About the picture: my city is not a snowy one. It might snow once every one or two years. This year, it snowed at the 4th birthday of one of my daughters :).

Shameless self-promotion

As you might know, I like writing fiction. I just happened to win XII Premio de Relato Corto “Una historia con Renault” :).

Software Engineering reads, podcast, talks…

Agile is one of the most conflicting terms in the industry ever, and articles like The age of cargo cult Agile must end by Jason Yip keep the fire on. It’s a response to The age of Agile must end. 30 years ago the technology industry…, an article I stopped reading at the first paragraph, after saying that “## Product can’t be defined (…) in a two-week sprint”. Challenging Agile is great, but if your arguments are based on the premise of “two-week sprints”, you just don’t know what Agile is about and you’re just clickbaiting.

The response, by a person with way more patience than me, is interesting, though. It provides an interesting timeline of some techniques, and a lot valuable thoughts and references about what Agile is.

Extreme Programming has a model called Four Variables: Cost, Time, Quality, Scope. Quick version: Flex scope, fix the rest.

Stop-the-line. Instead of keeping the assembly line running no matter what and then fixing things at the end (…), the expectation is instead to stop-the-line when problems are encountered so as not to leak quality issues to the next stage.

Engineering management

Feedback

Giving negative feedback is hard, and How to give negative feedback people will actually want to hear – RescueTime gives interesting hints. I’d like to add a side note to the following (bold is mine):

But if they don’t feel safe in the conversation, they’re either not going to listen or go looking for someone who tells them what they want to hear.

When your duty is making a team excel in the long term, I’d say that nurturing a safe environment should be your #1 priority. And safety or trust are not gained overnight. You can’t be reactive on that. Work on it, sincerely, from the very first day. Then, they’ll be there when you need it. The first thing that some people do when they get to a new team is asking for team metrics. IMHO, face-to-face conversations are a better choice.

Career developing

I’m not regretting switching to “the manager path”, but Leading With Confidence: How Engineering Managers Can Avoid Technical Decay | by Amin Rashidbeigi | Jan, 2023 | Better Programming gives hope and wisdom to those who make the switch and are afraid of never being able to look back. For people like me, managers with a technical background, it’s definitely important.

Games

I’m currently playing Disco Elysium after reading The future of literature is video games - by Erik Hoel (in fact, that article was my motivator for going back to games). Although it uses the classic means of amnesia to introduce the story and your character, it seems really interesting. Every NPJ so far looks interesting. The UI also helps for my random-ish game, with the mission list and so on.

Music

Attending Niña Polaca concert this month was my main driver for listenings, but I’m also enjoying Mengers (my current favourite for writing). Havalina just released a notable new album , so did _juno.

Reads

I’m currently reading two essays, El murmullo and Contra la distopía. Both share a common topic: the genre under analysis (self-help book and dystopias, respectively), is, at the end of the day, another tool of Capitalism for keeping the system under control, without actually calling to action. Good food for though.