Usually, with the experience comes the “knowing your shit” and you’ve been doing this for a while.
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As much as they’re trying to get a feel for how the team is doing, it’s hard not to take it a bit personally as the Scrum Master.
We are fortunate to have been doing this for 75 sprints with me as SM for 50 of them. If we were doing something very wrong I doubt we’d have got this far.
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Funnily enough he asked me what I thought “technical debt” meant. Glad we had that conversation. 
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That’s what we’re here for 
PS: and games. Of course.
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Pretty sure I did sound for them once.
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we have a continuous integration tool. It’s CI and deployment, all together. You can build complicated configs with schedules, and stages, and tests, and pretty much whatever else. We have a simple one for one service. Just build, deploy to the RC tier, let it run a little bit, and then promote to prod. (I think that can only happen on certain days, but whatever). For free, (meaning, you have to write code to make it stop) you get some checks on the process. One of them is that if production job is unhealthy, it will not deploy. so we had a bug in a version a while ago, that causes the listener to crash after handling certain requests. Volume is low enough that this isn’t an issue, because the restart is fast. But, because there’s a crashloop in production, we can’t replace the broken build with the new one, using the automatic pipeline. Someone has to go poke it with a stick, in this case weeks after the breakage (because it wasn’t broken enough to alert on anything we care about), because the package is too old.
this is an intentional design, and it strikes me as insane. “you broke your stuff, and instead of letting you use the awesome automation to fix it, you have to get a human involved.” In this case, the thing that broke wasn’t even ours, it’s in a framework, and we got the new version (because that’s how ci works!), and borked us.
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merchant bankers doing punk covers?
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I really like java. It’s my job and I still enjoy writing code in it. Except one thing.
@SuppressWarnings( "unchecked" )
public static <T extends SomeObject> Class<? extends SomeGeneric<T>> getSomeGenericClass( Class<T> clazz ){
SomeGeneric<T> ref = new SomeGeneric<>( clazz);
return (Class<SomeGeneric<T>>) ref.getClass();
}
There is no way that I know of to get this generic-generic class object without an unchecked cast. Sure java has other shortcomings, but it hurts that this has been a problem since they introduced generics like 15+ years ago.
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The agile coach has just asked me if I’d run a workshop on metric collection for all the other agile teams.
Maybe I’ll add “agile coach” to my CV.
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Well, sounds like you should ask for a raise due to “additional responsibility” as “head scrummaster”
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We had refinement today, and most of it was spent redistributing responsibilities from a colleague who will not be working for a few weeks due to health problems. Agile is all fun and games until someone has a highly specialized skill-set that is not easily taught to everyone and also not always needed (infrastructure stuff like application servers are rarely touched on a project but we’re in the process of upgrading the software infrastructure…). In any case I inherited one of the yuckier tickets because I worked on the topic for a couple weeks a year ago while that colleague was on vacation. Meh.
On the other hand, as we played a few rounds of planning poker on some other tickets, I got to explain certain domain specific details to our new colleague which is immensely cool because I’ve only been there for a year and this is kind of the first time I was able to tackle a bigger topic like that
Also, it turns out all the tickets we were looking up were on the smaller side and after I jokingly said that I would half my estimates if our “architect” (simply the person who has been there longest) told us the class that would be the starting point for the ticket, everyone was quite happy and it worked wonders on us realizing how small some of these issues were.
Another side effect was that when looking at the classes in question it happened 2 times (!) that the architect then said “Uhm, I changed the line, I am not going to delete it, assign me the ticket and I will push the changes after lunch.” Oops
We had a good refinement today!
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This may be an actually “make your life easier” thing.
On German blog Netzpolitik.org I saw a link to a new Firefox Addon Nervenschoner – Holen Sie sich diese Erweiterung für 🦊 Firefox (de) made by Verbraucherzentrale Bayern. It removes cookie banners. Based on uBlock Origin apparently. Seems to work for me so far. As I am an avid cookie deleter, I get banners every time I open a website that I haven’t white or grey-listed, but no more! Maybe you all solved this in other ways… but Netzpolitik is one of the few sites I trust on these issues. “Nervenschoner” translates to “nerve conservator”
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My boss’s boss asked me to contribute some slides for a presentation we’d then be giving at a conference next week.
Slides were submitted, reviewed and reworked last week. “All good” I thought.
This morning I went to double check something I’d written on a slide and found that all my slides had been removed from the pack and my name removed from the list of speakers.
What a nice way to be uninvited.
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My company has been nominated for two awards.
The awards ceremony is a prestigious black tie event.
£4000 a table to attend.
I’ve also found out who nominated the company.
It was our Director.
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Many years ago I subscribed to The Economist, and this got me onto a bunch of junk-mail lists. One offer was to be listed in a Directory of Terribly Important International Businessmen. (I was a student at the time.) On closer examination, it seemed that the main qualification for being listed was the willingness to pay £100-£1,000 for a listing. And it occurred to me that there might be a lot of people who would find a book of the names and addresses of people willing to do that very useful…
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Twitter is an absolute shitshow at the moment but I did find this exchange between EM and a Twitter dev kind of interesting because I see parallels with my current project with regards to tech. debt and new features.
Shame that it seems like EM publicly fired the guy after this exchange.
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I’m kinda surprised Tim Cook didn’t stick his head in there and tell Elon to just buy an iPhone.
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I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the original question was not being asked in good faith…
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I guess, also, it seems to me that Elon was going to fire him regardless of what he said, which basically makes this a bit of airing dirty laundry in public, which is just… the opposite of classy.
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The number of armchair software engineers in the replies agreeing with EM is … enraging.
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