Category: Productivity

Quick Bugs, Slow Fixes

Posted on by Morgan

The 🐒 engineer has good guts but often seems slow compared to the 🐰 engineer.

The 🐰 engineer is quick at decision and gives impression of progress to the product owner often disappointed with the slow pace of change of the 🐒.

The 🐒 is busy battle testing the draft he's about to integrate in the product, suddenly he finds out the new bugs were introduced recently by the 🐰, and decides to postpone his work while focusing on debugging the shit.

In the meantime, the customer complains because of the new bugs introduced in latest release by the 🐰 engineer.

The product owner is worried and decides fixing this bug is a priority.

  • The 🐒 engineer was already investigating the bug and proposes a fix.
  • The 🐰 engineer cannot wait for the 🐒 to fix the bug and already merges new changes in the stable branch so the new release will not only be bug free but also deliver new quality shit.
  • The 🐒 is busy integrating and retesting all the new changes made by the 🐰 as it seems those changes includes critical changes of the core authentication layer and library updates that had nothing to do with the features the 🐰 was working on.
  • 🐰 lacks time for testing for side effects, so his changes bring bugs πŸ’©, whatever, at least code is delivered, whether it works, that is someone else's problem (🐒 of course).
  • The 🐰 becomes impatient at the slow 🐒 and decides to create a hotfix πŸ’₯ and deliver his changes to production.

The customer is still unhappy 😠.

Ignoring the new bugs, the product owner finds it's time for 🐒 to deliver things too, but is happy the 🐰 is done.

The 🐒 will be busy with kids at home while also thinking about all new bugs caused by 🐰.
The 🐰 thinks and claims 🐒 is not delivering and working enough hours.
The 🐒 is tortured with this lack of teamwork and with all the shit πŸ’© that is being merged in the codebase by the 🐰.
The 🐰 says it's time to hire more people and he knows other 🐰 who can help and it would be nice if the 🐒 worked more like 🐰 is doing.

The 🐒 suggests to focus on quality and teamwork and slow down but the 🐰 and the product owner look at him suspiciously.

The product owner suggests the 🐒 to consider leaving the team if he's not happy with the way things are. Because in the end, speed and working long hours are important even if results are not perfect.

🀦 "fuck this shit". A few weeks later, 🐒 has left.

The 🐒 is working in a good team nowadays 🀲, where testing is a thing βœ…, quality is under control πŸ‘Œ, documentation matters ✍️, and collaboration is a foundation 🀲πŸ’ͺ.

Related

How the situation should be managed instead by the PO / Lead.

https://workchronicles.substack.com/p/comic-be-like-bob-he-works-long-hours

Don't be like the 🐰-> See broken window theory.

Effective content curation

Posted on by Morgan

I went up with this workflow that seem to pass the test of time and I'm sharing it with you :

  • I manage to keep up with Inbox zero, almost. The only mails I keep are mostly invoices/accounting related and require sometimes discussion with accountant and my partner. I try anyway to snooze them for later and schedule them as tasks.
  • I'm using ChatGPT Β» Summarize & Chat extension for Brave/Chromium (browsers) in order to save time at scrolling long articles in my inbox but yet it's important to note it's shrinking content more than summarizing it.
  • I'm not subscribing to any newsletter, everything is read through MiniFlux (RSS curator. If you don't know about that, read -> what is RSS?), combined with RSS-Bridge and ChangeDetection and some tips, all self-hosted. For any newsletter that cannot be replaced with RSS feed, I rely on my hero https://kill-the-newsletter.com/. And if email has your preference over RSS, I recommend you BlogToTrottr to follow RSS/Atom in real-time by email.
  • I edit my Feed titles with emojis expressing how I feel about their interest : πŸ˜• (Boring?) πŸ˜ƒ (Joyful read) etc.
  • I categorize feeds and label them also with emojis and sort them from the best to the worst. Those visuals clues really help. When I see nothing interesting for a while in any RSS I've subscribed to, I remove it from Miniflux.
  • I'm customizing my RSS curation in Miniflux through some hacks.
  • I dreaming to keep a maximum of 20/30 RSS feeds of interest but reality is I have hundred. Among those, I find maybe a dozen to be absolutely fantastic and I'm even sharing them in my /links section.
  • I've configured Tampermonkey browser extension to take control of the rendering of my RSS feeds list and replace the whole page with "FOCUS", at least 80% of time.
  • Something too long to read but that looks interesting is immediately dropped from Miniflux and shared/saved into Shaarli for later read. The goal is to declutter my subscriptions inbox.
  • Articles I browser randomly and are already saved in Shaarli are saved with tags like "x2" if it's second time I save them, "x3" if it's the third save I save them, etc.
  • If I find any image or PDF of interest, I save them locally to my Dropbox folder of interest. I have a folder for Books, which is subject to automatic triage with some scripting, also my ePubs are automatically converted to PDF. Duplicate files are moved to subfolders like "x2" if it's second time I save the same book, "x3" if it's third time, etc.
  • Everything in Shaarli is manually labelled based on keywords because Shaarli does not support automatic labelling like Wallabag. I don't want to waste anytime adding manual labels so I'm likely about to integrate similar features either as a plugin for Shaarli, either in Tapas which is my new project I elaborate in Ideas.
  • I subscribe to only 1 podcast which is Bombo Podcast, the one of my partner.
  • I want to take time for whatever is worth reading, and skip the rest fast.
  • Whatever is not worth is submitted to shrinking.

What it breaks and what it brings

Posted on by Morgan

Changes are not good or bad and not every success means perfection.

Some will revolutionize your habits, your workflow. The good or bad perception of the change depends surely on your own experience, your functioning.

Since recently I've turned my smartphone and laptop screens to grayscale.

Is it any good or better ? Sure, for making everything more boring and fight screen addiction, it helps (archived). I also turned Dark mode on in every app and websites that support it. And even this blog now is turned black & white, for the best I hope.

Changes can break compatibility, readability, harm productivity for instance I had to restore colors just for when my little one watches videos or when I edit some colorful documents we share with my partner. Using Grayscale the web extension on my Brave instance also caused my screen to blink a lot and I had to find an alternative. After a few days of experimenting with grayscale on all my devices, I really enjoy the experience especially in public areas, and I tend to find colorful screens more painful to watch.

Another example is that I use SyncThing with success for keeping my Obsidian in sync between my mobile and my laptops. It worked great at first, but then things mixed up between Obsidian Git based Sync and SyncThing, and I almost lost weeks of work. As a result I limit Git based sync solely to one instance of Obsidian, and also had to tune SyncThing to ignore some changes (similar to .gitignore).

Speaking of Obsidian, I'm recently starting to use Dataview a lot for generating dynamic content in notes with content extracted from other notes. It works super great but cumulating multiple dataviews in a document makes everything quite slow. Yet I'm not giving up on them, with time I'll find solutions.

In the end, it's a matter of tradeoffs, and be able to try, evaluate and adjust to your needs.

Nerds Against Clutter: My Digital Downsizing Diary

Posted on by Morgan

Declutter and letting go.

  • Dropping Discord, Diaspora, Daily.dev, maybe Pixelfed and Mastodon next (done, by March 2024). Too buggy, too noisy.
  • Kissed Google Keep goodbye and embraced Obsidian even more, thanks to the Importer plugin.
  • Trying to escape the WhatsApp surveillance state. I'm axing useless groups left and right.
  • Scrubbing my old web presence. It's like digital housekeeping.
  • Using Syncthing now. Real-time sync across devices without cloud middlemen. Dropbox, you're on notice.
  • Deploying FDUPES for disk decluttering – it's a duplicate file slaughterhouse. Throwing inotifywait into the mix for smart folder monitoring, because who likes manual mess management?
  • Cut down on RSS. I've dropped Wallabag (done by November 2024). I'm still using Miniflux. and Shaarli with their weaknesses. Thinking about it. Bookmarking tools still suck somehow and I can't see a better alternative (yet) for my needs... yuck, so I'm working on my own thing, Tapas. Looking at the market for knowledge and bookmarks management tools, there is room for improvement in how we manage and consume information. Most of the hard work is on you for years with tools that connect to information.
  • Harnessing RSS-Bridge and Miniflux for streamlined info feeds. Using Changedetection for the unRSS-able stuff, i.e to monitor some indexes, lists, legal terms, release pages.
  • My tab hoarding was legendary, now capped at 18 with Tab Limiter. Browser zen achieved.
  • I have been known by my colleagues and partner to keep too many tabs open. My nerves cracked at reading other folks suffering same issue. So I decided to close a number of them, and limit each Window to 18 tabs with Tab Limiter.

Exploring and creating.

  • Blogging's up, but it's a discipline game. Need to turn Obsidian hoarding into public wisdom. Notebooks over phones, knowledge over scrolling.
  • Taming my Brave extension zoo with Context. It's like a digital bouncer for my browser. Funny, now I've more UX/Privacy oriented extensions than tabs.
  • Eyeing Geeqie to outsmart duplicate photos. Even my pixels need to be minimal.
  • n8n (Zapier/IFTTT alternative) is my new digital butler, still a bit rough around the edges. Coding my own automation magic because their recipes are just appetizers for my needs. For the record I'm now using it to automate RSS feeds triage and automate the web archiving of some bookmarks as I feel archiving beats bookmarking.
  • Diving back into Rust. Cooking up something for productivity and knowledge management. Stay tuned.
  • And of course, some snowballs and video gaming to keep things balanced and fun.

To be continued.

Reflections on Change: The Constant Shuffle

Posted on by Morgan

Change is a constant.

I passed 37 years recently.

In 2022 I was going freelance after 12 years of employment. Why ? Because I had been so disappointed by many years of employment, bad managers or politics, I needed to feel like I gave the credit myself deserves. I now feel after one year I would like to help and mentor other people to go freelance.

My toddler (2.5 years old) is going to school and I drive him at school by bike. The more I invest time with him that I don't spend at other crap, the deeper we connect. But crap is everywhere and trying to steal time from us. Seeing him growing so much reminds me of the time passing and the need for me to lead by example.

I learned from hundred of hours spent crafting my LinkedIn profile, sending/receiving tens of thousands of LinkedIn messages, crafting my resume, interviewing for hundred of jobs. No matter how long we play this game of finding the ideal job and finding the exact rates, conditions, etc we deserve and want, those variables keep changing a lot and are difficult to correlate with ideal job. In the end it's not about the job but about who we are, what we need from life, what we really want to do on a day to day, what kind of problems we like to solve, what kind of people we want to work with, what kind of team we want to shape. The ideal job is a rare combination of hidden variables and is a constantly changing problem that requires gut feeling and experience, like finding the perfect taste in coffee / espresso / beer is a never ending game.

As part of this I've removed a lot of my previous job criteria at to recruiters to keep things simple.

Outside of work, I also made a lot of sacrifices, at least choices that I regretted. For the sake of trying to please or do the right thing, I got in trouble a few times. In the future I have to stand for what is worth to me, and trust my gut feeling. I'm always willing to make compromises as I'm a Belgian and we excel in this ! but I also have to set boundaries and speak the truth and take distance at need. Before this post, I struggled to start writing. Speaking of which, I even thought of using ChatGPT to help with the task. ChatGPT has clearly influenced radically the way I interact with the web and the universe of problems, including code but not only. It drastically revived my interest into technology. But it also obvious there is a long way before AI can supersed us. A good tool is nothing without a creative mind and some persistence. And a good mind needs to express, otherwise it's best to just play sudoku alone.

And that motivates me to write. And I make no promises, but to write for myself πŸ™‚ and share things.