jul 3	comment	Comparing one's self to others during interviews +1 for interviewing the employer as well. It's a two-way street...
Jun 26	comment	How can a code editor effectively hint at code nesting level - without using indentation? I have no real answer for you, just opinion. Looking at your examples, B is my preferred choice. It stands out for me because the "heatmap" actually follows the indenting instead of mirroring it like the first example and C do. A also follows the actual indenting, but B is more like what you would see when the actual xml would be indented. The second example is simply too "solid" for my liking.
Jun 24	comment	Is it illegal to rewrite every line of an open source project in a slightly different way, and use it in a closed source project? I wish I could give you +10...
Jun 23	awarded	Critic
Jun 21	comment	Is there any language specific comparison tool? Just try it, it has a free evaluation period. I can assure you it is aware of the importance of begin/end/function/procedure/etc keywords for Delphi and many other languages. And if it isn't aware of your language now, you can tell it what is important in your language. Just study the settings for any other language to see what can be done.
Jun 20	comment	What are some good questions (and good/bad answers) to ask at an interview to gauge the competency of the company/team? Don't ask whether they use NUnit or MbUnit, ask what framework they use. In general: always ask open questions that start with "what", "which", "where", "how", etc. It's what every interviewer should do and thus what you should do when interviewing the company / employees of the company to find out whether you want to work there. It makes for generally much more interesting answers! Closed question will just give you "yes" or "no" without any additional information that you can use to assess the other side.
Jun 18	answered	Is there any language specific comparison tool?
Jun 16	comment	Going about increasing salary during performance review @Matt: :-) good on you! And if I were to put a monetary value on freedom (self-control) and happiness I'd say you are earning at least 10 times more than what you earned before !
Jun 16	comment	Logging, do you do it? @Crazy Eddie: and after a while you would find that you cannot keep all those verbosity levels straight in your head and will start to whittle them down... We have actually done away with the verbosity levels. Instead we use several focused logs: Configuration/Customisation (our services are highly configurable and without info on what classes/data they use and load, we have no hope of interpreting user reports and/or knowing what is going on), User activity, Errors, (Execution) Statistics, Service (for our Windows services apps), General and Debug (!)
Jun 15	comment	Going about increasing salary during performance review @Matt: what you earned before is a fair indication of what you earn now and usually it will not be less than what you earned before... @Renesis: "grounds for termination?" my golly... what are they afraid of? That people will find out that their salary policies are completely willy nilly?
Jun 15	comment	Going about increasing salary during performance review @Jeff O: Companies requiring employees not to discuss their saleries are living in a dream... Apart from the wheather, salary is amongst the most discussed topics in any company, regardless of whatever rules the company may have come up with to prevent employees from comparing what the company is prepared to hand out to whom.
Jun 10	answered	What happened to Borland Delphi?
Jun 9	comment	How can you filter out irritable programmers in interviews? no. Problems are never solved by avoiding them. In case of "I can never be wrong" a good talking to has my blessing. If that repeatedly doesn't help, dismissal comes into view. In case of unwarranted lack of confidence: make sure feedback doesn't take the form of "bashing" (for anybody) and get the low-confidence person a coach to help them deal with feedback. You would be supprised what a little attention can do and how much productivity you c/would then get from someone.
Jun 9	comment	Babysitting your Continuous Integration System Anyone who breaks the build is to get coffee / cake / whatever your team's preferred candy for everybody. Or get coffee for everybody all day long, or... There are many measures you can come up with that make breaking the build unwelcome, while not being so threatening as to get people to avoid submitting. The latter can also be somewhat addressed by requiring everybody to at least submit their changes once a week. (Once a day is too often when working on something more substantial.)
Jun 9	comment	How can you filter out irritable programmers in interviews? A good talking to can do more harm than good, depending on where the "touchiness" is coming from. Two extremes of the scale: unwarranted believe in one's own abilites leading to "I can never be wrong"; unwarranted lack of confidence and seeing every criticism as a threat or a prelude to dismissal. Find out where the person sits on this scale before "the talking to"...
Jun 8	comment	From a design perspective, what are the best practices for logging? thanks!
Jun 8	comment	From a design perspective, what are the best practices for logging? It sounds very interesting, but I have reservations about what you would be able to log and how informational the log would be (ie more than "just" instrumentation of methods). Would love to see a working example of this approach to see what can and cannot be done. Especially as I am just starting out on a new app and would like to see where / how far I could carry this.