Category: mundane

Scrum and story points

At work, we use the Scrum methodology to organise our work. Without a certified scrummaster to whom we can refer, we end up making it up and adapting as we go.

I keep getting questions about “story points” and I feel like I’m not answering them correctly nor adequately. Here are some professional scrummasters taking on this topic:

A coworker suggested that it’s a way to indicating how big of a margin of error there is on an item, i.e. the more complex something is, the more likely our time estimate’s going to be off. That’s a very good insight to tie it into the time, but I think there’s definitely more to it than that. For one, you can’t fill a sprint completely with highly complex item, even if they fall well within the timebox; your team will likely get frustrated and burn out. I think it says more about how hard something is, how much unknowns are involved, and other hazy, hand-wavy gut-feel things that are not easy to measure.

The reason why they are not easy to measure is because your team is made of humans who vary from one another from one day to the next. Refactoring five major classes might be easy for one guy, while another has an easier time upgrading to a new framework. Last Friday I was having a terrible time condensing my research and thoughts into words; today I can’t stop writing.

A hazy metric like story points is a pretty fit for measuring complexity, especially for items that don’t require immediate inspection. It strikes me as something that is really only useful for the Product Owner, so it only needs to be as good as the PO needs it, which isn’t really fine-grained. (I think I’m in most agreement with Mike Cohn’s view on using story points.)

Yes, I’m a quitter

Recently, I left my reasonably secure job at Public Works and Government Services Canada to join a start-up. The timing is not, as some might say, ideal—we’re expecting our first baby in October—but I decided to make the leap anyway.

My job description remains pretty much the same: I’m still a web developer working under the direction of someone else’s vision. But so far, in the last three months, I’m working 200% harder and I’m 1000% happier.

Probably the top reason is the lack of corporate firewall… Not only is it unfeasible to maintain a firewall for the purposes of controlling employee productivity here (as it is pretty nearly anywhere), there just really isn’t a need. And we didn’t have to write long-winded business casses to convince anyone that we don’t need one… we just knew.

Another thing I really love is that I don’t have to wait for some manager to “go to bat” for me if I want something changed. I can just go to talk to the CEO in the next room and talk to him about stuff.

What else is there?

An overdue response to It takes a lot to render me speechless: The question that stumps Steve — “You’re telling us not to just get in a race for the traditional rewards,” [the young man] said. “But what else is there?” — is the one that I’ll try to answer here. First of all, let’s lay out what I think “traditional rewards” refers to:

  • wealth
  • good grades in school
  • successful career (could further define this as one that supports a particular lifestyle, which is tied into wealth)
  • fame and admiration
  • ownership of things

None of these are bad per se and don’t feel bad for striving for them. However, recognise that these are all extrinsic rewards.

Extrinsic rewards come from outside of the self. It relies on the co-operation of another individual or system who happens to value the reward. Again, that’s not bad per se — this is how trade happens and helps us work together and co-exist/co-depend. But the value of extrinsic rewards quickly depreciate once you get them — you will always want more to stay “happy.” Worse, over-reliance on extrinsic values mean you lose touch with the intrinsic, making it all the more tricky to understand them later.

Again, extrinsic values are not bad. But in order to maintain their value and usefulness, they need to be grounded with intrinsic values.

Everyone already has a set of intrinsic values, whether they know it or not. It’s probably the second biggest motivator of our day-to-day decisions (habit being the first). Understanding these values, and separating them from extrinsic ones, is the key to balance and grounded-ness (and, eventually, to bliss).

What are some intrinsic values?

  • strength of will
  • autonomy
  • discipline
  • self-sufficiency
  • enjoyment of what I do
  • relaxation
  • quality time with friends/family

A need for wealth can be driven by the need for autonomy and self-sufficiency. That’s OK. Being grounded in my intrinsic values, I know I need just enough wealth to maintain autonomy and self-sufficiency, but I don’t need wealth beyond that. Also, I can find other means to increase autonomy (by working for myself) or self-sufficiency (learn to grow my own food) which doesn’t require an increase in wealth.

Steve’s lament is that “success by conventional standards” in this day and age doesn’t emphasise intrinsic values enough, and that conventional schooling (which can be whatever you think that means — arguing this point is out of the scope of this entry) doesn’t give us enough help to find them.

It’s not so hopeless, though. I was once just like the young man. Somewhere along the way I came to understand that what I need is different from what other people have been telling me I need. Maybe this young man will one day fill up that “hole in his soul,” too.

Every little bit helps

For some reason, whenever I’m doing/reading something green there’s always a little part of my mind that starts getting defensive. Here are some of the criticisms to a variety of loosely-related subjects that pop into my mind now and then. The theme, though, is that every little bit helps.

“The hundred mile diet isn’t attainable for everyone. It’s only for rich food snobs in rich food snobbish cities!”

It’s true that the current food industry doesn’t make local food affordable for everyone. But for those of us who can afford it, we should. I think it’s our responsibility as citizens and neighbours to push the market towards good. We can tip the scale towards making good food more affordable and sustainable. There isn’t a good enough metric out there for measuring what’s “good”, so it’s based on the best of our combined scientific knowledge and experience—healthy, tasty food.

Also, yes, there are many places in the world who cannot naturally sustain a local food industry, or can no longer do it, or is trying but isn’t quite there yet. Some places rely on imported foods. It’s not a good or bad thing—it is what it is. They can do something else that’s sustainable… maybe by reducing the energy consumption in other ways, by promoting local crafts or by banning motor vehicles. But that’s no excuse for us to not do it. Just because not everyone can do it doesn’t mean we can’t do it. In fact, isn’t that more reason for us to do better, in order to make up for the parts of the world who can’t? If we can do it, we must. Same goes for anywhere else in the world who can.

“Solar panels are not green to produce/biodiesel still causes major pollution issues/ethanol takes more energy to create than it produces/nuclear energy isn’t totally clean/organic food isn’t sustainable, you know.”

I’ll start by acknowledging that all of the above statements are fairly true. HOWEVER, doing so makes sense in some odd circumstances where it does make sense, and they should damn well do it. Many of these “solutions” don’t scale well at all, and many of them don’t make sense here in Vancouver. If you installed a solar panel in your Yaletown condo, I’d be pretty sceptical that you have the special circumstance for that to make sense, but you know what? At least you’re trying.

Oil and gas doesn’t make sense or scales well, but it became the norm regardless. The “new norm” doesn’t have to make perfect sense or scale perfectly well to be “better.”

The fact that the new solutions don’t make sense in their current form certainly shouldn’t stop us from investigating how to make them make sense in more circumstances (or in any at all). Some of us need to be the guinea pigs to try out the flawed technologies in order to see, empirically, what the flaws are. Let’s not ridicule them too much without also giving them props for trying!

And here are some outright myths which are only myths because they’re so damn vague. Actually, if you use this as an excuse to not be green then I think you lack skills in thinking critically, anyway. So I’m not going to put a lot of work into these.

“It’s expensive”

It is. But if you considering the true cost of not it, then that is humongously expensive too, far more so than being green. It’s only cheap now because most of it is subsidised by how we have collectively decided to not value our resources very much.

Being green is expensive, but it shouldn’t stop you from doing your part. In fact, it gets a lot less expensive if you subscribe to minimalism and “appropriatism.” Give away what you don’t use. If you need to buy some new gewgaw, check if you can get it second hand, then if you can get it locally, then go to the store. Actually, first check if you really need it. Go without it for two weeks. At the end of two weeks, have you made through life happily without it? Then you probably don’t need it.

I remember an old friend saying this, and I paraphrase because I’ve forgotten his exact words, back when eating organic food in the now-hippietastic Vancouver was still a bit newagey: “Most people I know can afford to eat completely organic.” It’s true. You might not be able to see a new movie every weekend, or have nice new clothes from American Apparel every week. You might not be able to own ten pairs of shoes. But you’ll eat delicious food.

Actually, I have friends who have many pairs of shoes and eat nearly 100% local/organic nowadays. It’s really not that hard anymore. If they have student loans and can still afford it, so can you.

Being green is expensive. But you don’t have to go all the way. Even buying only from consignment stores, bringing your own grocery bag, or choosing to be weekday vegetarian, is doing a lot of good. It’s better than doing nothing at all.

“But it’s all greenwash”

It takes some acuity to figure out what’s actually good for us and what isn’t. Admittedly it isn’t easy. But learning to distinguish between what’s greenwash and not is, in the end, a rewarding skill. And there are ways to cheat, too—if you avoid processed food, you avoid having to learn about how to see through different greenwashing techniques used by food manufacturers. If you can sew and mend you own clothing, you don’t have to pay attention to which companies are having the latest labour scandal.

And we all make mistakes… but we can, and should, focus on minimising our wrongs and maximising our rights. That’s all we can ask for anyway.

Whew, that’s a lotta text. If you can think of any objections to being green, bring it here and see if I can debunk it!

There’s bad magic, and there’s good magic

I already miss Scotland. The Highlands and the Islands both have special places in my heart.

M and I started looking at the possibility of working and living there. I wonder if I would fall out of love with a place if I have to work in it. L mentioned that he started to like Vancouver more when he stopped working. There is probably a lot of truth in that. Can I fall in love with Vancouver again? By carving out a small patch of magical space for myself and my loved ones where we never worked and only played?

I feel I should connect with something deeper in this area somehow, something that’s not just about working from day to day. Yes, I miss the cloud bursts and the high winds, but truly I think I just miss the feeling of “something grander.” Do Parisians appreciate the grandeur and romanticism of their city?

How can Vancouverites claim that this is the best city in the world when it lacks so much? Why don’t Parisians brag about Paris? It seems almost like they don’t have to—anyone who has visited there just knows its value. Bragging is for kids. Kids like the Vancouvers of the world.

It’s so weird to hear Londoners and Parisians yearn for the spaciousness of North America, the great outdoors, etc. etc. The grass is just that much greener on the other side… but especially so in Scotland.

MySQL coldfusion connector and null dates

I copied some databases from MS SQL Server to MySQL and this came up:

`MySQL Cannot Convert Value ’0000-00-00 00:00:00′ From Column XX To TIMESTAMP`

[The fix](http://www.bennadel.com/blog/1434-MySQL-Cannot-Convert-Value-0000-00-00-00-00-00-From-Column-XX-To-TIMESTAMP.htm) is to put this in the cf data source connection string:

zeroDateTimeBehavior=convertToNull

Apache with Coldfusion, PHP, and ruby on Ubuntu

This is for setting up everything to appear under http://localhost/, i.e. http://localhost/phpmyadmin and http://localhost/redmine. I did it “properly” with aliases (mostly) and stuff.

I don’t know if anyone else would want this crazy set up, but here it is for posterity.

First install apache2 with sudo apt-get install apache2. Test it out in http://localhost/. If it says it works, it works.

Download Coldfusion from the Adobe site. MX7 supposedly has kinks with installing on Linux, so get 8 or 9. I’m using 8. chmod u+x the binary and then run it. Follow the prompts and let it configure apache for you; don’t use the standalone server. The standalone server probably eats resources like mad, though I eschewed it mainly for sanity since I wanted apache to do it all. Feels less dirty.

sudo apt-get install php5. Then aptitude search php | grep apache to get the necessary mods if it’s not installed already.

sudo apt-get install ruby rubygems ruby-dev and also look through aptitude for the necessary mod. You need the ruby-dev to install stuff later with gems.

I’ve stuck my project files in my homedir because I prefer easy access from my homedir. Some peeps say this is not as safe, but for local sandboxy development it’s grood.

Now lets install us some gems. sudo gems install passenger come to mind, and install whatever else it says you need. If it installs stuff to your ~/.gem folder because you didn’t call it with sudo, rm -rf .gems and redo it properly this time, you nonce.

Now to put it all together in your /etc/apache2/ confs:

The CF installer should have written something to the httpd.conf. Again, for sanity’s sake, I moved this into its own file in conf-available then symlinked it in conf-enable.

In the now-blank httpd.conf, put in: 

LoadModule passenger_module /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby
DirectoryIndex index.phtml index.php index.php3 index.shtml index.html index.htm index.cfm

And rig up the necessary aliases in sites-available/default:

RailsBaseURI /redmine
<Directory "/var/www/redmine/">
        Options Indexes ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
        Options -MultiViews
        AllowOverride all
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
</Directory>

Redmine was the only one that I couldn’t get to go just with an alias, so I cheated and symlinked to its ‘public’ directory in /var/www/. I’m not sure why. Ruby had some other fussiness as well. I can’t remember what exactly, though. Just pushed it around until it worked. Look around on google if it gives you error messages; ruby’s good for that. Check stuff inside /var/logs/apache2/error.log to see if you can get more details.

Alias /cf/ and /cf to your coldfusion apps directory. Same goes for your php apps, like my phpmyadmin, which can be symlinked from /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf.

Server woes no mo’! Also, horses and bikes, words and diaspora

Just finished porting over the last of the stuff that was locked in facebook-neverland. <smacks lips>

Brief synopsis: after upgrading to Lucid, my slicehost server went kaput and couldn’t get up for some time. I tried all the pills I could, but finally declared it unrevivable and nuked it. I thought I could export my blog posts from facebook afterwards but noooo… The RSS feed was broken and there was no guarantee that it would ever come back for the handful of us who care enough to want it. So it was manual copy+paste for the 40 or so posts stuck in facebook neverland.

BUT NOW

WordPress is up running this blog, tracks is up on a subdomain, and squid3 is making life easier at work too!

The main problem I had with tracks today were goofs… First I used the wrong password in database.yml, then I told lighttpd to look for dispatch.fcgi in the wrong place. BUT NOW everything is working and I can start focusing on getting the WP theme to not suck.

W is a sweet boy of six years, which is about 13 or 14 years in human years. He’s quite a dear for trying to rub me off on trees, but otherwise he was fairly laid back and would have to be pushed quite a bit to get up to a good speed. P is the opposite. The chubby girl was raring to go at every chance, and barely needed a nudge to take me on a short canter. Freaked out our hosts. They kept saying I did good.

The part that surprised me was how much Papa knew about horses. Over dinner one night he rambled off all sorts of breeds from around the world, who raced in what races, what awaits a horse when he comes of age… I think I’ve found that bond I need with my father, at last. I wager he’s probably a better rider than I.

I’ve also started riding my bicycle again. It was spurred on by the need to get better at it for my 101 pledge, and again by the peeps who got me into motorcycles. M is en route to getting his motorcycle already and soon I’ll get my gear as well, so I can ride safely on his bike. I wanted to get licensed myself this summer but there isn’t enough time. So I just got a new pedal-bike. Good enough. <rubs hands together>

I started writing on 750words as much as I could to get my writing going again. It’s fun, almost obsessive-compulsive. (Gotta ollect all them badges!) I’ve been griping about not creating enough recently—I’m reading tons of blogs, too many perhaps, and am immersed in social media stuff, again too much perhaps—so the free-writing opportunity was a great place to kick that.

The content of that isn’t too different from my other writing, but I do tend to self-edit more here than there. It’s almost difficult for me to not self-edit as I write. I’m not used to the mechanism of simply writing… it seems the voices in my head quiet down when the spotlight is shone on them.

Anyway, I feel I’m off balance again. Too much consuming not enough creating. I need to rein in from the diaspora.

Not to be confused with the Diaspora, of which I am lucky to backer (albeit a minor one).

I am also a backer of Am I Broken?

I am also loving education blogs. I might become an educator some day, though right now I oughta focus on becoming a shrink.

Right now right now I oughta go to bed…

Oh, stupid me

Being forced to go through old blog posts has its perks. Such as: gives me the chance to correct myself.

In The True Cost of Things, I compared American Express (credit card company) with banks; huge commitment of fallacy!

ColdFusion, apache, virtualbox shared setup

My setup is super hackery and isn’t necessary unless your VPN provider sucks and only supports Windows. Do not do try this at home without adult supervision.

Preamble: I have an ubuntu host and a Windows XP virtual machine. I prefer doing most of my development in linux and it works out OK when I’m physically connected to the work network, but because a) I’m too lazy to copy over the MS SQL Server database to work locally somehow and 2) I don’t have a linux VPN client I have to do pretty much everything through VirtualBox. That is the way of the world. So here’s what I do—I can think of only one other person who might want this, but I’ll jot this down for posterity anyway:

1) Make everything work in ubuntu first—get all the needed tools (git, vim, etc.) and mappings in CFIDE working. Installing ColdFusion 8+ with Apache2 in ubuntu is a piece of cake nowadays.

1a) Little quirky step that’s just for me: symlink ~/Public to /var/www so I can do my development all inside my homedir.

2) Share ~/Public with the Windows virtual machine.

3) Install all the necessary tools in the Windows VM: git, vim, xampp, and ColdFusion. Make CF use Apache instead of the standalone server.

4) Fix up apache’s conf to include the UNC path (//vboxsvr/public) as an alias (to /public)

5) Map everything in CF Administrator with the UNC path, NOT THE MOUNTED PATH, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.