Groove Salad plays constantly on all the Nest devices through my from morning to night.

In the very first real programmer job that had, back in 1986, the IT department estimated that they had a 51 man-year backlog of development work. That would have translated to two or three calendar years of work. Probably more, considering how crappy estimates always are, and the always under-estimate.

It turns out that this is pretty much the industry standard. Virtually ever place I worked for the next 35 years had a similar size of backlog. And that backlog isn’t standing still, either. All you can hope is that 3 more years worth of new requests don’t come in during the two years it takes to complete what you already have.

Some of those new things are going to have a higher priority than stuff that’s already in the backlog. The reality is that some item that’s down at the low end of the list is going to get bumped down, again and again, and never get done. Or it’s going to someday become an urgent priority that can’t wait any more.

So the pressure is always intense for the developers to go faster, faster, faster. And the business doesn’t understand or care about good engineering practices, even though the shit hits the fan when a critical bug gets released to production. And God help you if that backlog of 51 man-years has grown to 70 after a year because of the technical debt you introduced trying to go faster.

The fight to rein in scope is constant. At that first job, the head of the department told us, “to build Volkswagens, not Cadillacs”. It was laughable, because they were struggling to keep up while building Skodas.

You can’t just add more programmers because the productive backbone of the development team is a group of programmers that have all been there for at least 5 years and they are domain experts. It’s going take at least 5 years to bring new hires up to that level of knowledge.

And that’s all three sides of the project triangle: scope/quality, resources and time. You can’t meaningfully add resources, scope’s already stripped down to bare bones and the time is too long.

And the truth is that every one of those projects in that 51 man-years backlog is important, even critical, to some aspect of the business. But the development process is unfathomable to muggles, so can’t you just go faster? Can’t you wring a bit more productivity out of those domain experts?

“My nipples explode with orgasmic delight”.

Except I’m not actually talking about spelling, per se, but about attention to detail. Spelling errors in a resume is just sloppy rubbish.

As an IT/Development manager, I only had one role that I hired for where the skills for getting the job matched the skills for doing the job: Business Analyst. Not job entailed presenting information clearly, both written and verbally. So I expected the resume and cover letter to be organized and clear.

Programmers, on the other hand, I wouldn’t expect the same level of polish. But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count – a lot.

A lot of the people that applied, and that I hired, did not have English as a first language. So I gave a lot of latitude with regard to word selection and grammar. But not spelling. Use a goofy word or two, but spell them right.

I figured that most people were highly motivated when writing a resume – about an motivated on you can get. And if not level of motivation cannot get you to take care, then you’ll just be a bug creation machine if I let you touch my codebase.

Proper pickled onions and Branston pickle.

Bob’s Red Mill makes an adequate substitute. It’s not as uniform as McCann, but it is good.

Take a look at this:

This is in the Museum of the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome, and it comes from an ancient Roman Villa in Rome. Probably painted in the first or second century CE. There’s walls of this stuff in the museum.

It’s not realism, but minimalistic sketches that, in many ways, outdo realism in artistic quality. To me, this looks more like something that you might find in Leonardo’s sketchbook than on the wall of on ancient Roman Villa from 1200 years earlier.

This is true, but…

Moore’s Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore’s Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.

So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore’s Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.

You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.

And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80’s which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.

Same curve.

Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.

The implication of, “That’s not Moore’s Law”, is that the observation isn’t valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.

Even if you’re technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.

Why aren’t we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren’t we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.

While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it’s actually more important/interesting than Moore’s Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.

Actually…yes. At least for the “war criminal”. I think the point is that you can’t hide your inner feelings from the feather. So if you genuinely, in the deepest depths of your heart, have no qualms about bombing civilians then you’re fine.

I think this points out the fundamental relativistic nature of morality and how the feather copes with it. Everyone has some sort of moral compass, and the feather measures how true you were to it. And really, what more can you ask of anyone? Decide, for yourself, what is right and what is wrong and stick to it.

Putting aside the fact that a toddler probably lacks the intellectual or emotional development to have a truely personal morality, I cannot imagine that someone who “broods” all their life over kicking a kitten when they were three is anything other than the nicest most moral person you’ll ever meet. I don’t think that have any trouble with Anubis and Thoth.

I wonder how depressed Giorgio Tsoukalos’s dog is???

Anubis and Thoth weighing the heart of the dead to see if it is as light as a feather before letting them into the afterlife.

I love the idea that there’s no “do this, do that”, or a concrete set of rules or commandments. But the idea that if you can look back on your life, and if your heart isn’t weighed down with the burden of all of the things that you did that know we’re just wrong…then you can go on to the afterlife.

It’s just no much more of a reasonable, adult approach to morality.

It’s just a modern version of “Fuzzy Logic”

I’m not sure if traffic is “convenience” at this point. At least where I live, it’s a nearly essential piece of functionality.

In fact, for local driving it’s often the only reason to use a map app. I already know how to get to most of the places I want to go, I just need to know the best route to avoid traffic now.

Thank God somebody got it.

“Intercourse!”

In a way, this question itself is very “un-agile”. Agile should be always forward-looking, “What can we do next?”, “What can we get done in this short period of time?”, “What should we do next?”.

OK, so you found a possible “defect” in your system. Is it a defect, or did someone slide in a requirements change 3 months ago?

This reminds me of playing chess. Sometimes a player will make their move when their opponent is distracted. The opponent hears, “Your turn”, and they look at the board. “Which piece did you move?”. The first player just shrugs.

The point is that you shouldn’t need to know which piece just moved. Every chess position is a “state” of its own, and your best move should depend on going forward from that state, not knowing how the board changed recently.

It’s the same thing here. You have a situation. Does it really matter how, when, who or why it happened? It shouldn’t, and here’s why:

Just because it’s a defect (if it is) doesn’t automatically mean that correcting it moves to the top of your “to do” list.

It’s going to take some non-zero amount of time to change it back to blue. And when you’re doing that, you’re not doing something else. There is always an opportunity cost to doing bug fixes and you shouldn’t treat them in an ad-hoc way. Should you be spending that time, and who gets to decide if you do? It’s not your decision. It’s the PO’s decision to make.

Maybe the PO doesn’t care about the colour. Maybe they do care, but not if it means some other feature gets delayed. Maybe it’s the most important aspect of the whole system, and there’s no way you can launch with it green. So you cancel the current Sprint and start a new one dedicated to fixing this defect! Maybe they regret asking for it to be blue, and now they’re happy that it’s now green.

If it was me, I’d get a quick T-shirt size estimate on the work required to change it back to blue, then put it in the Product Backlog to be reviewed with the PO. Maybe have a quick chat with the PO, or send a memo about it. Maybe the PO will need to check with their SME to see if anyone remembers asking for it to be changed to green. Maybe not. In any event, it either makes its way into a Sprint Backlog or it doesn’t.

Also, if you’re doing Agile right, then your clients are getting constant, hands-on, experience with your system as it is being developed. To go 100 days without some kind of “release” that they can play with and give you feedback is an anti-pattern. If you are giving them the latest version every week or two and after almost three months they haven’t noticed that the footer is green, then it’s probably not important.

On to the actual question. Jira is a potential sand trap of administrative complexity. The answer is usually to keep everything smaller. Smaller features, and smaller Sprints. Smaller teams. A team of 5 or 6, working in one week Sprints, can only do so much per Sprint. If your fundamental unit of work - a story, or a feature, or a ticket - is set to take something like 1/2 day and forms the basis of your Sprint Backlog, then each programmer on the team can do at most 10 SB items (in a perfect world). Depending on the composition of your teams, you’re probably going to have only about 3-4 programmers - which means 30-40 tickets per Sprint Backlog. And that’s a blue-sky number that’s practically impossible in a world with meetings. A team of 5 or 6 is going to complete closer to 20 Sprint Backlog items in 1 week Sprint in the real world.

The point being that 14 Sprints is your 100 days and each Sprint has about 20 easy-to-understand items in it. Whatever your management tools, it’s a failure if you can’t locate those 280 features in a matter of seconds. And it should be easy to eliminate 270 of them as not possible places where the change happened just from the description.

And when those SB items are small, as they should be, it’s not an onerous task to document inside them the requirements that they are supposed to meet.

When you have 1 month Sprints with tickets that take 2 weeks to complete, then everything becomes a nightmare. It becomes a nightmare because it’s virtually impossible to impose some kind of consistent organizational structure internally on free-form stuff that big. But it’s almost trivial to do it with tiny tickets.

And the other thing that happens with big tickets is that there’s tons of stuff that programmers do without thinking about it too much. If you’ve got two weeks to finish something, then there’s a ton of latitude to over-reach and the time estimate was just a wild guess anyways. If you have 3 hours to do something, then you’re going to make sure that what you need to do is clearly laid out - and then you have to stick to it or you won’t get done in time.

Did somebody “fix” the inconsistent footer colour while doing some huge, 2 week, ticket? Good luck finding out. But that’s not going to happen with tiny, well documented tickets.

Many, many years ago I used to have two Wyse50 terminals, running split screens each with two parts. I did a lot of support on remote systems (via modem!) and I would have a session on a customer system, source code and running on our test system and internal stuff. I didn’t have space for a third terminal.

At another job I had an office with a “U” shaped desk. I would spread printouts across half the “U” and swivel around between the computer and the printouts.

My first experience with this food was in Halifax decades ago. The Halifax Donair is a unique thing.

And it’s definitely Donair, not Doner.

Technically, he would have three drives and only two drives of data. So he could move 1/3 of the data off each of the two drives onto the third and then start off with RAID 5 across the remaining 1/3 of each drive.