Marjan Venema

4,334 reputation

21423

bio	website	bjmsoftware.com
	location	Netherlands
	age	51
visits	member for	2 years, 8 months
	seen	4 hours ago
stats	profile views	456

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

Other

Obligatory link whenever someone thinks they are improving security by imposing all sorts of rules on password composition: Password strength

	4,334 reputation	bio	website	bjmsoftware.com	visits	member for	2 years, 8 months
21423 badges		location	Netherlands		seen	4 hours ago

summary answers questions tags badges favorites bounties reputation activity

398 Comments

suggestions reviews revisions comments badges posts accepts all

May 28	comment	What is the best retort to “premature optimization is the root of all evil” Just an interesting tidbit: even the original "money is..." is being misquoted. In the original the money wasn't equated with the root of all evil, but being at the root of all evil... In other words: evil and money often go together, but are not the same thing...
May 25	comment	How often do you review and validate your practices/process? @Martin: Yes, almost, we have got plenty of challenges left :-) However, I do indeed count myself very very lucky to be working where I am. It took me long enough to find them: approximately 21 years in software development to find the company that is an almost exact match to what I find important in a job/employer/team... :-) (btw it is not the company listed in my profile, that's my to-the-side business).
May 25	comment	How often do you review and validate your practices/process? @dietbuddha: I guess we switch continually between macro and micro. The interaction between development (developers/testers) and non-developers (support, speccers, consultants) is quite direct. One of our developers is 50% developer and coordinates the support team in the other 50%... These dual roles certainly help to keep a broad perspective. Of course our overall manager has weekly progress meetings with the coordinators of our development, qa, and support teams. Though they are focused on progress of a release's development, I am sure that processes and performance come up when needed.
May 24	comment	Best representation for relative dates & durations @philnext: sorry, no documentation, unless you count the FogBugz and Jira manuals. You should be able to find them at their respective sites? fogbugz.com and atlassian.com for Jira.
May 23	comment	Can non-technical staff gather requirements on behalf of the development team? @Péter: yes, answering on StackOverflow is like people speaking simultaneously. You only hear what someone else has said after they said it and you have stopped speaking (answering) yourself (or load new answers). It would be nice to get an indication that somebody is typing, like you do in a chat session, but I guess that would be asking too much of the StackOverflow servers... :-)
May 22	comment	How to handle workload in a better way +1 it is never bad to ask for help (especially as an inexperienced beginner), it is always a waste to fail not having asked for help at all.
May 22	comment	How do you explain to an “agile” team that they still need to plan the software they write? +1 very interested in how people solve this in a pragmatic way that lets you take advante of the best both waterfall and agile have to offer. By the way: agile does not equal "no design", but design does tend to be the first victim in the relentless cycle of sprints...
May 20	comment	Why are there multiple Unicode encodings? @TRiG: That's why I edited my statement to be specifically about Ansi code pages. Must have done that before you refreshed...
May 20	comment	Why are there multiple Unicode encodings? @MSalters: you are absolutely right. EBCDIC is different (and there are others EBCDIC). I guess that my mainframe days are so long behind me that I didn't remember, or I have repressed these memories too hard and too long... :-)
May 19	comment	Best practices concerning exit in Delphi To the disadvantages I would add that if exit is used as anything but "early exit guard clause"'s, multiple exit points increase complexity and make it less obvious under what conditions code further down a method is executed, because to it may look unconditional as it is not indented...
May 17	comment	Why almost no webpages hash passwords in the client before submitting (and hashing them again on the server), as to “protect” against password reuse? When you are quoting the original poster, please format the text as such (select the text and use the quote icon just above the editor)
May 12	comment	Default vs Impl when implementing interfaces in Java @Gary: prefixing interface types with I is a well-established convention in the Delphi language. In Delphi class types are prefixed with T. So we would have an IOrder interface and a TOrder default implementation with TSomethingOrder and TBullMarketOrder as specific implementations.
May 9	comment	What Special characters should one allow for a Phone Number? It would help to show the use of the brackets in your examples. International numbers often use them to enclose the leading zero of the area code to indicate that you do not dial it when calling from abroad. E.g. `+31 (0)30 1234567` where 31 is the Netherlands, 030 is the area code and 1234567 is the subscriber.
May 9	comment	What Special characters should one allow for a Phone Number? You are forgetting the \+ sign for international access
May 7	comment	Am I competing with a client? is it fair? @Martin: true. The only realistic way would be to delete all ClientA's code from all the company's assets. If they continue to help maintain their version of the platform, they have to do it at the client's premises, on their computers. That may be difficult as I take it that they are in different countries, though they could perhaps involve a third party in the same country as clide313 that could provide the "off-site"-ness for work on ClientA's code. No matter what though, unless there is a clean break with ClientA or not taking on ClientB, they will be walking on egg-shells.
May 7	comment	Am I competing with a client? is it fair? Check with a lawyer, but if you did the work under a work for hire clause, you will certainly not be allowed to reuse the code. What knowledge you gained in doing so is yours to reuse. If you are going to accommodate ClientB , I would make very sure that all copies of ClientA's source are not accesible in any way, shape or form to the team that will work for ClientB and that no-one works for both clients. If you don't it will become incredibly more difficult to prove there was no breach of contract with ClientA if/when ClientA suspects their code has been illegally re-used and sues you.
May 6	comment	What does Dijkstra mean when he recommends an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue? If "Some say that all the thinking we do is confined to our primary language" is true, then my native language is not (no longer) my primary language? Com'on. My native and primary language is Dutch, but my thinking language while programming is English... And not only because most of the terminology and almost all articles that help me think about programming challenges are in English. In fact, I find it hard to work a computer that talks Dutch at/to me, can't find anything and rely havily on menu location of things. (Another reason why personalized menu's suck).
May 3	comment	Proving Yourself "But when it comes to the concepts derived from Computer Science, ..., it's the computer scientists who really shine" My mileage differs. :-) I have found that its the computer scientists who get bogged down in something akin to "Architecture Astronaut" syndrom and its the more practical/pragmatic non-computer scientists who get the results, using whatever (non-)computer scientists before them have discovered/designed/written about.
Apr 30	comment	Implications of crediting a book source in a code file available under an open license -) (...and all this to avoid 15 character limit...)
Apr 30	comment	Implications of crediting a book source in a code file available under an open license Ehh, he's not writing a book, but using code from books in an open source project...?