tragic

At my last job, there was an incident (thankfully discovered in working hours) caused by a supplier accidentally deleting the country of Austria from some crucial database. You can't anticipate everything like that, but the show must go on ...

Or Rust, which - whatever you might think of it - does not feel very designed-by-committee.

> P.S. I am tired of the YADIW excuse. Let's have a nice honest discussion about how it can be fixed.

If somebody complains that Scrum is bad because e.g. every day you have to update management at stand-up (as mentioned in TFA), but the Scrum Guide, every book ever written on scrum, the websites of the Scrum Alliance and scrum.org, and more or less every advocate of scrum great and small, states explicitly that this is not the purpose of the stand-up but instead to highlight obstructions and opportunities for collaboration, then I don't see what more there is to say than "you're doing it wrong" - because you are doing it wrong, in letter and in spirit. It may not be your fault that you're doing it wrong (it's my guess that the widespread perception that scrum is management-heavy is a function of scrum's market penetration combined with the inherently dicatorial culture of corporate governance). But doing it wrong you most certainly are.

This is not one of your complaints of course, but you do complain about estimation, which - as a sibling comment mentions - is simply 'out of scope' for Scrum, which is a smaller package than people think. (Plenty of scrum thought-leadery types are part of the 'No Estimates' thing, for example.) It does, however, mandate that you occasionally meet for the explicit purpose of working out how to improve processes that are not working properly (such as estimation) - in other words, that the team takes seriously as a collective all the things that scrum does not talk about in itself.

> Why are we being asked how long it will take to do work in sections of code we have never seen?

It is common enough for those packs of estimation cards to include one with a question mark on it, to denote the "I can't estimate this sight unseen" scenario. The reason it's common is because often people are presented with stuff that isn't well-understood enough, and it's a very good idea not to pull a number out of one's rear in those situations. Don't be afraid to use that card (or do the equivalent and just say so).

If you are afraid because you will be marked as 'not a team player' or whatever, you have management culture problems that neither Scrum nor any other imaginable software development process will fix on its own. They will all end up feeding an idiotic garbage in/garbage out cycle of overpromising, crunch, burnout and general misery, with the superficial appearance of whatever process it was supposed to be.

> You would never run a class this way

As a literature graduate, this made me laugh. Maybe literature courses are more leisurely stateside, but for me it was a book a week (not 4 to 6 weeks, as OP suggests). That was literally how classes were run.

And it was stupid for the reasons outlined. I remember my class on Ulysses mostly because a) I was acutely conscious of not having been fully keeping up in the 250 pages before the closing chapter and b) when I arrived at class it became clear after about 2 minutes that only I had finished it, because I had read it over the summer break because I was really keen on those bragging rights, but everyone else has tried to read it in one week, which is a doomed endeavour if ever there was one. It would have been a better experience for everyone concerned if more than one person had done the reading, but that was not realistic on the assumption that Ulysses can be polished off in the same time as The Power and the Glory.

I currently work in one week sprints and we do this. Not 100% of the time of course, and it's an internal facing team where the customers are two desks away. But I've also done it on other teams with proper paying customers.

The devil is in the definition. As an example, we have a tool that bootstraps a new Git repo and we're adding a feature that will include our company Rubocop config if it's a Ruby project. There is no reason on earth that this should take 3-5 developers a week to accomplish (never mind two). But it's a feature and it could be useful. And on top of all the other features, the tool is quite useful nowadays compared to the first extremely thin slice we did.

The trick is reducing what you're counting as a feature to the smallest thing that is actually worth bothering to use. It won't always fit into one or two weeks, especially if you're dependent on hardware manufacture, or beholden to the iOS store approval timetable or whatever. But for your line of business SAAS apps there's absolutely no technical reason why you can't do it; there may be human obstacles to doing so. (Hell, maybe we're all wrong and you shouldn't do it.)

That's not quite true - iPads are a huge hit in electronic music for performance and production. Whether that counts as 'revolutionary' is another matter - there was the original Lemur which proved the multitouch MIDI use in principle - but it has created a new software niche market that genuinely is thriving and used for 'proper work'.

What a fine way to rule out of existence almost all subgenres of metal and punk, and all of indie rock, and indeed anything other than bands who do bucket-list arena tours. All this stuff is rock, and millions of people listen to it; the author is merely ignorant.

It's as if somebody were to declare that house music died in 1990, with the only evidence being an analysis of records from that year, and everything subsequent to that year simply ignored.

That is not to say that there's nothing wrong in these scenes, but we then get to the sort of economic arguments he dismisses at the outset; eg, the effect of gentrification on night spots, and so on.

> If removing repetitive code is a requirement then the team needs to be informed that code will be reviewed for repetition, and introduced to various techniques for spotting and removing repetitive code.

Things like this are never requirements, at least in the conventional sense of 'things the stakeholders ask for the software to do'. Nor should they be: it's our job as professionals to know how to do our work. I don't want a PM or sales rep worrying about the Liskov substitution principle (unless I'm working for code climate or something): it's a waste of their time.

Code cleanliness should make future changes easier. Of course, some 'cleaning' expeditions do the opposite, so there should still be code review etc.

I've noticed, in London at least, that there is a new appreciation of the style among hipster millennial types. You can buy maps of 'Brutal London' with all the great examples marked (Goldfinger's tower blocks, Guys hospital, etc). The Barbican Centre has made that part of its cachet.

I can remember the exact moment I fell in love with the style - I was traveling north on a streetcar on Spadina avenue in Toronto, back in 2005, and I caught a glimpse of the John P Robarts library, and it really did change my outlook. I grew up in Plymouth, which was blighted with poor examples of the style imposed on the town after heavy war damage. Much of the hatred of brutalism stems from the contemptuous attitude these planners and architects displayed to the pre-existing urban fabric.

I felt like the only one until about 5 years ago however, then suddenly there was this revival.

Now I'm more into medieval cathedrals, but it's worth noting that 'sophisticated' tastes were against them for centuries (hence the pejorative term Gothic). I don't think anything can be beautiful without irritating somebody ...

The GDPR angle is that this was why they decided to indiscriminately delete inactive accounts. Deceased users are the reason they're delaying it, not the reason they're doing it.

I think the idea is that it's easy to fake excitement until you're asked to spend six hours on a take home test. At which point you'd actually have to be pretty excited to do it.

If it's a sustainable business, I would guess it would be sold off to pay creditors in the event of a wework bankruptcy. So will probably be all right (depending on the buyer, of course).

> Yes, I know some things simply can't be done without a JS webapp, but not all and probably not even a majority, so if HTML and CSS will do the job fine, then so be it; and even if it needs to use JS, it likely doesn't need to be latest-browser-only JS either.

Sticking to HTML and CSS won't necessarily get rid of this - new stuff is being added to CSS all the time, in particular. And browser support is just as patchy.

You could optimise either, I don't think that's the point. It's just a convenience that more clearly expresses the intent of the code where it's used. Imagine an example where the callback to map is quite long; seeing the flatMap identifier alerts you to the fact that the callback returns arrays, even before you start reading.

You'll find equivalents in all the JS utility libraries and most functional programming language standard libraries (and languages like Ruby with functional-ish subsets), so there's a lot of evidence that people who write code in that style like to have such a function available.

> * Resale - By putting stickers on my laptop, I am either going to have to try to remove them again once I come to selling it, lowering my resale price because the laptop isn’t in near pristine condition.

> * Damage - There is a worry that some stickers may leave a horrible hard-to-remove residue, or maybe leave a discolouration to the aluminium.

To which may be added a third - your Mac gets sent off for repair, but repair nowadays means "we take the hard drive out and put it in another Mac because even we can't fix them"

It's a DDoS, apparently:

> We're experiencing a distributed denial of service attack. This affects your ability to login on the web & mobile. It may also create delays sending & receiving mail. We're working with our network provider to resolve this. We'll post more information as it is available.

https://www.fastmailstatus.com/services/general

> Will MIDI 2.0 devices need to use a new connector or cable?

> No, MIDI 2.0 is a transport agnostic protocol.

> That's engineering speak for MIDI 2.0 is a set of messages and those messages are not tied to any particular cable or connector.

There is a slight difference in that all those tools are the basis for their companies' commercial offerings. Google does not sell Go tools or consultancy hours etc. Its interest in Go is to have a programming language that's safe, fast, operationally undemanding and fits the mental model of a recent CS graduate (as per that notorious Rob Pike quote).

This at least makes it easy to work out if incentives are aligned. Do I want to program in such a language? Yes? Then Google is probably not going to completely screw it up, even when they make decisions I disagree with. Do I like to wax rhapsodic about parser combinators? Not ever going to be a good fit.

They're asking for the password to your email account, not your Facebook account.

Further: what about if I'd paid tens of thousands of dollars for a magic hearing aid that could pick out conversations in said Starbucks in which I have a potential business opportunity?

Apparently somebody tried this to get rid of Alex Jones[0]

[0] https://www.adweek.com/digital/twitter-users-are-blocking-hu...

Some friends of mine [0] actually made a puppet opera based on this chap - and a blast it was too.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/video/2017/jan/26/watch-a-...

> To me this ruins the meal.

But at that point you're basically just objecting to all delivery food ever. Which is fine but, like, you are aware that it is a huge industry and has been for decades and people do like it? Convenience trumps artistry (and optimum temperature) for many people a lot of the time.

You may know this already, but there are now several Crystal Maze attractions around the UK.

We did the one in Islington for a work away day, it was pretty sweet. Just about worked for me and I watched the show back in the 90s ...

https://the-crystal-maze.com/

In brief: if the economy is booming, loads of companies want office space. If the economy tanks, loads of companies need to cancel their leases.

WeWork's lifetime has been on the upward slope out of the 2008 crisis. There is a question as to whether they can survive a downturn that at all hits them where it hurts.

I remember, during a thunderstorm, being utterly convinced that a war was being fought outside. I was terrified ...

You could split off the ad selling wing from the rest of it for a start. It would be drastic, for obvious reasons, but forcible de-merging huge businesses is always drastic, cf Hollywood, Ma Bell, and so forth.

Nothing would stop close partnerships but GDPR-style regulation would hopefully stop the most egregiously invasive kinds of data brokerage.

The truth is that regulation is always and everywhere a game of whack a mole, and as long as capitalism exists someone will have to wave the comedy mallet around.

But if the means you choose to demonstrate your sovereignty is to defy a new wave of American sanctions on Iran, then you certainly are choosing Iran over the United States, as a brief glance at any recent news headlines will tell you. The current POTUS, and the large number of congressmen who hate Iran with a rather deranged fervour, will certainly interpret it that way.

Besides which - what is Macron going to do if half the board of BNP Paribas is arrested when they land on US soil for sanctions busting? Invade?

This seems like a very good way for the Europeans to learn how much of the international financial system relies on American goodwill to work as planned.