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dodgyb

25 karma · joined November 6, 2017

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dodgyb··on Ask HN: Best project management practices in 2018?
Communication and risk management are the essence of project management, i.e. those making a bet of a project need to know that there is a fair chance they will get a return on their investment.

OKR's are good for outlining requirements, but the project needs to be viable so start by validating the business case. This includes TCO - how much will it cost to build and how much to maintain.

Project requirements come in many guises: building skyscrapers, changing business processes, designing new tools, etc. etc., so choose the method to suit the requirement and the environment.

Providing an environment where contributors can excel is key. Proscriptive methods like scrum are useful when bringing teams together, but once they have found their feet let them organise themselves. Good governance is crucial for making this work - Cyranix's comment makes some good points on this.

The Manifesto for Async Software Development is a "21st century successor to Agile" and has some useful tips for working with distributed teams, which seems to be the way things are moving:

http://asyncmanifesto.org/

Both Cyranix and the Async Manifesto make a point of documentation. I would add that all design decisions should be noted with details about the reasons for the choice, and also the options considered and reasons why they were discarded. This will help with learning from retrospectives.

dodgyb··on Ask HN: How do you handle configuration management?
This is an interesting read on Config Management which essentially concludes that makefiles with Jenkins (etc.) work best:

https://fortyft.com/posts/ansible-puppet-chef-no-thanks/

For more bells and whistles (and a steeper learning curve) try Escape:

https://escape.ankyra.io/docs/what-is-escape/

dodgyb··on Ask HN: Is anyone interested in the idea of “DevOps without containers”?
Isn't that serverless?

What's your angle: IDE, testing, orchestration, monitoring, billing?

dodgyb··on Ask HN: What’s the best open source helpdesk?
Wikipedia has a useful comparison of issue-tracking systems, mostly IT focused though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_s...

These might be closer to what you are looking for but I can't recommend them because I haven't tried them. GPLi has my vote for tech support.

http://osticket.com/

https://zammad.org

You could also consider a CMS (Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) help-desk plugin

dodgyb··on Ask HN: Flow chart tool for MS Office
https://www.draw.io/ is a free online visio replacement

http://dia-installer.de/ visio clone on win/mac/linux

http://staruml.io/ UML modeller on win/mac/linux

https://www.calligra.org/flow/ Linux KDE flowcharting tool with win/mac installers

http://thinkcomposer.com/ Mindmaps, flowcharts etc. on Win only

https://modeling-languages.com/web-based-modeling-tools-uml-... reviews UML tools

dodgyb··on Ask HN: What is your favorite pocket knife?
The quality of the steel is the most important consideration when choosing a knife. See:

http://knifeinformer.com/discovering-the-best-knife-steel/

Victorinox knives provide the best performance for the price:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Army_knife#Design_and_ma...

dodgyb··on Ask HN: Advice for new project managers on new projects
Remember that you are not there to make decisions, you are there to help qualified people make decisions in good time by presenting them with the information they need, when they need it. Don't overload them with data irrelevant to the immediate task.

Risk management should also be a major focus. Always ask what could go wrong. I recently read an interesting proposition - in the project initiation stage outline the goal and state that the project has failed. Then ask for reasons why this could have happened. This will help the team identify assumptions, constraints and risks to be avoided or mitigated. It also focuses the team on risk management from the very start.

Herding Cats has put together a good outline of the subject:

http://herdingcats.typepad.com/my_weblog/2017/08/risk-manage...

dodgyb··on Ask HN: Database for efficiently storing many numpy arrays
pyarrow and parquet may fit your requirements. There are a number of analysis engines (spark, drill, hive, etc) that support parquet. For more detail see:

https://tech.blue-yonder.com/efficient-dataframe-storage-wit...

https://www.slideshare.net/julienledem/strata-ny-2017-parque...

If ACID guarantees are a must then use Kafka as a message broker between memory and file, but this has the cost of added complexity. For more info:

https://eng-staging.verizondigitalmedia.com/2017/04/28/Kafka...

http://activisiongamescience.github.io/2016/06/15/Kafka-Clie...

dodgyb··on Blockchain reading list
Try a google search, e.g. "site:github.com awesome blockchain"

https://github.com/naolduga/awesome-blockchain seems fairly comprehensive

dodgyb··on Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?
Fiction - Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse. Contrasting the lives of a free spirit and a disciplined mind.

Non Fiction - A Time of Gifts/Between the Woods and the Water/The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Recounting a trip from Holland to Constantinople by foot in the 1930's when he was a teenager. A trilogy of books written when he was in his 60's and 70's. An erudite raconteur.

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