These days These days, I'm more interested in the Razzies than I am in the Oscars.

“After strikes, lingerings of a worldwide plague and a general sense of universal agoraphobia, the decline of the cinematic experience goes without saying,” said the organizers. “Thankfully, a doll pic and a bomb movie jump-started the Industry, which still left behind a trail of Pooh for the Razzies to pick up!”

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.

An oldie, but a goodie.

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?

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.

As someone who battles "procrastination" I can get behind this. There can be a lot of moral judgement from others around procrastination.  Most offered solutions seem to be about willpower, time management or task management. Most of these solutions aren't solutions at all, particularly when others see you as someone who gets things a lot of stuff done, but deep down you really know about all the stuff you're putting off.

One small pilot study found very low procrastination scores among experienced mediators, suggesting that doing absolutely nothing might be the best way to get everything done.

I read a study long ago that had a similar outcome, people who were seen as "lucky" were mostly just open to seeing opportunities and positive outcomes.

And that optimism gives lucky people more “grit.” When you think things will work out, you persevere. And when you’re resilient, you give possibilities more time to work out in your favor.

Skeptics might be shaking their heads right now: But we all know people who aren’t just optimistic — they’re utterly deluded. Are you saying we should lie to ourselves?

Um… kinda. Turns out that while pessimists do see the world more accurately, optimists are more likely to be lucky because those delusions push them toward opportunities.

The opening couple of sentences nail it. There's a lot to getting things done, but one of the most powerful items is realizing that that project you're working on doesn't magically get finished by your own sheer will or direction. There's opinions to measure, feedback to listen to and people to mentor.

If you've been told you're leadership material, it may be due to these seven leadership practices. However, more often than not, people in positions of authority don't value the people-side of the business.

Frankly, they often defer "leadership development" to the lower ranks because they're too busy to care about raising their own capacity to transform the workplace and serve the needs of their employees.

I'll be picking up the book this article sources, "Fully General System For Learning To Do Hard Things" by David MacIver. To a small degree I've always done this as I learn and try new things. I really like the idea of finding an analog to the hard thing that you already do and slowly changing it, mastering it and iterating on it until you've mastered that hard thing.

So it’s not a guarantee but rather a structured plan to follow if you’re not sure how to start mastering the hard. He offers two approaches—one process if you already know what success looks like and one process if the definition of “success” is more subjective. In both cases, you’ll follow these steps:

I've been looking to build one of these as a project. I love the idea of it... there's a ton of potential in the concept for an awesome product.

Smart mirrors have been around awhile, and the most prominent version comes from Michael Teeuw. The idea is pretty simple; you’ll build a frame and box. Inside the box, you’ll place one-way glass (often seen on TV in police dramas), a monitor, a Raspberry Pi, and the cables necessary to power your setup. Michael and other contributors have created an open-source Magic Mirror platform you can install. Once installed, you can customize it to show your calendar, weather, news, and more. Installing the software is easy—it requires just one line of code.