Story Points Revisited ronjeffries.com

It's a bit of an older article, but in particular, I loved the highlight on the loss of focus on delivering value toward how to make estimates better. Our job as devs is not to be the best estimators, but to be able to deliver business value quickly and consistently.

To me, the important thing in Real Agile is to pick the next few things to do, and do them promptly. The key question is to find the most valuable things to do, and to do them quickly. Doing them quickly comes down to doing small slices of high value, and iterating rapidly. Story cost estimation doesn’t help much with that, if at all.

So if the existence of an estimate causes management to take their eye off the ball of value and instead focus on improving estimates, it takes attention from the central purpose, which is to deliver real value quickly.

This makes me think that estimation, be it in points or time, is to be avoided.

/ Agile · Programming
/ Fun

A long time coming (but worth it)

Order placed July 2021. Delivery a year and a half later. Somewhere in between I switched my color to eruption green and dropped the tow package, and I have no regrets about either. The green is perfect.

Ford sent order holders a photo of their Bronco coming off the line, which was a nice touch for a wait that long. Also here: a goodbye to my Honda CR-Z, which carried me almost a decade and close to 100,000 miles and still felt pretty damn solid at the end. Thanks to Lief Johnson Truck City for making the handoff an easy one.

Bronco
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This Triggers me

Autocommands are one of the first things you reach for when configuring Vim, and one of the last things you understand. You write an autocmd, it works, and then months later it fires twice, or fires on the wrong buffer, or quietly stops firing at all and you spend an afternoon discovering that the event you wanted was never the event you used.

Here I go through the events I actually rely on, the difference between BufRead and BufEnter and friends, why augroups matter more than they look like they should, and the small set of commands I use to find out what is really being triggered. Nothing exotic, just the mental model I wish I had started with.

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/ Fun

Halloween 2022 - Tom Servo Animatronic

My wife and I went with a Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme for the whole house this year, which finally gave me an excuse to build the Tom Servo kit I have wanted for ages. A puppet alone was not quite enough, though, so I set out to make him self-contained: battery powered, one button, a random clip from a pile of prerecorded Servo lines.

What follows is the build. An Arduino Pro Mini left over from last year's eyeball pumpkins, a DFPlayer Mini for audio, servos, speakers, and the awful popping sound that turned out to be the DFPlayer quietly insisting on a steady 3.3V. Code is up on GitHub.

Animatronics · Microcontrollers · Programming · Electronics
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/ Fun

Halloween Fun 2021 - The Tiki themed Mahalloween

Being new to the neighborhood, we wanted to do something fun, so we took a two pronged approach: a batch of eyeball animatronic pumpkins and a custom window animation. The pumpkins run on cheap servos and Arduinos, built off the usual tutorials, though every one of those assumes the Arduino can power the servos on its own. That works for a few and falls apart around eight, so I ended up with an external supply and a separate power rail for the eyeballs.

The window was the more fun half. My wife handled the design and all the skilled drawing, and I took it into After Effects for the animation loop. I love the way it looked.

Electronics · Animatronics
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/ Fun

I Don't Know What I'm Doing - Upgrades & Arcades

A few months' worth of hardware purchases, gathered into one video: a Commodore4ever power supply to replace the old brick, a new monitor, a PenUltimate+ cartridge, and a selectable RAM expansion with a reset switch for the VIC-20. All rad.

Then a drive up to Funspot in New Hampshire, home to one of the largest collections of classic arcade games anywhere. Rows and rows of cabinets, most of which I am spectacularly bad at. Music from Mattie Maguire, The Basic Game, and Falcon Dives, and thanks as always to everyone supporting the channel.

Vintage Computing · I Don't Know What I'm Doing · My Videos
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Maybe your voice assistant needn’t do it all uxdesign.cc

I love my Echo Spot, but there’s only a few things I regularly do with it via voice commands. It mostly boils down to controlling my smart lamps, playing music, and adding stuff to my shopping lists. Super convenient for these things, but with others I struggle to remember what I’m supposed to say to make something happen or if I even have a skill that does something.

There’s a huge rush to push things onto voice assistants since Amazon makes it particularly easy to do. I think it’s much like having a splash page on a website, just because you can do it does it mean you should?

Currently, services arenas are rushing to jump on the VUI bandwagon — from education to healthcare to banks. But can and should everything be supported by voice?

/ Technology

The Difference Between Leaders And Managers forbes.com

I've run across a lot of these articles lately, but it never hurts to get these great ideas reinforced again :)

Regardless of your title, you should strive to build connections with your employees and help them develop and grow. Take an active role in leading your team and don’t manage from the corner office. Help them out when a deadline is looming to show them that you’re invested in their success.

/ Leadership