Another day of rain in rain city. Nothing heavy, just the annoying, undying mist that makes your bones feel wet. There’s no protection. From the moment you wake up, it doesn’t matter whether you’re outside or inside, you just feel… moist. The forecasted sun today is nowhere to be found… I saw a glimpse of the blue sky earlier but even that’s disappeared.
everybody knows that I love your toes
everybody knows that I love your toes
I love your eyes, your ears, your chin and your nose
but everybody knows that I love your toes
Being outside was good, even if it takes us forever to get there
Today I am grateful for having a social safety net, no matter how bungled it is; having a roof over my head, no matter how strapped for money as a result we are; how loving my husband is, how sweet our child is, who are all the world to me.
For The Paper Mama’s self portrait challenge.
Woo! A quick post. I am currently:
Why R is often fussing while nursing. I think it’s a combination of him noticing the world and being distracted, me not understanding his cues when he’s really hungry or really tired (both involve fussing and sucking on his hand), and just new motherhood uncertainty.
A pixie hat for my niece, some blog posts, watching a Chinese soap (Tang Lang Detective), trying to get some yoga into my routine while R sleeps. A bit scattered-brained, which I’m also working on.
In the prenatal class, we talked about our birth plan and “birth fairies.” The idea was that, like the story of Sleeping Beauty, even if we try only to plan for good things, the not-so-nice fairy might still come to crash the party. The only way to not be weighed down by disappointment is to be make sure we have the skills to deal with as many things as possible. And we learned many skills, from meditation to birth balls to baths to taking naps and doing crosswords to baking cookies.
So, like many women, I had hoped for a natural unmedicated birth: it’s rumoured to be quicker in transition (aka pushing), stuff heals more quickly, I wanted “the experience,” and giant spine needles are NOPE NOPE NOPE D:
My pregnancy was fairly uneventful. Three months of nausea gave way to six months of physically feeling fairly glorious — my worst complaint was heartburn and needing about 17 million pillows to sleep comfortably. There were moments when I felt like a fat, beached whale, waddling around bitching about people not giving me seats on the bus, but the extra weight didn’t really catch up to me until the last few weeks, when going up and down the stairs at work really sucked.
I’m almost caught up!
M is the photographer. To make up for my lack of equipment and skills, Android’s Retro Camera comes to the rescue.
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.)