TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

I once worked Tech Support for a point of sale software package. There was really no internal help desk, so we got all of those questions as well.

One day our front receptionist that her computer is being really weird and she can't type - it keeps inserting 3s in the middle of what she is typing.

I take the short walk down the hall to her desk and see that, indeed, a never ending string of 3s is being input to her screen.

"I can't figure out what's wrong." she says.

Then I reach over and remove the edge of an open binder whose edge was resting on the 3 key and enter key on the num pad.

"That should fix it."

Walked back to my desk.

This morning my girlfriend told me about the network at her school constantly disconnecting, to which I jokingly replied "So, it doesn't deserve candy". She came back with "But it's already asking for so many cookies"...

I love my girlfriend, but sometimes she doesn't get dev-work.
Last night, we had a fight over me sticking post-its to the wall in our home office. I find them helpful for keeping an overview of what I'm working on. She finds them ugly and decided to tear them all down without conferring with me. I got pissed. I almost always give in to her quirks and wants in every other aspect of how we live, so I feel like my desk space should at least be under my control. In my anger, I ordered her out of the room. She then proceeded to be sulking/angry with me up till and including this morning "because I overreacted".

Was I wrong? What should I have done differently?

You know a good way to handle all of the issues with W10 force updating your system? Do it yourself FFS!

You know there are updates. Windows has been telling you ...

Pick a damn time, start the update and go get a coffee, lunch, take a dump or go home for the day.

It's *never* going to be the right time if you don't choose it. It will always be an inconvenience or you'll be "in the middle of something important" and then you'll get all pissy about it.

Yeesh ...

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

Management proposed to work with external freelancers, to "pick up speed so we can release these new designs sooner". We agreed, but of course we (the home team) can't have time to review their work because we need to develop other new features and bugfixes and such...
Weeks later, turns out that their changes are largely incompatible with the work we have been doing on the main branch. We are now rebasing/rewriting huge chunks of their work, probably taking as much time as it would have cost us to develop the design ourselves in the first place.

I spent the last 5 hours solving this FUCKING GREAT challenge and I'm finally done 🎉

It's hxp CTF btw, check it out

Started a new job at a big firm (previously came from a startup). Both do "scrum". Still have my mind blown because at the new job, we have people join the standup of which NOBODY in the team knows what their role is on the product...
Does this happen often in big corporates?

Ugh. That may have been a mistake.

I'm deep in a large effort to refactor my project. It's a one man deal and something I've been working on pretty much every day in some fashion for nearly 10 years (five years ago I started a scratch rewrite to move from a fully CGI server rendered application to a browser rendered asynchronous version built around JS) and that took me three years.

I started this refactor about 8 weeks ago. Turns out I've been tackling the largest modules and progress has been decent. So that's good.

But I got to wondering ... Just how much code is there?

So I whipped up a quick script to do some calculations. Read each file and get a line and word count, skipping empty lines.

In JS it turns out I have 83,973 lines and 467,683 words.

On the back end, 86,230 lines and 580,422 words.

Average publishing stats say the are about 250 words/printed page.

That means I'm confronting refactoring 1,870 pages of JS. That's the size of several decent sized novels. (I think I've done the equivalent of Maybe 400 at this point).

Makes me feel like the walls are creeping in to know how much is left to go ...

Oh thanks Windows. I wasn't working. And that Windows 10 upgrade I very specifically confirmed as cancelled ... yeah, go ahead and start that installation with no warning, while I'm working, sitting at a Starbucks that will eventually close and cutoff my ready access to power on a device with limited battery life, probably before you finish the update.

I don't mind sitting here twiddling my thumbs while you do your thing ...

Not that I didn't plan to upgrade, I actually like Windows 10 ... but it wasn't on the agenda for this particular moment.

o.O

Recently .. (28. Jan) .. Bluetooth 5.1 spec was released containing among other things, the abillity to detect the angle of recieved or sent signal using phased array antenas. I am exited as ... as ... i dont know what but this is amazing for indoor location uses ... cant wait to get hands on dev kit.
Anybody else fidling with BL tech ?

Even 30 minutes / day will accumulate over time to complete project.

Blindly copy pasted and executed commands from tutorial.
Just because it was faster to reformat sd card in the worst case ( raspberry pi ) than figure out what each one did.

Just got done watching a 2 1/2 hours of Uncle Bob on programming. I really like his style of speaking. Great data and interesting viewpoints. Really easy to follow. I'd read some of his articles, but never listened to him before. Will definitely be watching more. For those of you in organizations using "agile" development and having a tough time of it, his talk called The Land that Scrum Forgot was really interesting.

And he really looks amazingly like my uncle, Tom, who's also been a programmer for decades! So I just think of him as Uncle Tom instead.

Generally have great experience with our management.
I work at a scale-up, so I've had some run-ins with the founder shifting priorities too often in the early days, but he's got enough notion of tech to understand when we're telling about the why(not)s of what we can and can't do
A while back we got a product owner/manager/scrum master and he's great too. I've had times when he put pressure on making deadlines when it was really not helping, but overall great guy with a lot of empathy and respect for his team.

But recently I've been starting to feel like we (the dev team) are getting more and more excluded from the decision-making process of the features & designs that we're going to be working on. We used to have a say in what we felt like was a good idea for a feature or a design, but it feels to me like we don't get asked that question any more of late...

Not sure if I'm imagining it, or overreacting to a logical (possibly positive?) evolution in our development workflow...

Recently i switched from using git with gui tools to just console, and love the speed and reliability increase, but guys do you really resolve merge conflicts in console? Is it effective/worth getting used to?

1, someone breaks public/private key encryption
2, watch the world burn
3, people will understand that this rant is just a joke

Is it me, or does Enki include a question that just doesn't make sense every now and again?

Tl;dr any tips for new scrum team ? How to start with story points with people that dont know eachother?

More:
Its for our team project at uni ( 8 people 1 year). Yesterday we had our first meeting and the hardest part was asigning story points. Or asigning some benchmark value for story point.
Looking for some practicall tips since uni gives us all the theory we need. ( Does not mean I know all the theory :D )

Bloody softlayer sending notifications about expected downtime on "IMS services" (which could mean any of a great number of things), without specifying what it is, what it does or to what services or regions it is related...
Grmbl, what use is there to get a notification about unexpected maintenance if you can't even make out if you'll be affected or not!