Korthrun

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I want to add: 2-3 sprints ahead is a GREAT begining goal for a team trying to get started with Agile.

Long term though let’s set that bar higher :D

I do greatly appreciate my management and general company tech culture, they’re great.

I agree with your stance here, because it’s part of my point. I tend to see more people bitching about Agile itself and not management or their particular implementation.

The jobs where I was only given enough info to plan 2 - 4 weeks out were so stressful because I frequently felt like I was guessing at which work was important or even actually relevant. Hated it.

Turns out it’s a skill issue ;p (on the management level to be clear). Folks, don’t let your lazy managers ruin you on a system that can be perfectly fine if done right.

2-3 sprints?! Y’all really flying by the seat of your pants out here huh?

My teammates and I have no trouble planning multiple quarters in advance. If something crops up like some company wide security initiative, or an impactful bug needing fixed, etc then the related work is planned and then gets inserted ahead of some of the previously planned things and that’s fine because we’re “agile”.

I delivered a thing at the end of Q3 when we planned to deliver at the start of Q3? Nobody is surprised because when the interruptions came leadership had to choose which things get pushed back.

I love it. I get clear expectations set in regards to both the “when” and the “what”, and every delay/reprioritization that isn’t just someone slacking was chosen by management.

Hot metal + arm = Smiley Face

Configuration management and build automation are definitely worth the time and effort of learning. It doesn’t have to be ansible, find which tool suits your needs.

I also have a small domain that is relatively low traffic. A lot of the “all in one” software on the list you linked looks pretty cool, I can’t deny.

What I found is that I make very few changes. I used to add mailbox aliases fairly often, but the fact is there are only two users and enabling the “+” syntax in addresses put a stop to me needing to make new aliases when I wanted a new address.

I just don’t feel like I need a management interface. Because of this I’ve just sort of frankensteined my own setup together and I love it. It operates how I expect it to, and enforces the standards I care about to the extent that I desire (e.g. which SPF result codes am I ok accepting?).

• Postfix as SMTP/Submission server. I chose to go w/PAM based for outbound SMTP auth.
• Courier for IMAPS
• Dovecot for LDA (sieve is delightful)
• Snappymail for webmail (served by apache httpd)

Bonus tip: Many distros make this info available on the cli by including a “hier” man page that you can read using the command “man hier”.

Bouncing around between two for the most part.

I’m mostly playing Guild Wars 2, enjoying saving the world from demonic invasion in what has so far been a pretty great expansion IMO and I am a bit of a hoor for some of the new cosmetics.

When I need a break from the rough grind, I jump into a super duper rough grind by firing up ol Leaf Blower Revolution. Idle game my ass, I’m clicking more than 5 cookie clicker players combined! There are still leaves everywhere!

It’s not “apart” at all. One person saying “yes” in a sea of "no"s still answers the question “Does anyone else”.

Anyone who has answered “No” is either wrong or is not answering the question “Does anyone else find street performers particularly annoying?”. They’re answering a question they imagine they were asked which is “Do YOU dear %USERNAME%, in particular, also find street performers particularly annoying?”

If 10,000 people respond to a super broad “Does anyone else” question and 9,999 of them are “no” and 1 is “yes” then you have 9,999 people who have provided an incorrect answer. More likely they’re just answering the question they wished they were asked though.

Pretty sure that’s what goforliftoff@lemm.ee is on about and why I felt your response to their comment warranted my unsolicited explanation.

There are plenty of good shows I’ve seen from street performers. Just stay out of the thoroughfare and don’t harass people and we’ll be fine. There are certainly a lot of talent-less fuck wit archetypes I could come up with though. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• Teenager who just discovered contact juggling
• Hipster on a unicycle who makes his own mustache wax. No juggling, no nothing, just a dude with a very groomed mustache
• Burn out who thinks if you replace metal riffs with minor chords they’re excellent soulful ballads
• Concerningly skinny geek doing geek shit. Like actual geeks, not mislabeled nerds
• College age stoner who thinks that people want to watch him play hacky sack
• Raver trying to justify their light up hula hoop purchases by performing for sober people while no music is playing

I hate most of the musicians too. I think that there is a pretty wide variety of reasons that the world would benefit from greater education in music. It won’t be for everybody, but neither is trigonometry and that’s pretty common in education curriculums.

The bar is extremely fucking low here. People are just way too easily impressed by someone being able to play an instrument at ALL. They can’t tell when a multi-stringed instrument is out of tune (and neither can the fucking busker), and they certainly can’t pick out the good from the bad.

Then you get these goddamn mediocre as shit buskers all chuffed up on their Dunning-Kruger high. I imagine the thought is something like: “People clapped and cheered, there’s money in my hat. I must be amazing at this!”. I am completely fucking unimpressed by your ability to play three simple chords on your dollar store toy piano while absolutely disrespecting a Johnny Cash cover of a NiN song.

Your human experience is not so unique that you are literally the only human being bothered by these particular types of street performers.

I think this comment is less about answering your question and is more about how asinine this very common framing of “Does anyone else …” is. Statistically speaking: “Yes”. It almost doesn’t matter what comes after “Does anyone else”. The difference between “Do any of you in this chat room also like blue?” and “Does anyone else like blue?” is huge.

Posing this sort of question online without great specificity or audience restriction is almost always going to result in the response “Yes”.

There are so many ways to phrase this question and start this conversation, it’s wild that the equivalent of “Am I literally the only currently living human being with this experience” is the current “go-to” in the English speaking world :p

I don’t feel guilty about the things I do to make myself happy or to make time spent more enjoyable. I know that’s not really in the spirit of your question, but I think it’s an important statement to make. Yes, I do understand the term “guilty pleasure”, I just think it’s a bad phrasing.

Some things that I do not feel guilty about:

• Having a bong hit with my afternoon tea
• Taking a break from work, socializing, or gaming to play some guitar
• Whatever is happening on my second monitor.
  • Buffy while working? Yes.
  • Psych? Yes.
  • MUDding? 100% this mud all the time.
  • Cat pics on discord? Fuck. Yes.
• Browsing pictures of Panko the dog.

Good job getting the fuck out, that place sounds full to the brim with batshit insane management.

no one talks

met with deafening silence

This reminds me of children who will get their toothbrush wet, put a little paste on their tongue so it smells like mint, run the water for 2 minutes, but not actually brush their teeth. You know, because they don’t want to, and/or they don’t understand the point.

They just know that the parents say they need to do this thing, and they’d rather be off playing. You’re standing there for two minutes holding a wet toothbrush and staring at yourself in the mirror. Why not just brush your teeth?

I get it, they’re very busy. They’re already gonna be on the call for 15 minutes. Just participate ya know. Why choose to make that 15 minutes a complete waste? I expect the above from a child, not people with jobs in tech =/

It IS a great place to work, and I absolutely hate that 20 years ago I post under this handle on stuff like “Ubersite” about how “We should stop saying ‘sucks’ for negative things. How do we expect to get blowjobs if we keep saying bad things ‘suck dick’”. Like I just can’t tie that to my employer as much as I’d like to hype them up to dev/engineers online :p

I’m sure the internet super sleuths can figure it out, but I can’t imagine why they would bother :p

I am about 12 years into using Agile at my work place and I am about a decade in to being dumbfounded at the fucky implementations I read about in this type of post and it’s comments.

We are never asked to turn our cameras on during any of our agile related meetings. In any meetings really. Some people do it, some people don’t, I don’t think I’ve ever had someone ask me to turn my camera on at work.

How do you even set a color for a meeting? Is that an outlook thing? Are you scheduling meetings in JIRA? I honestly don’t even understand how one uses a color for a meeting. I would love an explanation of this :D

I’ve never once used a sticker, virtual or not, to tell others how I feel (at work). I’ll assume this is a retrospective thing. We mention anything that happened in the last sprint where we think we as a team need to do one of:

• Start doing X
• Keep doing X
• Stop doing X

Then the team has a quick anonymous vote and if we have a majority we either start, stop, or continue doing X.

e.g. “The slack workflow we implemented in our public channel last week was used 15 times. We should definitely keep prioritizing moving FAQ type items to slack workflows”

Quoting from some of the comments

Its literally hand holding and baby sitting.

That’s about your team and/or your teams leadership, not scrum.

checking in from the 45 minute “stand up” in which 10 people have their cameras on but only 3 people speak.

This is about your scrum masters inability to keep the meeting focused. We just do a straight up rotation, alphabetical by first name. Any time we are in danger of devolving into dev/engineering discussion our scrum master interjects and the conversation is saved for after standup or a meeting is setup depending on the topic. More often than not we give our updates and then say something like “JoBob I’ll need some time from you sometime today to discuss how to integrate with the thingamajig” or “After standup I’d like to talk to the team about XYZ”. We sometimes certainly have 3 people start trying to engineer a solution when someone says “I couldn’t figure out how to schoop the woop, so I’m still working on that.” but again our scrum master will say “Oh, JoBob is the schoop the woop SME, why don’t we chat it out after stand up”.

I hate that paragraph but I can’t find a good place to break it up, sorry.

Most of the complaints I see (overall, not just in this post/comments) come down to really basic shit:

• Your scrum master is fucking terrible at their job
• Your team actually does behave like a group of toddlers
• Your manager is actually a micromanager and this is just another micromanaging tool to them
• You’re bending your team/process to fit agile, and not bending agile to fit your team/process

I want to give two examples addressing my last list item.

First: We do not have stand ups scheduled 5 days a week. We found a cadence that makes sense for our teams work pace and our sprint duration.

Second: There’s such a thing as tasks that take less time/effort than writing the associated JIRA story would take. My team has agreed to just not bother with a story in these cases. It fits our workflow better and as a group of adult human beings we accept that it’s a waste of time/effort to write four paragraphs and a customer value statement for what essentially comes down to “type the number 70 into a form on a website and hit submit”.

Again as adult humans we also try to be aware of and avoid abuse of this mentality, and make sure we aren’t just doing mental gymnastics to avoid writing a story for something. When someone says “eeehhhh maybe we should throw a story on the backlog about that”, we just suck it up and do it.

This shit is so easy, and so helpful, it’s crazy to me how ridiculous y’all make the process.

edit: I will add that if you Masto-stalk me you’ll definitely find me bitching about long stand ups. FWIW that’s almost invariably when the scrum master is out and management has decided to run the meetings because none of the team felt like stepping up and doing it for a few days. i.e. it’s our own fault when it happens to us.