:)

NO bald. NO nuance.

"OP you forgot –" stickers will be awarded for CREATIVITY, but you guys don't get a button.

Got this locally dyed wool at the coast in October! I was so hyped that the LYS we found had spinning stuff. Colorway is Stargazer on rambouillet by Hearth Rest. So soft so bounce so pretty colors 🐑 chain plied to maintain the gradient

Sometimes it is possible for there to be a many-months-long effort in software engineering where the instructions from leadership are "go as fast as possible, don't think decisions through, just do things, because time is the most important factor, be as fast as possible" and so a bunch of people get together to make a shittier and shittier train which is only designed to go as fast as possible and all the bolts are wiggling loose under the momentum and sometimes you're like "the bolts are super concerning. the 1 million loose bolts are super concerning. and everything else. i dont like to look at this. im not even sure that's salvageable" and leadership says "train should be faster" and you're not even the fastest train because the shitty huffing wiggling-apart locomotive is being overtaken by other trains that spent longer on the train engineering and then your train derails and gets all crashed up in the grass and is a lot of crashed up busted train pieces all in the grass and leadership is like "okay just put it back on the track and make it go fast" and I don't know how to tell you how much a crashed up train rolling down the hill into the nearest river below is never going to actually be a good fast train.

So so so much this OP. There’s this idea that “get it working shoddily and quickly so you can get the customers and the money then fix the issues with the money” and while there are a lot of problems with that mindset the one that drives me crazy is the idea that getting it working shoddily is easier and cheaper and quicker than getting it working right. This isn’t naivety because the naive position is actually that, of course shoddy engineering is quicker than good engineering. But in my experience it’s so much easier and quicker to build the second half of the building if the first half of the building isn’t actively collapsing underneath you. But management loves to be like “the people living on the first story of the building don’t mind the walls swaying, so just build the second story of the building on top real quick and then we can reinforce the first story.” And I’m going insane because it’s so much harder and worse to build the second story of a building on top of a swaying first story but what do I know.

(This is still about software development.)

I largely blame this on corporate leadership hearing about “agile development” without understanding anything about it. For those who are unfamiliar it’s a framework that aims to “fail fast” in the prototyping phase, incorporate frequent end user feedback, and deliver in small increments that provide value to the user. This is not solely a software methodology. It’s also rarely actually implemented with those goals.

Instead of implanting the full framework, leadership will nod along and hear fail fast, deliver often to the customer and ignore if it’s actually a useful improvement or even a working one. They cut the customer feedback loop out because it “slows things down” and “development should be fast.”

Instead of consistent research and outreach by product owners, the role is boiled down to being a “tell the team this is what they’re making” role with all of the time spent refining the backlog. Dev just hears “here’s your next two weeks of work, get it done faster so our velocity increases” while decisions are made in an echo chamber.

It’s become a game of improving KPIs instead of properly scoping projects based on what the team can take on. It’s become “qa isn’t a listed role so it’s not needed” instead of qa being an active participant in engineering. It’s soul sucking instead of encouraging useful ideas and iterating with end users.

Because profit is more important than the customer. And all they see is output=profit. Until it tanks because it’s become unusable. And that’s no longer that corporate leaderships problem because they sold the company the moment before everything broke, and the cult following never saw it coming.

Portland's crow population not only rebounded from West Nile Virus a couple decades ago, but has exploded! Thousands of them migrate toward downtown every evening to roost in the trees. I get to watch them flying over my apartment, at a time I call "Crow O'Clock." This video shows a relatively small gathering I saw while out and about yesterday.