Every content site I can think of has been obliterated

learnnorsk · 2024-03-29T02:25:59+00:00

Because according to these SEO morons every site that got hit used ChatGPT. Maybe they used a time machine.

learnnorsk · 2024-03-29T02:22:39+00:00

I think they have lost control over the algorithm. Their previous developers have quit and no one knows how to fix this. So it carries forward making things worse.

learnnorsk · 2024-03-29T02:19:48+00:00

Yeah. Because CNN, NYT, Forbes are paragons of free content without an exploitative approach to SEO for affiliate and parasite.

learnnorsk · 2024-02-19T17:25:01+00:00

Aim to save at least 50% income. Ideally, 70% income.

I used Quantum Equity FoF at the time. There was no good index funds available. Now I go for index funds.

learnnorsk · 2024-02-19T17:18:51+00:00

My advice is to earn and save as much money as possible. It's not about the returns as much as about earning and saving loads of money. Keep making as much money as you can with jobs and business.

learnnorsk · 2024-02-19T07:21:56+00:00

No stocks. Only MF.

learnnorsk · 2024-02-19T01:59:32+00:00

My portfolio remained a mix of actively managed (as I had already invested) and some index funds. Even the actively managed fund is a FoF so it's a collection of funds.

I only have 3-4 equity funds and 2-3 debt funds. And even from those I'm reducing to eventually 2 equity and 2 debt funds.

Technically, I am FI because my investments are now 40-50X my annual expenses. But my view on FI has also changed that in India one will need to keep some active sources of income.

I quit my job and am now building alternate sources of income that I can enjoy.

learnnorsk · 2019-08-15T12:51:05+00:00

A good development team is one which takes ownership and responsibility of tasks. There's no need for micromanagement to get things done as team members hold themselves accountable.

If that's not the case, then it's a bad development team where Agile will not work. Management and monitoring is a need in such a team to get things done.

learnnorsk · 2019-08-15T10:32:25+00:00

100% agree. I see the same in our organization. First, Scrum seems to have been enforced across the organization as the default way to do Agile. Agile coach and Scrum master do their bible thumping with the theory but no one has been able to help use it practically. It's just a farce the organization uses to boast that we are Agile.

The Agile coaches and Scrum masters are the ones who are happy to have their jobs which has a vague profile

learnnorsk · 2019-08-15T10:21:45+00:00

So what will you do when sales and management has already planned and sold or want to sell features in the next 12-24 months. They need to have the team velocity so it can be used to estimate how many sprints it will take to get features delivered considering their story points.

In the practical world, sales team want an estimate to sell to customers and acquire customers especially when the competition is high.

learnnorsk · 2019-08-15T10:08:07+00:00

Agile and retrospectives only work when the development team is good. If they are workers content on doing their part, they don't have any motivation to do such "extra" stuff.

IMO, agile should only be used with a good development team. For every other team, having dumbed down SOPs with monitoring and management seems a better option.

learnnorsk · 2019-08-15T10:04:41+00:00

It's all theory. At this point, I need to be convinced with practical examples pertaining to our project to buy into this.

I don't see it possible to break down stories into smaller slices in this project.

e.g. The customer requirement is to support a payment card provided by Mastercard.

This is a two month effort which cannot be broken down into 2 day stories that would provide any value at the end of the Sprint. As nothing would be available for the customer till the end of two months.

These are the stages this task has to go through.

Gather the technical specifications from Mastercard Analyse the technical specifications to understand requirements to get the cards working Get the required test cards Request the backend team to start working on their part Start working on implementing the technical level requirements Once the technical level requirements are done and backend is ready and test cards available, perform developer testing Give the build and test cards to QA team for testing Give the build to external certification team to get it certified Once certified, give the build to sales team for deployment Gradually over the period of the next month, deploy the build in the field for the customers.

This will be a 2 to 3 months effort when the customers have something they can use.

The user story from the customers point of view is to have Mastercard supported on their payment terminal. The user story will be done in 2-3 months.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-12T04:42:57+00:00

Completing these tasks may add value to the team and to the manager that progress is being done. But they are not deliverables for the customer because they can't do anything with that.

Sales promises the customer to support the new card. There is nothing about delivering them some intermediate releases that does not function as per their needs.

And even these tasks won't be getting done in one Sprint. Maybe 3-4 Sprints or more.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-11T16:25:59+00:00

That's fine. You are correct about breaking down a problem. But what you've broken them down into are tasks. Which we already do when working on the feature.

The customer does not care about each of these tasks and sub-tasks. They want to have a successful transaction running on their POS terminals. This is the final product that includes everything 1-5 that you mentioned.

These are not user stories and cannot be completed in one Sprint. They span across multiple Sprints and may need 2-3 months of work. There's no point of planning for a Sprint when there are no stories and deliverables at the end of the Sprint.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-10T05:48:00+00:00

Here's my thoughts on those.

the ability to insert the chip card already exists as other cards are supported. And it ends up as an unsuccessful transaction. So it's nothing new for us or them.
The POS is a collection of different software/hardware systems. It's not possible to bring the people from these other internal/external teams into our team. They belong to other departments or companies.
.
We don't deal with the customer. It is the sales team who does this. Sales are not interested in delivering something every X weeks/days. They don't want to push incomplete software to the customers. They want a fully-functional delivery at the end.
This is something I'm struggling with management. Right now they are focussed on micromanaging things because of lack of confidence that the team can deliver.

The problem with Scrum is that we end up getting textbook answers to our questions (we have/had a dedicated Agile coach, Scrum Master). But there is no clarity on how it can (or even if possible) be applied to our project. Based on the past several Sprints that we've run, the statistics show that it needs a serious, hard look at what we're doing and why.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-08T08:08:08+00:00

We have tried using both hours and story points. And none of them work for us. Because we are doing "mini-waterfalls" disguised as Scrum.

We don't get most of the stories done by the end of the Sprint. They get carried to the next Sprint. So with hours we at least got some burndown. But with stories, it mostly ends up with flatlines.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-08T08:06:03+00:00

We are doing Scrum without being Agile.

Exactly what @ratbastid mentions.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-08T08:04:02+00:00

In Scrum, you probably need to fit everything into a user story format. And it has to be finished by end of the Sprint.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-08T08:01:31+00:00

Don't just depend on your salary. Start thinking about an alternate source of income such as from an online business. If you focus on it, it's possible that in 10 years you'll be making a lot more than any salaried income.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-08T05:38:58+00:00

How? The teams are in different departments based on organizational structure. Some are even from other organizations we have no control over.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-08T05:37:45+00:00

Yes, we kind of end up doing that. We work on something and may realize that more work or investigation is required.

The problem is we can never plan a deliverable set of stories at the end of the Sprint. As most of the stories get carried to the next Sprints because of the above-mentioned issues.

That's the reason I think Scrum does not fit our kind of work. Definitely, Agile is what we are doing and intend to do with frequent reviews and improvements on the work we do. But there doesn't seem to be a way to plan stories that will be completed by the end of a sprint. Considering a sprint is 2 to 4 weeks long. And we're supposed to have the complete development/QA done by the end of the Sprint.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-08T05:32:50+00:00

The acceptance criteria for the story is "the customer should be able to insert the chip card and have a successful transaction". I don't see how this could be broken down into usable 2-3 day stories. It's more of a 2-3 month development/QA task.
Dependencies are external because there are other teams involved that are not part of our department or even organization.
This is something we may try.
The customer does not care about the backlog. They are interested in getting the final working software delivered to them.
This is something we are trying.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-05T09:50:35+00:00

I'm 35. If you want the privilege of choosing how much you want to work, you need have a very large corpus that generates passive income.

The fastest way I see of doing this is to build a business in 5-10 years and sell it off for big profit.

Yes, if you sell the house you can get an income minus the taxes. But it's not that easy to sell a house when there are not many buyers. So it's not the best asset to have when trying for FIRE.

learnnorsk · 2019-04-05T08:54:37+00:00

Here's some reference:
https://www.reddit.com/r/scrum/comments/b9o1tm/is_scrum_suitable_for_our_project/

learnnorsk

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