diiq

Once you enter tasks, and estimate at least one, you should see a link to view your "Projections".

(Fetching those projections uses websockets, so you may need to refresh if you're behind a particularly restrictive firewall.)

If you're still having trouble, drop me a note at sam@sambleckley.com and I'd be happy to help.

Haha, at least tell me which external tool you'd like me to add an import from, and I'll be happy to add it to my backlog.

Fair enough! There's more than one way to skin a cat. This way was easier for me, and has additional benefits as described.

Not at the moment. This is the dream, but it's statistically much harder than it seems!

For each task you have one distribution, and one sample. What's the likelihood that sample was actually from a different distribution?

Instinctively it feels easy to judge "your usually closer to the worst-case than the best-case" but mathematically it's not so straightforward, especially when the estimate doesn't include sick days, splitting time with other projects, etc, but both the projection and the reality do.

Once I took a few steps down the simulation path, it seemed so easy and powerful that I didn't look back. There is some computational cost, but for me it's more than made up for by how easy it is to, for instance, say "I'd like to model sick days"; * let the government tell me how often people are sick (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat47.htm, see "Computer and # mathematical occupations", absence rate, due to illness or injury), * make my simulated workers take days off at that rate.

And everything else, all the statistics etc, can stay exactly the same. And I can have a lot of trust that it's producing sane results because I can look at a run, and say yes, that's a plausible number of sick days.

Monte carlo requires you to be clever once, setting up the simulation, and then you almost never have to be clever later when you want to introduce new twists. Any other statistical model you have to keep being cleverer for every additional complication.

Thanks!

I totally agree, personally I want more hierarchy; but user testing with milestones was pretty rough. Vistimo proper (https://www.vistimo.com) is less slick-looking, but has milestones and story-mapping and bugs and enhancements and all kinds of hierarchical organization tools. Most users I've tested with have found Vistimo Quotes' approach easier to pick up and use on existing projects, even if it's less powerful at expressing the full richness of the work.

Re: the long running calculations, I will take a look, but it's possibly just a traffic jam. There are a few more "test" simulations running simultaneously than usual this morning.

Thanks, will fix.

I promise, this is the result of real constraints! Monte carlo is used because of the limitations of analysis when using log-normal distributions. Normal distributions can be summed algebraically; log normal distributions cannot.

https://blog.vistimo.com/post/169546687605/estimation-math

Note that Monte-carlo is not used prominently anywhere on the site, just here because I thought HN would find that part of the implementation interesting.

I think Steve McConnell was calling for statistical modelling even earlier than that. Definitely not a new idea!

I'm working on the assumption that it hasn't caught on because it's a pain to do without proper tooling; but it's also true that many engineers believe estimation is useless, impossible, and a waste of time or worse. It can be hard to overcome the pain of having been burned by a too-tight timeline.

You're not wrong; normal distributions are OK but not ideal for estimating durations -- it can lead to weird artifacts if you don't restrict yourself to just the mean. (https://blog.vistimo.com/post/169546687605/estimation-math)

And once you're committed to using monte carlo, you're free to include one-off events -- sick days, vacations, social loafing, etc, that are really hard to model analytically, since they are roughly uniform in time -- the longer the project runs, the more days off make the project run longer.

Haha, look closer! These buttons have a continuous curvature profile, rather than a rounded rectangle. It's a big part of what makes them feel so "70's calculator" chic :)

You're right! Ensemble forecasting is great! Vistimo proper (https://www.vistimo.com) does both -- it gets individual high/low estimates from multiple people, and creates a combined distribution from all of them (though each estimate is a log normal, not normal, since it's a time estimate).

But Vistimo is a full project management tool; that space is full and switching project management tools is expensive, so it's hard to get people to adopt.

Vistimo Quotes is a much lighter-weight way to get many of the same benefits without having to talk your whole team into signing up.

There's an "unknown unknowns" factor specifically for including guesses about new features or last-minute changes.

And the great thing about being able to run estimates quickly is that you can tell the CEO how much their new idea will send the timeline off course as soon as they propose it, so they can decide if it's really worth the cost.

I've been using this tech for years as a consulting engineer; this is just the dressed up version. It's been useful and effective for me, at least.

The video on the How It Works page (https://quotes.vistimo.com/how-it-works) has footage of every step you'll take to run an estimate.

If you mean you want technical details of the math involved, https://blog.vistimo.com/

The agile manifesto is so terse and carefully written -- every word is there for a reason -- and so many people ignore the words they find inconvenient.

"Responding to change over following a plan" specifically says "over", not "instead of!"

They even say it twice, to avoid misunderstanding: "That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more." In a document that's only a few sentences long, to repeat a meaning is a little like shouting.

Don't value your plan more than your ability to respond to change. But do still have a plan! How will you know if you're responding to change without one?

It's a=just a standard welt pocket on an angle. Find a welt pocket tutorial you like and follow it, but on the outseam :)

The only trick is that the inseam has to be open when you add the pocket to the outseam.

I haven't made a paper pattern of it, yet, because I've cut it differently each time. When I settle on a design I will make myself a pattern -- but it'll be pretty specific to me.

Neat! This would be pretty useful to me if the settings persisted between sessions -- I don't have the time to fine-tune my camera for each meeting, but if I could tune it once and use it again and again, that'd be worth it.

You're right, I think a yoke might work better than darts to break up that space.

I drafted from scratch; not shown here (for fear of distracting from the pockets) are the high waist, button fly, and swallowtail back that make them deeply unfashionable :)

But you could easily add this to almost any pants pattern, so long as the inseam isn't flat-felled.

I did.

Absolutely in the works, but I'm not rich enough to make prototypes in superfine :)

If you don't already sew, I'd start by making a pillowcase or a dice bag, and then maybe a shirt or something. Take some time to learn about fabric materials and weaves. Pants are notoriously hard to fit, and if you're also learning to use a sewing machine at the same time, it's gonna end in tears. Or even tears.

Youtube is chock-full of "learn to sew" videos, and you can buy paper patterns online, or in person (and get helpful advice) at your local fabric store.

The instructions that come with such patterns are bad, but still better than the average readme.

Then when you've got a feel for it, you can start drafting your own patterns. Much of the information that's available on that is for womenswear, but it doesn't take too much thought to translate things.

Could be.

But the only demographic I named was "people who can wear cargo pants to work", so you kind of set me up for a "no true scotsman". There are events, and clients, to which I wouldn't wear cargo pants, therefore we're in different demographics :)

It is a little disheartening to spend so much time talking about cargo pants, when I relegated them to a postscript and only mentioned them to say "I am not talking about cargo pants".

But nice to meet another michigander! Hopefully I'll see you at some meetup or event once we have those sorts of things again.

Most of those pockets, notice, are in the side seam itself -- allowing them to be made without changing the order of construction, but requiring a zipper to keep things from falling out.

I realize that within-the-seam vs, welt pocket is externally a small thing, but it changes the order of construction dramatically. My approach doesn't need a zipper to prevent things falling out, but does need a reordering of the construction process, and so is much rarer to see for exactly the reasons I enumerate in the post, even in spite of being potentially materially cheaper.

Haha, no, no sales. Making clothes to fit one specific person is an relatively easy task. Making clothes to fit distant internet strangers is much, much harder; and wouldn't pay as well as making software, anyway.

Even the US startups that are making clothes to customized measurements, etc, are forced to stay price-competitive by using the same overseas factories that (in addition to the specific kinds of inflexibility I bring up in the post) are often labor rights disasters, which is part of why I make my own clothes in the first place.

If I had a clear plan of attack against fast fashion, I'd probably take it, but the best I have right now is individual action.

Yeah, when I have a moment I'll rewrite that section. I clearly missed the mark tonally.

At least I know folks read all the way to the end, I suppose.

Go for it! The main construction trick here is remembering that to put a welt pocket on the outseam means you need open access -- so you close the inseam last, opposite the usual order of things.

I guess I should re-write that postscript, given how much attention it's receiving. I have nothing against cargo pants! My point was just that they're solving very different problems for different people, and are stuck in a different kind of innovation-rut.

I suppose I didn't include photos with the phone fully in the pocket because you genuinely can't tell it's there.

There's a slight bulge from the welt of the pocket itself, which I'm still experimenting with, but with-phone is truly indistinguishable from without-phone when I'm standing up. Seated, there's a bulge at the side of the thigh if you really look for it.

I solemnly swear I've experienced no swinging or banging. These pants are fitted at the thigh, and the pocket bag is inside the pant leg. I genuinely forget my phone is there, even on long walks.

And there's no bulge at the knee because trousers don't fit tightly at the knee -- otherwise, you would't be able to sit down. The fit at the top of the pocket prevents swing, and the ease at the bottom prevents bulge.