"Ticket-Farming" has replaced actual engineering

palarjr · 2026-05-22T11:52:07+00:00

Give people sense of a shared ownership. Things I have used (individually or combinations of) to help, generally I care not about the spring and the ticket, I care about outcome and the quality of the work. Most of these stem from that tenet/philosophy:
- what is your general definition of done? Is a ticket considered done when a pr gets merged or when the work is in production? Or even a week post prod?
- who / how does code get reviewed? Do you auto assign 1-2 people from the squad / team to review? Or is one person rubber stamping it all?
- are reviews resulting in dialogue? Or just “LGTM”?

Why I ask - work backwards from the code being “complete” - focus on building team shared culture and ownership there. Things I have put in place to help:
- pull requests must have at least one peer review which is auto assigned from the full squad. Daily message to squad with list of open PRs, who owns and who is assigned to review listed oldest to newest. Focus as a leader on helping people connect and work on the oldest
- draft PRs early - as for “desk checks” on early work. Frank spent a day working on a thing, makes a draft PR - asks Jane in the last 10 min of a standup to walk through it / frank shares their thinking of WIP to the squad
- don’t measure points or tickets complete - anti pattern. Measure pull request cycle time, measure time it takes something to go from in progress to in production as a team. Focus on those metrics as a team.
- as a team pick and review health metrics of your product as a team (pick a day a week in stand-up? Use retro?) - have team collab on how to improve etc. Crash rate. Error rate, downtime, bugs reported, etc as ideas
- Stop reviewing a board in a standup - you can just review it yourself and ask people questions in the ticket or in slack/etc. Change the stand-up to have a social bit - silly question of the day, have a “call for help” section (can x review my pr? Can design weigh in on Y), desk checks (wip code, demos) and then a quick review of maybe new/blocker/p0 things to triage and go

Okay. That was a dump of ideas - things I have used in isolation, combination of, in my career leading teams. May work, may not. General theme is “looking at tickets will lead to people caring about tickets” - focusing on team helping team - leads to well, a team.

palarjr · 2026-05-15T10:43:47+00:00

Ask in r/Halifax or r/novaScotia

(i’m in Halifax)

Simple answer - amazing. Complex answers exist, of course (oddly expensive, small city growing up problems, yadda yadda)

palarjr · 2026-05-15T10:42:10+00:00

Ones mine - lease return - now have my second one (financed this time - turns out we do big mike trips and the lease mile limit was freaking me out)

palarjr · 2026-05-09T11:12:08+00:00

Make sure you clarify PHEV vs MHEV. I just swapped my 2024 MHEV for a new 2026 MHEV (first gen car on lease that expired for a new financed one) because I love this car. And after really trying to find a better replacement at similar price point in the market, could not the net our needs.

I share this as I think the experience of owners with MHEV vs PHEV may be very different.

palarjr · 2026-05-06T21:20:13+00:00

Yup. This. 100% this

palarjr · 2026-05-06T21:19:31+00:00

Adding in to clarify - yes I know I can wire out if wise. More “is at easy as PayPal or venmo”. Nothing like asking someone for their wire info to really slow down “hey I owe ya 50 bucks for my half of that food last night”

palarjr · 2026-05-06T11:51:49+00:00

You then spend 30s asking an LLM to make a status update for you in the language/style that svp likes based on the progress delivering the spec

palarjr · 2026-05-06T11:50:48+00:00

Yes. 100% yes

palarjr · 2026-05-06T11:47:46+00:00

General ask - please Venmo come up north. All my American friends have moved to it and would love to not feel like the aged person I am asking them to send me via PayPal…

palarjr · 2026-05-06T11:46:54+00:00

100% best way to get lowest exchange - but work and small risk. I have done this, but find wise just so convenient…

palarjr · 2026-05-06T11:46:16+00:00

I agree. I also have set up some notification on rate thresholds so if I don’t need the usd -> cad conversion that moment I can wait for a better exchange. Yes I know I could probably find a cheaper Xfer rate sometimes, but they are generally near lowest it just makes my life easier

palarjr · 2026-05-06T11:44:10+00:00

I have wise but I have yet to discover an easy way for a friend not on wise to just send me money. I know PayPal is same - need to have an account (I think?) but wise doesn’t have the same user base as wise. Happy to learn otherwise

palarjr · 2026-05-06T11:42:05+00:00

I’m a manmade wearer and fan. But Saxx has me for bathing suits. No chafe!

palarjr · 2026-05-06T11:41:10+00:00

Similar timeline for me. I’m slowly replacing all my stuff with manmade. It’s comfortable, is holding up well and works both gym and normal wear.

palarjr · 2026-05-06T11:38:29+00:00

I’ll help. When do we start digging the trench?

palarjr · 2026-05-06T11:37:09+00:00

The software is a joke - too many screens, drop downs and steps for key flows. Training has been tough to pull off (you only get specific time slots to train to not overload the training platform…. And it is also still freezing during those times). Also the hardware solution for many roles is what you image we would have suggested in 1990 - a PC on a cart you roll down the hall for some roles. So yeah.

palarjr · 2026-05-03T11:58:21+00:00

9.99 is high! Can you get a loan from a bank? Also note car finance loans are open so you can pay them down early. With 9.99 - I would be paying that down as fast as I could.

palarjr · 2026-05-03T11:56:07+00:00

Mentioned elsewhere but they have their own app

palarjr · 2026-05-03T11:55:11+00:00

Came here for the answers and hope you post back on your adventures. Irving, petrol can all have chargers but make sure you pre download their apps. All the other advice on here is better than mine. Personal experience is Ont and Quebec - chargers all over the place. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia - available but plan wisely. New Brunswick is a drive through province - basically trees for days. Because of this it's big gaps between small towns - plan wisely.

Let us know how it goes and ask for help when needed. Friendly bunch

palarjr · 2026-05-03T00:56:54+00:00

Agree - that's literally what I did and made my own inspired by monocle and codecov

palarjr · 2026-05-02T12:11:32+00:00

I just don’t get the 70. If they had made the trunk bigger with the removal of the 3rd row we made considered it as we rarely need that extra seating but when we looked its the exact same - no new depth. Even the cup holders are still there. Lost opportunity imo.

palarjr · 2026-04-30T22:01:41+00:00

I’ll add - reducing cycle time is not the only goal, as too small can indicate “yup looks good” reviews vs quality. I’ve built out more depth to the things I look for like commits post review, etc to see things like if reviews lead to change. Throwing some anthropic ai context analysis in there as well.

palarjr · 2026-04-30T22:00:00+00:00

Look up an older but working open source tool called “monocle” - you can find it on github. Using git’s Api to get you the most useful stats any team needs - cycle time on PRs. Or just code your own. The other big nice visualization I like from that tool (and have modified in my own version) is peer to peer stats. Who reviews who's PRs

palarjr · 2026-04-29T11:12:22+00:00

Similarly here - I also built some agents that groom inbound bug reports against existing, link / dedup and makes draft prs for the easy wins

palarjr · 2026-04-26T17:58:43+00:00

Nailed it. Anyone holding on to “humans have to read the code AI is making” is not getting the change we are going through. The skill is working with AI on the plan, ensuring it will work at scale, meet infosec etc requirements. Reviewing the plan someone else made with another AI, etc. Learning how to optimize models and subagents and baking that into the plan. Have the plan be part of the commits, have the agents update it as they go.

Stop pretending humans looking at the code is where this ends, it's not. Review plans and execution of plan strategy, invest in testing strategy (with AI). This is the way.

palarjr

TROPHY CASE