It’s usually the implementation of Agile that’s bad.

The Manifesto’s organizing principles are quite succinct and don’t include a lot of the things that teams dislike.

We follow these principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals.

Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.

The Peter Principle

Kind of the opposite actually.

The Business™️ used to make all decisions about what to build and how to build it, shove those requirements down and hope for the best.

Then the industry moved towards Agile development where you put part of the product out and get feedback on it before you build the next part.

There’s a fine art to deciding which bugs to fix win. Most companies I’ve worked with aren’t very good at it to begin with. It’s a special skill to learn and practice

That’s why I don’t work on mission critical stuff.

If my apps fail, some Business Person doesn’t get to move some bits around.

A friend of mine worked in software at NASA. If her apps failed, some astronaut was careening through space 😬

Gig nursing is different from travel nursing.

Travel nurses are paid much more than staff nurses and often receive travel stipends and housing allowances.

You might check to see if Eater has a site for your city/area

🐬 Improvised Underwater Timekeeping for Dolphins:

An intelligent dolphin could adapt to underwater timekeeping by observing natural cycles, biological cues, and marine phenomena. Here’s how:

1. Harnessing Natural Rhythms

   • Tidal Changes: Dolphins could monitor the ebb and flow of tides, which occur predictably based on the lunar cycle. Changes in water current speed, temperature, or pressure could serve as cues for time measurement. • Day-Night Cycles: Despite being underwater, ambient light penetration varies with time of day. Dolphins with sensitive vision could detect shifts in light intensity or color. • Marine Sounds: The ocean environment is rich with natural sounds that vary throughout the day, such as coral reef activity during daylight hours or nocturnal hunting sounds.

2. Biological Cues

   • Internal Circadian Rhythms: Dolphins have well-developed biological clocks that could help them estimate time intervals based on their innate circadian rhythms. • Heartbeat or Breathing Patterns: They could track their heart rate or breathing intervals to measure short durations.

3. Environmental Markers

   • Bubble Streams: Dolphins could use their breath to create bubble trails or patterns and observe their rise time or behavior as a rough timing mechanism. • Floating Particles: They could monitor the sinking or rising of particles like algae or debris to estimate time.

4. Intelligence and Communication

   • Echo-Location as a Timer: Dolphins use echolocation effectively. They might develop a way to measure time based on how long sound waves take to bounce back from consistent underwater structures. • Social Synchronization: In groups, they could rely on collective signals, such as patterned clicks or whistles, to denote the passage of specific intervals.

5. Innovative Tools

   • Natural Hourglasses: They could manipulate objects like sediment-filled shells, observing how long it takes particles to settle or rise when shaken. • Thermal Layers: Dolphins could detect thermal gradients or changes in water temperature at specific times of day.

1. Open a screen
2. Start an rsync job to maintain parity between source and destination
3. Exit the screen, but keep it running
4. Now rsync will be running in the background until you kill it

You can reattach the screen whenever you want to check on status, change parameters or kill it

Thanks for sharing! I’m a pure headless Linux user, so I don’t know much about desktop environments

Depending on your file structure, you could probably keep this running all the time so you don’t have to manually intervene in the future

rysnc might be a faster and more reliable option. It can compress the files for transfer and does checksums after the transfer is complete

I used something like this to transfer 12 TB from offsite to onsite with zero failures

rsync -arvzip --progress /path/to/host /path/to/destination

You can set up a screen and let this run in the background all the time

The Passenger is mild… but only half the story. You want to read the companion novel Stella Maris too

Some of his books are fucked up. The Road and Blood Meridian are stomach turning, gut-wrenching explorations of the awful side of humans.

All the Pretty Horses is: young man likes horses. Moves to Mexico to work on a ranch. Young man falls in love with woman. Hijinks. horses. Done

• All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing are beautiful western novels by Cormac McCarthy. Both are very much “a boy and his horse” kind of stories about learning to be yourself. They’re loosely related and there’s a third book that brings the boys together and concludes their stories

• The Jungle and Oil! by Upton Sinclair are novelizations of Sinclair’s investigative journalism work in the meat packing industry and the nascent workers rights movement respectively. Oil! was very loosely adapted into the film There Will Be Blood (the film covers maybe the first 3-4 chapters by greatly expanding upon the material

• Hatchet by Gary Paulsen was a very impactful book for me as a child. It’s a YA novel, but still worth a read. The main character Brian survives a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness and is forced to find a way to survive on his own

A few more recent novels that I enjoyed:

• Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Won the 2024 Booker Prize (best English language novel) about an authoritarian government taking power in Ireland and how that unfolds from the perspective of a mother with young children. It’s a hard read, but very well written

• Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. Translated into English. A friend described it as “sexy witches in South America deal with authoritarian rule.” And that’s pretty close…

• Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park. A semi-fictionalized history of the Korean Peninsula and the desire to have a unified identity. Many people come to the peninsula (same bed) with very different goals for its use (different dreams). Really fascinating book and engaging

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Follows a trio of friends as they explore the world of video game design. Starts in the early 80s and runs through the 2000s. Reminder me very much of the show Halt and Catch Fire.

• My Friends by Hisham Matar. Follows a Libyan immigrant living in England in the 80s through 2010s as he wrestles with his identity, his homeland, his friends and family. Khaled’s closest friends serve as foils to his own feelings, reacting to the same circumstances very differently from himself

Check out Spiritfarer. I loved it

My top ten-ish tv shows

1. The Wire
2. Bojack Horseman
3. Patriot
4. The Americans
5. Better Off Ted
6. Arrested Development
7. Pushing Daisies
8. Gravity Falls
9. The Bear

Honorable Mentions

1. Over the garden wall
2. Luther
3. Friday Night Lights
4. The Queen’s Gambit
5. GLOW
6. Mindhunter
7. Sports Night
8. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
9. Atlanta

On my fifth rewatch right now. Just started S2

Obsidian might work for you

In the 2000s and early 2010s, less of your life was lived on a cell phone or smartphone.

For kids now, it’s 100% of their lives. Post-COVID, the majority of social interaction between peers is through a social media app.

That means that close to 100% of kids are on their phones during the school day. If you aren’t, you run the risk of social isolation and FOMO.

Administrators can’t send a kid to detention for using their phone because ALL kids would be in detention every day.

Here’s one article that examines the problem

Surprised no one has mentioned The Expanse series. A ton of world building in very different kinds of environments. Space stations, small ships, big ships, generation ships, asteroids, moons, planets.

The environments are well thought out in how the residents would need to adapt

Columbus is a great little city in a not so great state. The local politics are quite progressive and the food and bar scene is quite nice. There was a decently sized queer community when I lived there a decade ago, and I’d expect it to continue to flourish as long as a major university is nearby.

Winters are cold. Summers are hot. The weather is what it is 🤷🏻‍♀️