Robin Green @greenrd@fosstodon.org

Stephen Diel has recently updated his guide to modern #haskell - "What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell", now at version 2.5
http://dev.stephendiehl.com/hask/

Will have to give it a re-read, as I haven't done any Haskell development for years, but I'm trying to get back into it with a new #sideproject - about #cryptocurrency futures trading

Do not have themed retrospectives where the team only talks about one topic. This hinders the team's freedom of speech. Instead, if your desired topic is not talked about enough in the retrospective, simply schedule another meeting about it.

Do not use happiness or morale metrics in retrospectives. People may lie because they fear getting fired. Instead, ask how things could be improved, and try to elicit thoughts about improving happiness/fun/morale.

Protip: when restoring a hard drive with Linux DD, in another terminal, type kill -USR1 $(pidof dd) to have the progress so far printed to the terminal where dd is running (it will be sent to the stderr stream)

Don't forget the -USR1 bit though!!

BTW, this is a graph of Tesla's share price as what Elon Musk and his employees have achieved has become increasingly evident. Yeah correlation is not causation but...

Elon Musk is a CEO who, though he may not use the word "agile" to describe it, is very committed to agile, customer-centric principles in improving manufacturing and indeed all aspects of his Tesla business. This, all without sacrificing safety - safety is Tesla's #1 priority, and it shows - it produces the safest cars ever tested. Self-driving cars are a key example of a safety-critical system. So, still think agile cannot be used for safety-critical systems? Think again.

On the other hand, if their answer is more along the lines of "none, but we know we need to improve, and we are moving towards agile", then again, don't just take their word for it. Ask what concrete steps they are taking to move towards agile? Are they hiring people with agile expertise or experience? Do they have a deadline for the transition to agile? Do they have executive buy-in? Can they should you evidence in writing of that executive buy-in, e.g. an email saying "we are moving to agile"?

Sometimes you come across firms that seem to be agile, but aren't really. Here is an idea for a question to enable you to filter them out:

"What individual or team improvements have you made over the last year due to retrospectives, which haven't just been a case of the product manager or another manager identifying a problem and then ordering something to be done to fix it?"

Tweak the question to suit.

If they can't answer, or try to avoid the question, reject any job offer you get from them

You can do mini-waterfalls as part of agile, but you can't do agile as part of waterfall. That makes literally no sense whatsoever. (Not that waterfall makes much sense for doing a whole big 1-5 year project in the first place.)

Professor Meow is teaching many people a very valuable lesson about not leaving your databases exposed to the internet... with default/no passwords

Gone and bought a #RaspberryPi for the first time. My plan is to use it as a home mailserver (initially, maybe other uses as well later) and, since my ISP doesn't offer a static IP address any more, to use a free Google Cloud VM to expose port 25 and forward it back to the Raspberry Pi.

The software engineer / programmer is motivated to go with slightly hacky solutions if they're less complicated. The computer scientist is more motivated to publish elegant solutions, even if they are more complicated and less intuitive to work with in practice.

Case in point: graphs. Computer scientist: let's represent graphs as algebraic expressions!

Me: let's represent digraphs as a set of arcs and a set of missing vertices, and then filter out those vertices that aren't *actually* missing.

Programming #Haskell is - for me, at least - like riding a bike. You never forget.

Programming best practice