"Here's the sprint, it's well defined. fullstackchris, can you do this in two weeks?"

"Hmmm... nice work, looks well defined. It'll be tough, but sure, I can do it two weeks!"

Two days before sprint ends:

"Can we quickly duplicate n number of features from apps with literal armies of devs like whatsapp, airbnb, and Instagram?!?!?! We NEED these features to be polished and work perfectly!"

Scope creep will be my ONLY feedback in this retro.

First experience with a PC....

It would have been the Commodore64 and those giant 5.25" floppies, ah those were the days with CRT TV's.

Watching a friend load up Tetris on that big screen was eye opening for a 8-9 Year old.

Am I a hack? Like yeah I complain about technology left right and center, this sucks, that sucks, what fucking moron wrote this?! These days I do write my own alternatives (which usually work surprisingly well). But for what? And was I really in a position to complain about those other things? Impostor syndrome, it's so annoying...

Oh and also, is it really all worth it? I like retro tech and so I do have a fair interest in the history of technology. Say between VHS and Beta, sure VHS was superior in practice and won the video cassette war, but Beta machines were seemingly better constructed. VHS won because it did just enough. Perhaps the same is true for software? Overengineering, is it poor engineering?

Anyone can build a bridge if the budget is unlimited and it can take a lifetime to construct. But part of engineering is making a bridge that'll just barely stand and be finished in a few years. I've been working on my own Linux distro since August last year and am not even close to finishing it. Chances are that it'll take several years. Perhaps I've been looking at the problem the wrong way all along?

I suggest at our retro that other teams have skills in languages and frameworks that we have only just started using, and that we practically just make it up as we go along and then keep making changes as we realise things suck. Why not bring a real expert in from another team for 1 or 2 days to rapidly improve our knowledge?

15 people in the room, every single one of them: "no that's stupid. Why would you even do that?"

Really? Am I the retarded one?

I took a few days off to move and when I came back, my manager had posted a message in chat about how horrible one of the naming conventions was (an implementation I made). One of my co-workers then defended it and defended something else I wrote that he was complaining about.

We had a 1:1 the day I got back and holy shit ... I did loose my cool and I'm not proud of it, but the guy went totally bat shit. He said I was the problem with them team, screaming about going off and writing rouge things, how he was my boss and I needed to do what he fucking told me to.

In my 20+ years in tech, I have never had to deal with a psycho. He served work release for assault and witness tampering last year and he told us a story that made it seem like it was his all his "crazy ex-girlfriend" who made trumped up charges. After that conversation, I doubt that's the case.

He's still under house arrest for something else until the end of May too. The entire team told me not to do any 1:1 calls with him and our project manager, who is really amazing, will probably be on any calls we need to do in the future.

I've also all confidence in him as a manager. Even when our PM tried to do a retro for the team, he still passively aggressively bitched about things that obviously related to my projects and the entire team could see it.