The thing with making things easier is that it makes mediocre people seem competent and incompetent people seem mediocre…
— Ronald (@blytkerchan) July 21, 2017
This afternoon, this headline caught my attention: “Police hack PGP server with 3.6 million messages from organized crime BlackBerrys“. When I read it, I thought: “either the journalist/title writer got it wrong, or PGP is broken”.
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I have recently had to modify some code that, to say the least, was very hard to maintain — or refactor, for that matter.
The following are a few, firmly tongue-in-cheek, steps to make sure your code is thoroughly frustrating to whoever needs to maintain it after you.
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Recently, I spent a significant part of the day in a meeting reviewing the year’s progress on several projects, including the introduction of an agile methodology — Scrum. The approach in the meeting was simple: write on a sticky note what we did well, and on another what we should not repeat or how we should improve. The subject was “Scrum/agile”. I only wrote one sticky note: “get rid of Scrum”.
I am often asked by friends and acquaintances of various backgrounds, what I do for a living. Depending on my mood at the time, I can answer in any number of ways, but invariably my answers are met with blank stares, questions that clearly demonstrate that I have once again failed to make myself understood and an eventual change of subject.
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The Twitterverse has spoken, quietly, with a single vote — a cat it is…
This is another “HOWTO” post — setting up a Xubuntu-based kiosk, which I did to make a new “TV” for my kids.
In my previous post, I described technocracy as something that is positive in project and product management, and in team organization. In this post, to supply a boundary to my previous text, I will make the case for the opposite.
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In a discussion with a “Product Owner” recently, I told him I take a more technocratic approach to project management than they did. We discussed different project management styles for the next hour or so.
Imagine you’re running a coffee shop — not the kind you find in Amsterdam, but one where they actually serve coffee. Your customers are generally in a hurry, so they just want to get a cup of coffee, pay and leave to catch their plane, train or automobile. To attract more customers and appeal to the Geek crowd, you name your coffee shop “Real-Time Thirsty” and promise an “Average case serving within one minute!”.
While you get many customers, you’re not getting the Geeks-in-a-hurry crowd you were expecting.
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