278 karma · joined September 11, 2009
My last job had me on a ten person developer team and I would not try to use that process there - although I'd consider splitting that into a couple of smaller groups focused on a specific product/system and using a very lightweight process for those groups.
The best project I ever worked on: one developer (me), one project manager on our side, one QA/test person at the client, and one manager at the client who was what we'd call a product owner on a scrum team.
No ceremonies, no pointing, very little backlog grooming. Shared Bitbucket repo for issue tracking. Deployments scheduled every Tuesday when their QA person signed off on the feature working as expected (this was in the days before CI/CD became common).
Worked great. Low friction, they got features and bug fixes, we didn't get hassled, and we could set up a call (or usually just a couple of emails) if we needed clarification or needed to explain why something was more complex to do than we or they originally thought. One of the best six month periods in my career, and I've been doing this stuff for almost 25 years.
I don't mind some aspects of scrum, but the things I don't mind (mostly around team autonomy and self-organization) seem to be the same things that are quickest to get thrown out when someone gets impatient.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine in Oklahoma says he never uses Google Maps to navigate because it has a bad habit of trying to route him down unimproved ranch roads of dubious quality.
Personally, I usually prefer Apple Maps since it plays nicer with CarPlay, and while Ohio has fewer roads of dubious quality like that, my experience left me much less trusting of GMaps.
Even with a degree in technical writing, I still find it helps. I overuse passive voice and unnecessary words, and LanguageTool flagging them as I write is useful.
After using it for a while, I'd go as far as to say that if I bought a house with a gas stove, removing that in favor of an induction range would be pretty high on my priority list. Safer, better for air quality, and the occasional spill is much easier to clean.
Not being able to take proper advantage of a wok is a little annoying, although I've only tried it with a relatively small stainless steel one. I'm betting a flat bottom carbon steel wok large enough to fit the 12" burner would work better, though.
Regular sinus rinsing made a huge difference in getting that under control. I'm also a big fan of the NeilMed squeeze bottles and that's what I've been using for a couple of years now. That said, this year I switched to the Xlear salt/xylitol packets and I like them better. I don't know if there's actual science to the claims that the xylitol inhibits bacterial adhesion or any of that, but I do find them gentler on my sinuses and less unpleasant if some of the solution works its way into my throat.
I don't rinse daily, but the instant I start to feel even a bit crap, I'll pull out my rinse bottle, distilled water, and packets, and have at it.
I'll be honest, the other thing that's helped is that "world events" normalized wearing masks in indoor public places, and I will continue to for a good while (the 3M Aura foldable N95 masks are _fantastic_) for things like grocery shopping. Wearing them doesn't bother me personally and definitely beats spending two weeks with my head full of crud I can't quite get rid of, or with my ears full of fluid.
Whereas, Visual Studio... well, let me just say first that I know real people work on that product, some of them are probably reading this, and if so, I appreciate you.
Unfortunately, every time I've ended up having to switch from Rider to Visual Studio for some edge case scenario or to do an Azure deployment (before we moved that process into CI), I'd end up frustrated. Even with VS 2022, which is better, it's slow compared to Rider. Also, despite a couple of cosmetic coats of paint and new icons and such for VS'22, it doesn't really feel like a modern IDE or like it's changed noticeably since 2010 or so. Granted, stability is often a plus, but there's a ton of workloads in there that I don't think are relevant to a modern cross platform .NET Core 3.x/.NET 5/6 development experience and I suspect supporting all of that is a factor in why it's so slow.
I haven't even gotten into how much worse the performance in VS gets when you add ReSharper to the mix, and even with all the genuine refactoring improvements in VS in the past decade, I still feel like I'm working with a couple of broken fingers when I don't have ReSharper active. Better refactorings, better intellisense.
I also happen to use fountain pens for it, but I think that part is optional. :)
The only nitpick is that if you're a side sleeper (I am) it can be a little uncomfortable depending on what kind of pillow you use. I use shredded memory foam pillows and they're pretty firm.
Work is a Windows laptop; I could (and do, on my personal Windows desktop) use VoiceMeeter to accomplish the same general approach as described above. But rather than have my security team at work asking me annoying questions, it's easier to run Otter on my iPad and use a TRS-to-TRRS patch cable (I use the Movo CFP-1 from Amazon) to feed that into my iPad... plus using my iPad to display the captions frees up my displays for meeting-related things.
In pre-pandemic times I would also use it for some meetings at work, and meetups.
I think Otter has a fairly significant user base of people using it for accessibility and not just meeting notes, and is seemingly aware of it because they've added features geared to that use case, like the full screen text option with adjustable font sizes.
I generally prefer Apple for their strongly pro-privacy stance, but this is something they're dropping the ball on. After living with this feature in Chrome for a while, it's such a big quality of life improvement that for the first time in years, I'm thinking about jumping to Android even though it would incur some extra costs to do so[1].
I can use Loopback to feed audio into the iOS or web version of Otter.ai on my MBP to fill in some of the gaps where Chrome isn't an option (i.e., FaceTime calls with family and friends), but it increasingly feels like a janky solution and I'd rather have something built in.
[1] - I like having a smartwatch so as not to miss notifications so I'd need to find a good enough solution for that, plus my current hearing aid needs an additional supporting device to stream from an Android phone, so that would run up some additional costs.
I'll have to try Mount Hagen for a change of pace sometime, though.
Unfortunately, while our leadership hasn't said anything official yet, there's so much writing on the wall that you'd have to be illiterate not to see it. They're making anyone who has an office go back full time next month and have been pretty much ignoring the employee surveys saying people want remote flex and a hybrid policy.
My wife is job hunting right now so I'll grudgingly go back so as not to disrupt my family's health insurance, but once she finds something, I'd say it's good odds I'm going to start looking. It's a shame because I like my team, but I don't feel a need to actually see them in person more than once or twice a year. I'd much rather work in my nice home office where the bathroom's never occupied, people aren't walking around/talking and being distracting, my dog wanders in occasionally to see what I'm doing, and my daughter runs in to say hello when she gets home from school. None of the office "perks" measure up to those, for me.
Between that and my preference for Macs for my personal laptops -- and I've been very excited at how good .NET Core has gotten on non-Windows platforms -- as well as a ~3 year sojourn working with Java 8/11 in IntelliJ, I've gotten very comfortable working with JetBrains IDEs and generally prefer them when I have the option. Structure View is great, the search is nice and snappy.
The only thing that frustrates me with Rider is I don't think you can apply fixes from Roslyn analyzers at the file/project/solution level like you can in VS. We enforce our team's coding standards using those, so it's a minor pain point, but not enough to get me to stop using Rider given how much faster it is.
There were a couple of things that ultimately worked for me, although I think it's important to note they may not work for everyone since people are different. What helped was a combination of CBT and Buddha breathing and mindful breathing-focsed meditation. I also became (with the help of my counselor) more self-aware, so I could realize when I was starting to become anxious and use breathing techniques to intervene before it became a full-blown attack.
I don't do it as much now but for quite a while I had a serious journaling habit (I'd go through a Moleskine-sized hardbound notebook every couple of months) and that turned out to be surprisingly helpful; I could get the things that were stressing me out or depressing me written down on paper and out of my head. For me, at least, it worked.
All that said, for someone who's dealing with anxiety, I think the best thing is to talk to a professional.
As for me, things have gotten better; I don't get these attacks so much anymore and a lot of the time I'm able to keep them from escalating into a full blown one just by focusing on breathing for a while.
I'm really hoping Apple introduces a comparable feature soon for iOS and macOS.
On the one hand, I get it - sometimes it actually is nice to have a ticket that you don't have to think too much about the bigger context for, and can just crank out code.
On the other hand, I don't think it's particularly good for your career security if you're limiting your own role to "minimally communicative code monkey" - if that's all you want to do, there's an awful lot of competition out there.
I've made an effort the past couple of years, across multiple jobs now, to get some real exposure to the ops aspects of my roles (most recently, prototyping and then helping implement CI/CD pipelines for Azure Durable Functions) as well as making an effort to understand the business domain, where the gaps in our product offerings are, and what the competitors in that sector look like. It's really helpful in terms of looking for a more efficient way to solve a business problem, not to mention being able to say things like "hey, the market we're in is moving pretty heavily to Kubernetes, so it's really important that we decide how we're going to support that."
I'm not saying you need to be (or can be) an expert in all of those things, but I think having the high level exposure is really important, at least when you get to a senior IC level. A minor bonus is it helps you develop a Spidey sense for when the business is pursuing strategies that don't seem likely to work, giving you a chance to either try to offer feedback/seek clarification on why, or to pull the plug and find a new gig if it seems bad enough.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Wattenbe...
At my previous job, I worked from home 2-3 days a week and commuted (~50 minutes each way) the rest of the time, then I took a new job less than ten minutes from home. We got sent home due to COVID a few months after that. Management talks a lot about how they know remote isn't ideal and want to get us back in the office as soon as possible, despite most of the software teams finding they've been equally or more productive as before.
For me, this has been the first time I've been WFH on an equal footing with the whole team, I _love_ it, and I never want to go back to the office. I actually prefer meeting via Teams since I can't hear well and the built in captioning makes it easier, I have better monitors at home than I do at the office, there's never a wait for the bathroom, can pull some lunch out of the fridge or pantry and heat it up at my convenience.
I know some people lament the whole "not having hallway conversations leading to innovation" thing but I'm honestly curious how real that is. I've been in the industry for over 20 years now, the bulk of that in software-focused companies or teams, and while I do have casual conversations with coworkers I can't recall any of them ever segueing into "so here's the challenging thing I'm working on right now..." -- I'm not saying it never happens, just that I can't recall it's ever happened to me.
Some of my coworkers do miss whiteboarding, though I don't have strong feelings about that one way or the other. I'm more of a textual than a visual thinker personally so I've never found diagramming things out to be particularly helpful.
At any rate, while I really like my boss and my team, the day management sends out the "mandatory full-time return to the office in (x) months, including the development teams" email is almost certainly going to be the day I update my resume.
I'm a heavy Otter user and find it well worth the subscription - I used it a lot even in person, and have used it more since we all started working from home. We use Teams for most of our meetings and I always switch the captions on there; one or the other sometimes lags, but usually not both at once. For family video chats, we use Google Meet, and it's usually on par with Otter and Teams.
I have read a lot of positive comments of Google's Live Transcribe and Recorder apps, but can't evaluate them since I'm an iPhone user. Between this and the other hearing a11y features in recent Pixel phones, and me having one foot out of the Apple ecosystem anyway, I give serious thought to switching to a Pixel almost every year and one of these days I'll actually do it.
Worth mentioning: Google added the Pixel's Live Captions feature to Chrome and it's in the beta and main channels, but it's hidden behind a flag AND a setting, so you have to enable the flag, restart Chrome, and then confirm in settings that captions are turned on. I believe this is entirely on-device and it does work astonishingly well; I've used it on programming streams on Twitch and it handled the technical vocabulary better than I expected , if not flawlessly.
A US-centric point I should mention: for companies above a certain size, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that they make reasonable accommodations for you. I have done this in the past to have a professional captioner. They're more accurate, but inconvenient to schedule, usually have a bit more lag, and very expensive ($125 an hour was about average when I last had to get quotes for this). Not everyone wants to make the accuracy tradeoff and that's fine - I understand their position - though I'm personally willing to because it makes it very easy to jump on a call with a coworker whenever I need to.
Quick notes on my setup: I have a 3.5mm splitter hanging off my work laptop's headphone jack. One side goes to a ReSound Multi-Mic (which includes a 3.5mm jack) to stream the audio to my hearing aid. The other side has a TRS-to-TRRS cable going into my iPhone (via the audio to lightning adapter) or iPad to provide an audio stream for Otter to work on. USB webcam provides the microphone. I typically use my iPad since I can set it up under the monitor my video call is running on and then I don't have to use screen space on my monitors to display the captions.
I really should write up a blog post about all of this, with photos.
Lenovo has a couple of AMD-based ThinkPads that are looking pretty appealing, although they come in around $1500 with the configuration I'd want.
I have a unique situation since I can't hear well, and everyone being on WFH has been a huge benefit for me: since everyone's got their own microphone/camera/etc, they come through clearly enough that my captioning app can actually understand them well - typically I get captioning as live CART through a crap conference room phone. Being able to hook my captioning app on my phone up to my laptop's audio out and jump on a Teams call with just a few minutes' notice has also been a huge benefit in easily being able to collaborate with my team and talk through problems.
I'd worked from home before, but never in this kind of remote-first/remote-only scenario, and now that I've gotten a taste of it I kind of never want to go back. I understand that other people are more extroverted than I am, and can hear normally, and it's not an ideal situation for them - but it's been pretty awesome for me.
Granted, I just spent about two years doing Java dev in IntelliJ and recently moved back over to working with C#. I'd gotten pretty used to working with IntelliJ so that probably colors my viewpoint a little, but the JetBrains IDEs do have some features I really like - the class structure pane, for example, is really useful.
Meditation, diet, sleep, and exercise can all help, but ultimately it was talking to a professional that made the most difference; all those other things have helped to sustain it since then.
It's the perfect micro-ORM. Eliminates boilerplate, gets out of the way otherwise.