July 2020 – Software and Other Shenanigans

Scrum’s not that bad

General Commentary, Work Comments Off

Jul 312020

Generally speaking, when a software development organization says that they’re going or practicing agile development, they mean they’re following the Scrum methodology. Most jokes about doing software development have nothing to do idiosyncrasies of programming itself (Gary Bernhardt’s classic “Wat” presentation notwithstanding), but rather about dealing with Scrum. I get the frustration, As fun as it is to make fun of Scrum (and I’ve made my fair share of jokes about it), I really do think it’s a good development process (when done well), and that we would do well to keep it in mind. So having said that, here’s my attempt to defend Scrum.

Don’t try to out-think your users

General Commentary, Programming Comments Off

Jul 042020

Few things are as annoying as when you have a device that tries to be helpful and is completely, and utterly, wrong. Not only are you not gaining any convenience, because you still have to go back and fix it, but psychologically it feels worse because instead of making things better and doing things automatically for you, you’re having to go back and do it yourself anyways. If these were settings users can easily change, then it’s a minor inconvenience because we can update a configuration and be done with it. Sadly, that’s not the case, especially with devices that are supposed to be “smart” and thus figure it our without us having to do anything, or software that doesn’t expose these settings to users.