I swear I'll snap if someone tells me it's weird that I resize applications to be taller than they are wide. I keep them that way because widescreen monitors came into existence when computers became mainstream and the market shifted to the plebs who only used them to watch videos and wanted to not see any bars on screen, and now we all have to suffer.

Web pages are organized vertically so it makes no sense for me to browse the web in full screen, it wastes space where otherwise all the content is contained and distraction free, most pages strip the side-bars so you'll also see a few less ads. I can also use and organize multiple apps how I want. Small thing too but browsing the web in full screen means pages can find the exact dimensions of your screen and learn more about you (I don't care about this but it's also worth mentioning).

I promise you there are so many good reasons to not use apps in full screen.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Spent a couple hours writing a new feature yesterday, and finished it only to discover that somebody lazily wrote the global method that my feature was utilizing. Emailed them and told them that I completed the feature and asked them to fix the bad method. Figured that I wouldn't commit my code changes until he fixed his method. He proceeds to fix the method, and then completely redoes the feature I ALREADY TOLD HIM THAT I FINISHED. He removed me from the backlog story that I was assigned to and did the feature the exact same way I did. Motherfucker I already told you that it was done, you just needed to fix your lazy shitty global method. You did twice the work and wasted my time. If you wanted credit for your work, that's fine -- you could've created a new story to fix your method. Now I've wasted hours of my time writing a feature and then reverting the changes because you couldn't follow directions

A guide to estimations.

1) don’t give an immediate answer. The first “timeframe” you give will be held against you and will result in overtime and working weekends.

2) think of a relevant piece of work and the time that took.

2.1) if it’s something you haven’t done before, add some adequate research time.

3) allow half a day of testing for every day of development.

4) add a day as buffer - this is good for on the fly bug fixes

5) calculate time

6) now give an educated estimate.

7) this should take you 5 seconds to get through mentally.

8) if scope creep occurs: goto:1

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

So true 💡

I was never able to do it in one go :p

I like how I didn’t get he was talking about cars for a solid minute

I’m a REALIST. What are you?

How do you salvage a really hard question on a whiteboard interview?

Ans: "I'm sorry, I don't code on light theme"!

Via reddit user csquestions5583292

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Try pair programming! I've never had an official pair programming session, but I'll be damned if my best code and quickest solutions didn't come from having a bitch session with my coworker. Just having to talk it out or having that second set of eyes can work wonders. Plus you have a built-in de-stressing outlet to help you sleep at night.