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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • I asked gpt for code to aim a heliostat

    It needed a module to get the sun’s position, it used sun::alt:: azimuth which doesn’t exist rather than Astro::Coord::ECI::Sun

    It needed a module to calculate mirror angle between the Sun’s altitude and azimuth and the target altitude and azimuth. It left that commented out rather than selecting the altitude halfway between Sun and target and azimuth between Sun and azimuth

    It turns out there’s precious little on the internet on how to aim a mirror, partly because it’s not popular, partly because it’s dead simple



  • 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











  • 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.