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#clojure-uk
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2019-05-03
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guy06:05:29

Morning!

dominicm06:05:23

What is everyone's wfh routine?

dharrigan06:05:48

I usually lock myself away (figuratively speaking) into my man-cave (i.e., attic) once I've taken care of family responsibilities, with a warning to DnD until I emerge...and I usually ensure I'm wearing at least some clothes.

dharrigan07:05:48

then, I treat it much like I'm in the office, but with vastly less disturbance (I loathe open-plan offices)

otfrom07:05:47

my wfh routine is pretty much the same as my normal old working routine, but my commute is shorter

otfrom07:05:20

get up make breakfast eat breakfast shower dress (layers depending on the coldness and draftiness of the house and who I'll be on camera with that day, a tshirt and shorts are fine for work, but collar if on a vid call w/a client) work from 8:30ish finish work 6ish

otfrom07:05:57

when I'm in London my commute is a 1-3 mile cycle ride depending on where I'm staying rather than a 30 second walk to my office

dominicm07:05:38

I usually get up at 06:00, so I work from 06:30 in my pyjamas, and depending on whether I take lunch I'll finish at 14:00 or 15:00.

Conor07:05:34

Drop son off at school, quick walk around the park opposite, mess around until 0900, then start doing things

otfrom07:05:42

@dominicm do you work with others in the UK or different time zones?

dominicm08:05:00

I do work with others in the UK, but they're not generally blocking on me. They can ping me on slack of desperate.

dominicm08:05:37

Those in other countries mean I finish a little earlier, then join the stand-up after.

otfrom07:05:45

I also try to get 2-3 bike rides up to 1 hour in the week. Otherwise I wouldn't move much

otfrom07:05:51

15-30 miles m-f and then another 15-30 at the weekend

otfrom07:05:53

Sit ups while my post stand-up tea brews and push ups before lunch

thomas07:05:49

@ben.hammond you got some CRC errors as well. I'd say keep an eye on it and see how if it gets worse. If yes then replace.

👍 4
alexlynham08:05:42

I tend to get up between 7 and 8, do half an hour (or an hour if I’m not cycling in to the shared working space) then work mostly til about 5 with a couple of decent breaks if I have chores to run

alexlynham08:05:12

even if I start super early I’d probably keep IMs open until 5-6 just in case something blows up

dharrigan08:05:46

Man, there's a lot of healthy living going on here.

dharrigan08:05:02

I usually plonk myself down in front of my computer and hours pass.

alexlynham08:05:55

I want to get better at doing a ride during the day if I’m fully WFH, but I find once I’m in flow it’s difficult to break out at a natural stopping point

otfrom08:05:50

I generally have enough meetings in the day due to my role that I can find good breaks to do things.

mccraigmccraig09:05:19

generally i get up about 07:00, sort kids out, drop them off at school 08:45, down to work about 09:00 although sometimes i get up proper early and go for a ride, also getting down to work around 09:00 - the only way i can ever fit a ride in is to do it before work or after work @alex.lynham

alexlynham09:05:06

hmmm yeah that’s why I find the commute useful

alexlynham09:05:09

although half the time I cycle in about 10 to 9 or so after having done a bit at home and nobody has opened the office yet so I arrive at 9:20 and have to frantically do the shutters and fire escape etc before standup lol

otfrom09:05:42

what time do people have stand up at (if you have a stand up at all?)

otfrom09:05:53

we do 9:30, have done 10 before to accommodate commutes

maleghast09:05:53

@otfrom - We do 1100h, for lots of reasons, but it works for us. We're not fully committed to ceremony though, at the moment, as we only have Stand Up Mon, Weds, Fri rather than every day.

alexlynham09:05:32

9:30, you gotta get it out of the way asap or it breaks flow imo

alexlynham09:05:26

or if people can be concise/you have an egg timer, 9:50-10am is great

otfrom09:05:38

I do still like having the stand up. Otherwise with a distributed team you could go days or longer w/o speaking to some people.

dharrigan09:05:10

We've abandoned standups at our place of work

dharrigan09:05:38

As we didn't find it very useful for us.

otfrom09:05:48

we consider it every once in a while and then decide to keep them

otfrom09:05:14

@dharrigan how do your days and weeks work then?

otfrom09:05:25

(I know they can do, just wondering how yours do)

dharrigan09:05:02

We're a small(ish) office, so we all pretty much know what we're (all) doing.

otfrom09:05:21

so wfh is an occasional thing for you?

otfrom09:05:35

the rest of the time is an ongoing mind meld?

maleghast09:05:40

Ah yes, not distributed, so StandUps might be extra to requirement in that case

dharrigan09:05:55

Our standups descended into "I'm doing what I did yesterday" type of conversation, so we felt we could just keep the communication going via day-to-day slack/coffee breaks etc...

dharrigan09:05:30

seems to work for us. Even people working from home, they aren't "gone" that many days that causes a desync on what they are doing and what we (in the office) are doing.

otfrom09:05:59

is it mostly product work or do you have client projects you have to deal with too?

dharrigan09:05:06

In the end, we felt that people are adults, that developers like to just get on and do things (solve problems), so having standups was (in our view) treating people like kindergardeners

dharrigan09:05:37

People are, for the most part, trustworthy in ensuring they get their work done.

dharrigan09:05:13

Seems to work for us, since dropping standups, the morale in the office has greatly increased.

otfrom09:05:14

that is a very dark view of the purpose of standups, but if that was where you were/are I can understand why you dumped them

thomas09:05:35

I go to the office 99% of the time and I tend to work for 4 or 5 different clients/projects. sometimes multiple a day, which kinda sucks, but usually 2 or 3 in a week. And on some of those projects I am the only one... so no stand up for me.

dharrigan09:05:48

Personally, I've been doing so-called-agile since 2001 (I remember being introduced to the white book etc..) back then and truth be told, in all my years of experience, working for a multitude of companies, agile/standups is nothing more than a marketing scam....

dharrigan09:05:31

Unless a company does agile from top to bottom, completely 100% across the board, in all departments, then there will always be conflict, dissatisfaction and resentment

dharrigan09:05:42

and no company, from what I've seen, does that.

otfrom09:05:43

I agree with that

thomas09:05:52

but today there is hardly anyone in the office... and I need help on the issue I am stuck on... so I am started hacking on a neo4j project I have been thinking about for a long time... Only problem with that is I don't yet know how to make sure they turn into billable hours :thinking_face:

otfrom09:05:04

for me standup is about planning out the day and seeing if we need to change the plan for the rest of the week based on any thing we've learned. We're small enough that operations, sales, and delivery are all in the standup tho

dharrigan09:05:26

@otfrom living the dream... 🙂

otfrom09:05:00

had to start my own company to do that. 😉, but then that is also how I got to do clojure and work on things that are important to me

otfrom09:05:04

or interesting

otfrom09:05:12

and often both 😉

otfrom09:05:51

I liked crystal most as a method as it is about thinking if you have agile principles rather than doing the agile practices of something like scrum or xp

otfrom09:05:27

I think there is a lot there and other places to steal, but I think the only important things to do are to keep talking, reflect on what you've done, and then decide how you'll make things better

otfrom09:05:47

everything else should be a result of that

otfrom09:05:07

pairing, mobbing, stand ups, planning, fixed time iterations, kanban, tdd, roles, responsibilities <- all of those and more are just things that the team should be deciding how to do, even if they decide to do something like try "vanilla" scrum

👍 8
otfrom09:05:51

(not saying I'm perfect in any of this by any means, but it is what I try for)

otfrom09:05:33

same with making a distributed and flexible company too and trying to be a diverse one

rickmoynihan11:05:00

I got into XP/agile/wards-wiki/c2 etc back in 2001 in a big way when I was a student, and even introduced and sold the whole thing to my project supervisor; who subsequently made a bit of a career out of it as she got it on the curriculum, published a bunch of papers on pair programming, TDD, CI, became a scrum master before becoming Dean of the school of computing… Anyway since then I find industry adoption largely to be cargo-culted these days… agile has lost pretty much all meaning as it’s grown into an industry that focuses almost entirely on the practices and check-listing. I completely 💯% agree with @otfrom on this: > I think the only important things to do are to keep talking, reflect on what you’ve done, and then decide how you’ll make things better I’d say aside from the guiding principles the most important thing is to think about what you’re doing, and try and improve the flow of work etc… the practices exist to solve problems, you can pick, choose and disregard just about any of them — it’s all trade offs always, so you need hammock time to reflect on these and an organisational/cultural willingness to improve, reorganise and empower people to change things.

rickmoynihan11:05:38

My big problem with it is the myth that if you just follow the practices something good is guaranteed to fall out. I find cargo-culted-agile frequently refuses to acknowledge that thinking deeply about something can be a much more important factor in delivering good software.

👍 8
jasonbell11:05:25

@rickmoynihan Even Martin Fowler now thinks that “90% of Agile is bulls**t”

rickmoynihan12:05:50

I know right…

rickmoynihan12:05:05

I think there are also some things that agile is just fundamentally bad at. Some solutions you can’t just incrementally iterate towards. Some things need to be invented, or designed up front.

Ben Hammond12:05:08

I do hate the way that Ctrl-C means either 'Copy' or 'Kill REPL'

💯 4
Ben Hammond12:05:51

what I really want is a seperate numeric keypad dedicated to sending Unix Signals and then disable signals from the main keyboard

Ben Hammond12:05:24

protected from accidental usage by a plastic cover

Ben Hammond12:05:34

and some barbed wire

Ben Hammond12:05:40

and a shark-tank

Ben Hammond12:05:46

with frikkin lasers

otfrom13:05:12

@rickmoynihan and @dharrigan sounds like we came to agile at around the same time and have the same problems with Agile as practised nowadays. I think most Agile suffers from people cargo culting as you say and still having a fundamentally Taylorist time and motion attitude towards this kind of work. Add to that the problems in the rest of an organisation and things can get quite bad.

rickmoynihan13:05:23

Agreed. I think you’re bang on about the taylorist time and motion attitudes.

👍 4
otfrom13:05:21

people don't want to give up their illusion of control

rickmoynihan13:05:21

yeah — definitely. I once travelled to London for a 3hr meeting with a customer where the agenda was for the three different technical teams (the customers, us and a 3rd party supplier) to get together and discuss and resolve a complex, subtle and serious data issue at the boundary of the 3 systems. Unfortunately the customer had bought into big-A Agile in a big way (15 years after everyone else) and had paid agile consultants to host all such meetings. The consultant railroaded the whole meeting, without ever looking at the agenda or realising that the project had been running successfully for 6 months, she didn’t even know that two of the groups of people were customer suppliers. Instead of letting the people who needed to speak, and tackle the issue at hand she insisted on making us doing stupid exercises… lots of post its, planning poker that kinda thing for pretty much the entire 3 hours. She kept promising it would blow our minds, and be the most amazing meeting ever. The actual discussion about the real issues happened in the 5 minutes as we were all packing our bags and leaving. Thankfully we never saw her again… though I suspect she was just rotating across random meetings, disrupting them all with her fingers in her ears.

otfrom13:05:18

oh dear, yeah, I've bumped into that before

dharrigan13:05:18

There's gold in them thar hills!

otfrom14:05:24

tho I remember enough of pre-agile days to not want to return to them either, so I'd rather take the good things of agile and move on. I'm not too fussed about the name except as a way of being able to communicate with people

thomas14:05:29

sounds like a great meeting @rickmoynihan I bet the scrum master made more in those 3 hours then any of us makes in a month.

thomas14:05:21

so from their perspective it was a success.

dharrigan14:05:40

@rickmoynihan trying out your repl/rebl middlware thingie

rickmoynihan14:05:41

yeah, I need to do some more work on that 😬

dharrigan14:05:29

I'm using the deps.edn approach

rickmoynihan14:05:56

that works too

rickmoynihan14:05:44

you should also be able to bump the versions to the latest REBL… I did it yesterday and it seemed fine

dharrigan14:05:45

yup, it seems to work - just one curious hang so far 🙂

dharrigan14:05:52

Yup, running latest

rickmoynihan14:05:11

are you on mac or another platform?

dharrigan14:05:45

The Only One True OS (tm) 🙂

rickmoynihan14:05:54

should be fine then 🙂

rickmoynihan14:05:49

there’s an annoying issue on macos where by the REBL window when launched with the cider-middleware becomes detached from cmd tabbing and other basic windowing focussing behaviours. I need to debug it; but suspect cider-middleware is doing something funky somewhere

dharrigan14:05:46

I'm still learning and discovering what fits me best

dharrigan14:05:57

so long as it (whatever it is) works with vim, I'm happy