I feel like every retro I’ve attended has been a farce.
“What went bad? We said doing it this way would be harder and more risk prone. Management insisted we do it that way, and it took longer than and caused a site outage.”
"What should we do differently?’
“Listen to the team next time”
“That won’t happen”
The worst is when people don’t know how the system works, and then won’t listen to answers
Like I was at a job and product was going on about “our system has no concept of project owner. We have all these projects but there’s nothing unifying them under a single owner. We need to build this!”
I was like “… what? That’s just not true. There’s a “company” object that does that. It’s got a foreign key with project in the database. I guess it’s a weird name but it’s there”
It took several back and forths over multiple meetings. They eventually got on the same page and I saved us doing a whole useless project, but they did insist I rename it to “account” in the database and code. I would’ve rather left it because that could’ve been dicey, but alas. (The rename did go out fine, but I had to go looking for every reference.)
For the code, open source is probably the way to go. People should be able to build from source. Otherwise, how do they know you’re not doing something shady. Open source is generally a net improvement on security, assuming people actually look at it.
For screenshots, first fix it so the screenshots render nicely on narrow displays.
Would probably need to be open source to be trustworthy. Running a random executable from the Internet seems dicey.
Needs more screenshots. The two that are on the site don’t render great on mobile. Can only see a small portion.
I’m unclear how you find another user and verify who they are.
Website should have a clearer feature list. The user manual wants to download a text file instead of showing it in the browser.
Yes! I usually take any opportunity to gush about Fate but I restrained myself here
The main weakness of Fate is you need more engaged players. Stuff like DND can mostly hum along with passive players, but Fate falls really flat if people aren’t engaging with it.
On player training, I like systems where you can bribe players to let bad things happen.
Like in vampire: the requiem, a player can always turn a regular failure into a Dramatic Failure, and get a little XP. This meant the players went from “oh no the cave is probably full of monsters let’s take forever stressing” to “I ROLLED GARBAGE CAN I JUST BARGE IN LIKE A CONFIDENT IDIOT FOR MY DRAMATIC FAILURE?”
Tastes vary, but I found it made a more interesting and snappier game.
I’ve seen at a very large company a workflow that involved manually updating an excel workbook and (I think) saving it on confluence, so a python script could download it and parse it later. It wasn’t even doing formulas. It was just like less than a hundred lines of text in a half dozen sheets.
As someone who works in software, I’ve been using macs at work for more than a decade. One job had Linux machines. One place had windows for developers and it was a shit show.
Apple isn’t amazing but at least the terminal is sensible.
There was a job interview once where the candidate was presented with a form that had 3 entry fields. They started as like [2, 4, 8]. The candidate was tasked with figuring out what made the form submit and what generated an error.
People would build all sorts of bizarre hypothesis and fail to test them. Good candidates would have an idea, then try to invalidate it.
It was for a QA role, where the ideal candidate would have good debugging skills instead of running with the first thing that came to mind.
Edit: oh, it was basically this guy: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick-puzzle-to-test-your-problem-solving.html
For work, a Mac and vscode. I don’t love vscode but it’s what everyone uses.
Well, some of them develop on windows with like notepad++ and it’s kind of a nightmare. There’s no ci/cd, linting, or testing, so whenever I check out someone else’s branch it’s full of red squiggles.
My personal is pop!_os Linux where I’m also using vscode because I’m too cheap to pay for pycharm.
Did a one shot in high school where to cast any spell you had to sing a relevant line from an extant song.
I don’t remember everyone’s picks, but one player pulled out a pretty enthusiastic Beatles’ “got to admit it’s getting better, getting better all the time” for a heal.
I’ve seen some garbage slide through code reviews. Most people don’t do them well.
I’m doing contract work at a big multinational company, and I saw a syntax error slide through code review the other day. Just, like, too many parenthesis, the function literally wouldn’t work. (No, they don’t have automated unit tests or CI/CD. Yes, that’s insane. No, I don’t have any power to fix that, but I am trying anyway). It’s not hard to imagine something more subtle like a memory leak getting through.
In my experience, people don’t want to say “I think this is all a bad idea” if you have a large code review. A couple years ago, a guy went off and wrote a whole DSL for a task. Technically, it’s pretty impressive. It was, however, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary for the task at hand. I objected to this and suggested we stick with the serviceable, supported, and interoperable approach we had. The team decided to just move forward with his solution, because he’d spent time on it and it was ready to go. So I can definitely see a bunch of people not wanting to make waves and just signing off on something big.
SCP to prod, or ssh in and copy paste. Devops only removed write access to prod machines this month, and people complained. (No, we don’t have docker)
I think they used Amazon CodeCommit for a while, but I don’t know what that’s like.
This almost makes me appreciate my current job, where most stuff has been in place for years and any changes take forever.
It’s kind of a bummer that it’s going to take like six months to add a linter, and they only started using git like last year.
I like a short backstory that provides hooks. “Disgraced son of a noble family that became a warlock when everyone expected a sorcerer” is fine.
12 pages where all the cool stuff already happened is bad. Write that as a book.
There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.
The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.
Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.
Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.
Nice!
I’ve been using Linux as my main machine for a few months, but I’ve also worked as a software nerd for years so I was familiar with a lot of concepts.
Most of my daily usage is just the browser and steam, but there’s a lot of options!
Wizard I ran DND for in didn’t love this, but understood it.
The real problem with that group is we kept changing DMs, and some were a lot more easy going. You gotta get on the same page as a group
Good. The more people switch, the more support there will be.
I had a dm once say he was thinking about saying no about my rogue’s “I shoot, move, bonus action hide around the corner” loop. But then he said he realized if he said no, my character would suck and it’d be no fun.
I think that was the right call.