About gaman

Author Archive | gaman

How to Get Your First Programming Job

By on November 10, 2007 in

You’ve completed high school with high grades, attended a mid-tier college, and all the sudden you set foot out into the world awaiting to land your first programming job. You know everyone is going to be dying to hire you for a programming job the second you get that diploma, right? That’s what every counselor has ever told you said.

The media published numbers about how easy getting a programming job is. You go into the phase of submitting your resume to not only one, but possibly as many as three programming employers of your choosing, knowing you’ll have the cherry pick of the programming offers when it comes to your first job.

Read full story • Comments { 1 }

Creating Software On A Tight Deadline

By on November 9, 2007 in

Making a software deadline can be one of the most stressful experiences for software developers and programmers. As the project progresses ever closer to a release deadline or phase deadline, there are many challenges. All the sudden smooth sailing is cast into stormy weather from unexpected bugs or major project changes in art or mechanics.

Part of creating software on a tight deadline is normal and natural, as many programmers do their best work when pressure gets laid on. Another part of deadlines is abnormal and results from market conditions and investment pressures.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

What Software Products Are Hot?

By on November 7, 2007 in

Hot software changes all the time. Software popularity reflects the desires of the user driven software marketplace and is subject to change frequently and often the hottest trends change rapidly as well. Identifying what software is hot can help a developer pick projects that are leading the market in terms of downloads and purchases. To get hot on the trail to making popular software, we’ll begin with a run down of some of the hottest categories of software.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

Quality Assurance – Is My Software Program Ready to Ship?

By on November 4, 2007 in ,

Before any program ships, software developers need to invest substantial time in quality assurance. Quality assurance is the aspect of software design that revolves around taking something presumed to be working just fine and hammering away using quality techniques to try and break the program. Only after a thorough and exhaustive search can quality assurance individuals release their approval.

In the world of hardware design and electronics, quality assurance is indicated by little white dot stickers that read “QA by:” and are usually stamped with either initials or an associate id number. A failure to conduct thorough quality assurance in hardware projects can ultimately cost lives from glaring defects that cause overheating or strangulation hazards.

Read full story • Comments { 1 }

How to Find Software Programming Resources

By on November 3, 2007 in

Finding software programming resources is almost easy. It would be entirely easy to find software resources if not for the plethora of programming related material littering the shelves of bookstores and overcrowded internet software resource search results. As a programmer, whether you are new or experienced, there will be times that you need to find resources to help you master new and complicated programming challenges.

There are many types of software programming resources including language-specific books, software marketing guides, API library resources, online communities, open source applications, the public domain, on down to energy drinks. This article will focus on several of the various types of software programming resources as well as how to isolate resources that are helpful to various unique software programming needs.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

Finding Software Ideas Hidden In The Public Domain

By on October 31, 2007 in

There are millions of software applications, and thousands of new programs are released every day. Many of these software programs will never be successful for one simple reason. They lack originality. Now, what is original to a modern computer software user is not necessarily the same as what is historically original.

In fact, many of the best software ideas that mankind has come up with occurred decades if not centuries ago. Take for example chess. Chess is a public domain game that has resurfaced in countless software renditions, two of the most popular are the ChessMaster series and the online Yahoo Chess java game.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

Easy Help files – Writing Documentation People Can Actually Read

By on October 27, 2007 in

If the world’s population was shrunk to one hundred people, ten years ago only one would have owned a computer. Nowadays, at least four would. Guess what? Only one of those hundred would have a college education during either time frame. Despite this, help files for software are generally atrocious and fail to be easy to read by the majority of software users.

While an easy help file for a CAD program may never exist, why should help files for a simple program like webmail be so amazingly hard to read for the average user? There are many steps that can be taken to help make help files easy. These can range from content flow and intuitive interfaces to simplified wording and grammar.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

Tips on Providing Good Customer Service and Support For Your Software

By on October 26, 2007 in

Providing good customer support and service is the goal of many businesses. Yet, despite this, for some reason, a large number of businesses, especially big businesses, fall short. So short that many customers bounce back and forth just trying to find a pleasant service and support voice. The focus of this article is to address tips and techniques for giving good customer service and support.

Before we detail on individual strategies, an overview of the general types of service and support is necessary so that we can focus on how to improve on these areas and make our customers feel good. The major spheres of customer service and support revolve around product documentation, question answering service, sales support staff, and dispute resolution services.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

What Are Your options For Customer Service and Support

By on October 25, 2007 in

When it comes to product life cycle, only one thing is sure to either benefit or hurt any software – service and support. Regardless of how intuitive and simple a developer believes a program to be, there will be an astounding proportion of users unable to successfully navigate software without the help of customer service and supplemental support options.

Beginning with supplemental support, the options include interactive tutorials, support documentation in the form of help files, support forums and online communities, and live technical support. Finishing with service, customer service is integral from making the sell to keeping customers so well serviced that they continue using your product.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

How Software With Embedded Digital Rights Management (DRM) Is Regarded

By on October 23, 2007 in

Embedding DRM software into files can be a very effective way at controlling the distribution and unauthorized usage of material. DRM works by assigning ownership, which is authenticated by the host equipment. It’s become very popular in usage over the last few years, although DRM is generally ill-received by the end users.

This unpopularity of DRM software results from a very generalized mentality that why should something cost more and work less? It is this paradox that makes DRM software so controversial. According to a recent press release by Sony music, trying to circumvent DRM software measures is equivocal to stealing.

Read full story • Comments { 0 }