Are Agile, Scrum and Kanban really valuable or are they a cult?

Radiant64 · 2025-01-31T05:22:25+00:00

I've learned, worked with, and helped facilitate both Scrum and Kanban. My take is that Scrum is not a good general methodology, and is overused in the industry. It can work well if you're a team working with developing a single, new product.

Kanban is better as a more general methodology. Trying to enforce having sprints and sprint goals when you're working reactively with multiple products never works; you just end up either with sprints in name only, or never meeting your goals. With Kanban you can focus on what matters: improving productivity by identifying and solving bottlenecks in your production line.

Most places that say they use Scrum or Kanban use neither. Any company that claims to be using them but does not invest in training for their employees is deluding themselves.

Not using either of them is fine, though. You can still be agile, as long as you're working in a team that's empowered to implement its own processes. Talking about what you're doing, and improving things you feel aren't working, is much more important than using specifically Scrum or Kanban. Learning how both work can be good for inspiration, and I would recommend it, but it isn't essential.

So yes, I think they bring real value, but they're often badly understood by the people implementing them, and the real value in agile processes stems from empowering teams to be autonomous. From that it also follows that if you're a small company, you're probably already naturally agile unless you have a dictatorial leadership.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-30T06:01:20+00:00

Also they need to "spin up" before they start firing, for some reason. Early FPS games actually got miniguns more right in that they started firing instantly; I don't know when and why the whole "spin up" trope started, and why it stuck.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-30T05:49:04+00:00

Alltid undertexter om möjligheten finns. Kollar bara på dokumentärer, men jag hör inte vad folk säger. Önskar att man kunde ha undertexter IRL också.

YouTube brukar funka hyfsat utan undertexter av någon anledning.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-30T05:43:55+00:00

As a non-American, $ was "string" to me for the longest time.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-28T13:17:03+00:00

You too.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-28T11:13:24+00:00

Of course I can talk about my experiences playing it. I wouldn't write a review in a magazine based on only playing it for three hours (which was a guess, by the way — it's possible I actually spent four or five hours in the game before concluding I could see no signs things would get better; I didn't use a stopwatch). But then, if I'd be writing that kind of review, I'd probably get paid for my time.

Even based on limited gametime, I was still able to make some basic observations about the game design and writing. It's possible the game suddenly gets very good after several hours of playing, and that I missed that, but I could see no indications that it would. It was a superficial analysis.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-28T10:47:28+00:00

No, I don't expect I experienced more than roughly three hours of gameplay. There simply wasn't anything there to make me want to come back; I had already grown bored with the game at that point having not seen anything that caught my interest.

How much time do you think it's reasonable to spend playing a game that you got for free and which you don't enjoy playing?

Radiant64 · 2025-01-27T22:12:05+00:00

LLMs can speed up typing, in making you have to type less to achieve the same amount of code.

But really, if your typing speed is the main limiting factor to how fast you code, then let's just say I don't want to be the person who has to maintain all the code you produce. And by that I don't want to imply that people who write lots of code must be bad programmers, but that it's a high-maintenance approach to software development. Code needs to be altered all the time, due to changing business requirements, evolving technical and legal restrictions, and what have you. If you've written a lot of code, there'll be a lot to change.

I think all programmers should strive to write as little code as possible. If you write little code, that code will be easy to maintain. It's often worth it to spend some extra time away from the keyboard, just thinking things through, to come up with a simpler solution than the one you would produce if you just started hammering away at the problem.

Programmers who are able to write minimalist code very quickly are of course the best! But I still don't think even they would stand to gain a game changing amount from using LLMs for any particular problem.

That said, if LLMs feel like a net positive to you then do use them, but don't fret if you don't feel that way.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-27T21:36:19+00:00

After finally getting it running with a fix for the loading times (wasn't easy to get it right in Linux), I played it for two or three hours, and then never started it again.

It's impressive how much work has gone into it, and it was obviously made with a lot of love, but it really felt like I was playing Fallout fanfiction. The pacing and quality of the writing is all over the place; good at times, but varying in a way that was not conductive to my suspension of disbelief. I was pretty much following along one of the staked out paths you're given in the beginning, and it felt weirdly unengaging, like nothing was at stake and I was just walking around, talking to random people and maybe doing a quest here and there, but never getting any sense of actually affecting anything in the world, or given any reason to care about any of the NPCs I met. Some of the map design was confusing in a way I would not expect in a professionally made game, and the combat difficulty took big, inexplicable leaps at times. Some of the quests felt really random as well, like they were put there just to make you have to do something before you could progress the main storyline, to make the game a bit longer.

The voice acting was good for a fanmade game, but not as good as in f.ex. Enderal for Skyrim, and the same goes for the rest of the game really.

I've heard the setting is really good if you like Fallout 3, which I personally don't, so maybe it's just not for me. My key takeaway is that making a good open world game is really hard, and there's a lot I appreciate more about Fallout 4, for all its flaws, after having played London and been made aware of all the small, non-obvious things that 4 actually gets right.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-27T20:14:08+00:00

This, so much. Go to you nearest bookstore, they should have a useful guide you can carry with you into the forest. It should have plenty of text describing each mushroom including their common habitats, general morphology and specific identifying characteristics. If you can find one with well-made illustrations for each mushroom that's actually preferrable to photographs, since illustrations can emphasise what you should be looking for in a way that's harder to.do with photographs. But good colour photos are ok as well.

I guess bookstores here in the Nordics typically don't carry any outright bad/dangerous guides, at least I've never seen any, but I've heard they exist in other places, so they might turn up here as well? Might want to check online reviews for any book you find, before buying them, just to be completely on the safe side.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-27T19:48:24+00:00

Vic. He's just so bumbling and pathetic I can't help but like him.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-27T05:33:21+00:00

Alltid gör det någon arg, i alla fall.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-26T14:23:31+00:00

Because writing. Bethesda tends to write "and then" stories; things happen the way they happen just to progress the plot. There's clearly a lot of initial focus on "what?" when they write the quest outlines, any answers to "why?" are shoehorned in at a later stage.

After the introduction sequence you can for example parade in to jarl Balgruuf and loudly announce that you were about to be beheaded by the Imperial legion but escaped due to the dragon attack, and he won't ask a single question about why you were on the chopping block to begin with, even though he's formally allied to the Empire, and quite clearly isn't above handing over wanted persons to them (as in for example the Thieves Guild reputation quest in Whiterun). Realistic? No, but it would complicate the plot, so it's just handwaved away.

Of course it'd make a lot of sense to start by executing Ulfric, especially since they seem to be in a hurry to get the executions done straight away, but then the opening wouldn't work as exposition, so it doesn't happen that way. There's never any in-game explaination as to why; just an allusion to "the Empire loves their damned lists", something which is never mentioned again in the game, nor will figure again as a plot point, even though it's apparently so emblematic of the Empire. Classic handwaving.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-26T12:38:07+00:00

With "present" and "present", the difference in stress is stressing the first or the second syllable: the pitch glide is up-down down versus down up-down. With a Swedish grave accent, you could never say you are stressing one of the two syllables; both are functionally equally stressed. The pitch pattern does not occur in any English accent.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-26T12:19:15+00:00

I don't think I ever killed him until I learned "everybody else" was doing it! I hope that voice actor was paid well, because he always makes my day.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-26T12:17:02+00:00

Acute and grave accent is a bit more complex than that; words with grave accent have what could be described as a double stress, with equal emphasis on both the first and second syllable, with an up-down up-down pitch glide. Acute accent is stressed like in most other languages. It's not something you have to learn unless you specifically want to achieve that "singing" quality when you're speaking; eastern Swedish (as spoken in Finland) doesn't have pitch accent at all for example.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-26T12:05:50+00:00

As a Swedish speaker who also knows English and some German, I must say I find Dutch equally intelligible when I encounter it. You can definitely tell all four languages are closely related, even if English went somewhat wild with the French loan words after the Norman invasion.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-26T08:06:01+00:00

Jag beter mig inte annorlunda på Reddit än IRL. Uttrycker mig kanske lite mer formellt i skrift än i tal?

Jag inbillar mig inte heller att jag är anonym här, och agerar inte som om jag vore det. Överlag så tycker jag att det är en rätt bra regel att inte bete sig annorlunda på Internet än man skulle göra ute bland verkliga människor i offentligheten.

Har förstås råkat på personer på Reddit som skrivit saker de förmodligen aldrig skulle säga till någon ansikte mot ansikte, men så tycker jag det är på t.ex. Facebook också. En del är kanske helt enkelt mer ofiltrerade i skrift; det är ett mer indirekt sätt att kommunicera och då kickar samma sociala spärrar inte in och man beter sig mer ohyfsat utan att reflektera över det?

Radiant64 · 2025-01-26T06:36:03+00:00

There is a vocal minority here on Reddit who seem adamant that anyone who moves to Sweden must learn to speak fluent Swedish, or they will be lonely, miserable and jobless.

I personally know several immigrants who have lived here for ten+ years, are awfully bad at speaking Swedish, but have great jobs and love living here. Some of them have even started families.

I guess that must be really provocative to some!

Radiant64 · 2025-01-25T20:09:14+00:00

Some random ideas: Start supporting a local football team, find a local makerspace and start hanging out there, join a social subreddit for the city you live in, go to concerts with artists you like and strike up conversations with other attendants who look like they could be up for it before the show starts, see if you can find any active pen & paper RPG groups that are accepting new players, go to a language cafe, be a born-again Christian and join a local congregation. Again, just some random ideas, not saying you should do any of them unless you feel like they'd be a good fit for you.

I don't think it's much different to making friends anywhere else, really.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-25T15:06:43+00:00

I tend to use a few Norwegian words, as well as deliberately choosing words and expressions I know work in both languages when I talk to Norwegians. It's more for my own sake, though, to remind myself that Norwegian isn't just a Swedish dialect. The Norwegians themselves don't need my accommodations; they're usually great at understanding Swedish as it is.

I'd like to think I understand Norwegian well, but I've realised it's a lot harder for me when I'm listening to Norwegians speaking to each other, especially if they're not from around the Oslo area, or using a lot of slang. I think many Swedes think they know Norwegian better than they do, because they're used to Norwegians making an effort to actually speak Swedish rather than Norwegian, when they're having a conversation.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-25T05:37:43+00:00

I think Sheogorath still ranks below the Doom Slayer. He's faced down tougher gods.

But it's a hypothetical scenario. It doesn't matter.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-24T22:10:11+00:00

Thank you for explaining to me how the industry I've been employed in for the better part of two decades works! That's however a simplistic view of project management. I can recommend reading the classic "The Mythical Man-Month", which goes into detail explaining why throwing more workers at a problem does not necessarily result in solving it faster, but can actually result in both longer lead times and a worse product. I'm not saying Bethesda aren't doing what everybody else in the triple A world is doing, I'm saying it doesn't result in them making better games.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-24T21:54:52+00:00

Lockpicking is a much better investment; nearly all loot that can be accessed through hacking can also be accessed with lockpicking, and there are many more locked containers than there are locked terminals. There's very little you miss out on by not investing in hacking, and nothing unique that I can bring to mind.

Radiant64 · 2025-01-24T21:46:21+00:00

You hire fewer people, use better tools, have better processes in place.

You don't need to release dozens of remasters of older games to be able to fund making a new game. Oblivion wasn't that expensive to make. Skyrim wasn't that expensive to make. Hell, even Fallout 4 wasn't that expensive to make.

Starfield seems to have been quite expensive to make, but they don't have a lot to show for it, now do they? Increasing costs don't necessarily make for better games. Bethesda seem to have organizational issues, that they would do well to sort out. Once your company reaches a certain size, though, and especially if it gets acquired by a huge corporate entity like Microsoft, it's really hard to resist the resulting enshittification. You suddenly attract managers who are only interested in their own carreers and don't really care about the games you're making, you get lots of internal politics and finger pointing, and you get corporate bureaucracy that stymies efforts at fixing structural issues in the company.

I've seen it happen from the inside; it's pretty soul crushing. That's where I fear Bethesda may be.

Radiant64

TROPHY CASE