sourcaustic

Although I appreciate the sentiment behind this very romantic comment and I understand that it is mostly addressed at kindred spirits who can relate in parenthood, I think that it's important to nuance the idea a tad bit. The world is already filled with too many people mindlessly following tradition. When in doubt about how to make themselves happier, they don't dig much before reverting to the status quo: having a kid. The promotion of the idea that we're realizing our purpose in life by procreating has undoubtedly caused a lot misery, as a substantial portion of those who experimented with parenthood failed to find what they hoped for and many children ended up suffering for it. Human beings are not just mere biological entities fulfilling some function of nature. We are blessed (or cursed) with complicated minds that make us appreciate a lot more to life than raising children.

My best friend since childhood has a kid and I can see that he lives an adventure of which he appreciate every second and I enjoy watching him live it. I don't have kids and I live different sorts of adventures and I can see that he lives them vicariously through me. It's pointless to try to make a tally. Figuring out what makes your mind "tick" the most is how you best "win at life".

The one thing that I like about daily "standups" (daily meetings rather) is to see my teammate's mug every morning for a brief moment, while taking my first sip of coffee, and that scintilla of a moment when we wish each other a good day, all smiling, as our heart fills with hope that today is gonna be that lovely day where we'll finally experience the flow, the apocryphal stream of uninterrupted productivity. That's what a perfect daily "standup" looks like to me. But sadly, someone always feels the need to tell us what they had to do yesterday in great details and what their plan is for today, as I nod mechanically and cluelessly zone out.

At some point I noticed that my teammates, including my manager, often are at least as clueless as me, especially when the verbiage becomes a bit too technical. I thought I'd do everyone a favor by simplifying things. So some time ago, shortly after the start of a sprint I tried a format that corresponds pretty much with what is generally understood from our little speeches, but said more directly: "well, I made some progress on that thing yesterday and I'll work a bit more on it today. That's about it." On the second standup of this, my manager asked that we have an impromptu demo that afternoon, which was really inconvenient, since instead of working on my branch, I now had to spend the morning preparing a presentation that he could understand. That's when I realized that daily standups aren't really designed to boost developers' productivity, but another tool that is easily misused by managers to give themselves the illusion of control.

Don't ask me what I think of scrum, it would rhyme.

I've worked as a web dev on Linux for nearly 15 years (most of it Ubuntu). My day job requires that I work on Windows 10 and I'm sorry to say this, but from a developer's perspective it does feel like an inferior user experience. To cope I've tried the WLS, but it didn't really do it, then I was able to somewhat cope a bit with Cygwin. Still it's not the same. I miss the extra desktops. I miss the ability to install a proper tiling window manager with sane keybindings (I use i3 so please don't even mention Power Toys). I miss simply configuring stuff with simple text files, instead of pointing and clicking to open layers after layers of windows to simply change one value, which can also turn even the simplest tutorial into a headache (try installing a wsgi server on IIS). I also miss having my configuration respected without agenda, rather than seeing some applications somehow capable of vetoing my choice of a browser, or my language preferences. I miss ubiquitous utilities that are just sort of expected to be there by anything you install, like cron. Oh, how I miss the shell (please don't even utter "PowerShell"), would you believe that I even miss Bash as a language after trying batch files?

I miss a whole lot of other things and looking for replacements on Windows, it's especially annoying that everything that MS produces is promoted as the next best thing to sliced bread, so you're never really sure if the solution you're being sold is just pure shite, or if it's really worth your time. And on that note, I would never believe that I would miss the capricious Linux community, because it doesn't matter how good Canonical gets it on a release, we're guaranteed to have laments about the millions things they got wrong this time. But it's only when you decide to take a stroll on the neighbor's grass that you realize how green yours really is, right?

Please do not aim to replace Agile, you'll just be creating new problems. Go back to the basics of the Agile Manifesto, understand where your organization fits in the problems that it aims to fix, then overview the different solutions proposed by various methodologies, pick and choose the ones that address the biggest problems that you're facing and adapt them for your own purpose. Start small, as each solution may introduce some processes and distract from the actual mission. Augment only when necessary. You're Agile.

You don't need to buy entirely into a single methodology. When people say Agile in software today, they really mean the Jira-flavored Scrum. Some now claim that they've abandoned Scrum and you hear more about Kanban. Sometimes they really are switching, other time they're really just doing Scrum with a Kanban board. But again, they're often falling into the same traps of forcing solutions, rituals, and processes they might not really need into their flow.

You want to be Agile? Start small. A simple checklist is a good way to start.