They worked well for us, we were updating a big system or adding functionality to it and a lot of the features were similar enough that we could reliably break the work down to sub-single sprint chunks and assign consistent story points to them

Though I have only been in one team that lasted more than 3 sprints relatively intact, and it’s only that team that got good at story pointing work

I try really hard when I’m in a scrum master position (my position is pretty chaotic, 20k person organisation, scaled agile, “we need your x skills this program increment, please would you?”) to hide my team’s individual performance from management. Mostly because your can’t compare a system analysts numbers to a mainframe programmer to a mid-range programmer, but also if someone’s not pulling their weight I want to solve the problem within the team where we can approach it as equals before resorting to management “performance review” systems.

The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.

One team might deliver 30 points in a sprint while another delivers 25 and they deliver the same amount of work

Of course management want to be able to use story points for tracking, they want to compare teams using them, so you end up with formulas for how many points to assign

Of course if they score you on points, they get more points, not more work and story points become useless

The estimate is not a promise, it’s a guess. I prefer to estimate in sprints because that’s about the resolution we can have confidence in, but management want hours so my process is to estimate the number of hours in a sprint (73.5 for us) plus one sprint

200% overruns are common, especially when requirements change significantly

Are you sure you can’t make a high entropy memorable password?

My scheme pulls four words at random from a large corpus

KeePass doesn’t rely on any third party, and if you choose to use a third party file storage to hold your password vault, it’s encrypted

My workplace has finally gone to passphrases and 1 year password life, which is nice as it’s a password I often need to type, so I’d rather 20 easy to type and memorise chars than 16 random

Since pixel phones started using one volume button + power for reboot and the other volume button + power for screenshot, I have so many random, useless screenshots

I monthly go into the gallery and delete all the screenshots to keep on top of them

“it’s a bit limited for an operating system”

Thanks. It’s been decades since my last bit of mainstream Catholic education

Instead they’re probably paying Canonical

If you’re a complex machine whose action could be perfectly predicted (with full knowledge of everything you ever experienced) it’s still reasonable to punish you for breaking rules - the risk of punishment goes into your programming as part of the (deterministic) calculation of what action to take

I reckon we are so incredibly complex, are integrating so much information that from inside it’s hard to see if you’re deciding or selecting by rule your preferred path given what you know

You can call the complexity free will, we’re all so different having had different parents, different childhood experiences, different education, different opportunities so each has their own solution that rises to the top in any situation

But also brain scans have demonstrated that for minor stuff (like raising your hand) action precedes “deciding” to take the action.

I don’t think believing in fate (or a plan) is strongly correlated with atheism

That doesn’t work. People with crap lives often can’t meet the standards of goodness that many forms of Christianity need for you to be qualified for heaven

Depends on the flavour of Christianity

At one end unforgiven sins condemn you to the ancient Greek underworld, slightly modified

At the other end you land in limbo if you haven’t been perfect for a time that fits, thence to heaven for the rest of forever

Beyond that end, their god is infinitely forgiving so everyone goes straight to heaven.

Don’t worry, they don’t read the Bible, and especially don’t read the old testament.

They believe they have god given freedom of action

I think they are saying that discord is bad because it is not Free software, that it is bad because it is a commercial service

Yep. Guy had his life pretty much ruined. Don’t tether your life to a company — they don’t care about you, they have no duty toward you

There was that man who was all in on Google.

He had a telemedicine appointment for his son who had a problem with his penis. Dr asked him to send a close-up photo so he could diagnose the skin condition

So the guy takes the photo with his pixel phone and sends it

The phone automatically backs up the photo

Google’s AI says it’s child porn, his account is deleted and police are contacted

Police look into it and say “not porn, totally fine” but have to go to his house to tell him the was no problem because his phone was Google, his internet was Google fibre, his email was Gmail and his photo album was on Google and all that was irrevocably deleted