Might wanna read it again, it’s right there :)

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

It’s an incredibly critical part companies love to completely ignore.

If you assign devs to teams and lock em down, you’ve violated a core principle

And it’s a key role in being able to achieve these two:

Agile processes promote sustainable development.

And

The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

This is talked about at length by the likes of Fowler, who talk about how locking devs down us a super fast way to kill sustainable development. It burns devs out fast as hell.

Note that it’s careful not to say on the same project

That’s actually a pretty important part of its original premise.

It’s a big part of why scrum meetings were a thing, as the expectation was any curious dev could just join in to see what’s up, if they like.

Not tying devs down to 1 specific thing is like the cornerstone of agile, and over many years of marketing and corporate bastardization, everyone had completely forgotten that was literally the point.

The whole point of the process was to address 2 things:

1. That client requirements can’t easily be 100% covered day one (But you still need to get as many as you can!)

2. To avoid silo’ing and tying devs down to specific things, and running into the one bus rule (“how fucked would this project be if <dev> got hit by a bus?”)

And the prime solution posited is to approach your internal projects the same way open source works. Keep it open and available to the whole company, any dev can check it out, chime in if they’re familiar with a challenge, etc.

One big issue often noted in non-agile companies (aka almost all of them) is that a dev slent ages hacking away at an issue with little success, only to find out far too late someone else in the company already has solved that one before.

An actually agile approach should be way more open and free range. Devs should be constantly encouraged to cross pollinate info, tips, help each other, post about their issues, etc. There should be first class supported communication channels for asking for help and tips company wide.

If your company doesn’t even have a “ask for help on (common topic)” channel for peeps to imfoshare, you are soooooooo far away from being agile yet.

I’ve literally never actually seen a self proclaimed “agile” company at all get agile right.

If your developers are on teams that are tied to and own specific projects, that’s not agile.

If you involve the clients in the scrum meeting, that’s not agile.

If your devs aren’t often opening PRs on a variety of different projects all over the place, you very likely aren’t agile.

If your devs can’t open up a PR in git as the way to perform devops, you aren’t agile.

Instead you have most of the time devs rotting away on the sane project forever and everyone on “teams” siloed away from each other with very little criss talk, devops is maintained by like 1-2 ppl by hand, and tonnes of ppl all the time keep getting stuck on specific chunks of domains because “they worked on it so they knpw how it works”

Shortly after the dev burns out because no one can keep working on the same 1 thing endlessly and not slowly come to fucking losthe their job.

Everyone forgets the first core principle if an agile workplace and literally its namesake us devs gotta be allowed to free roam.

Let them take a break and go work on another project or chunk of the domain. Let them go tinker with another problem. Let them pop in to help another group out with something.

A really helpful metric, to be honest, of agile “health” at your company is monitor how many distinct repos devs are opening PRs into per year on average.

A healthy company should often see many devs contributing to numerous projects all over the company per year, not just sitting and slowly be coming welded to the hull of ThatOneProject.

All the electronics inside are very much capable of combustion.

Your power supply inside the printer body for example can very much fail and burst into flames.

And tbh it’s not that uncommon for that to happen with 3d printers. They’re often made with very cheap parts and prone to cheap work on the inside bits.

Add on how much of a high wattage load they meed to handle for extended periods of time and yeah, sometimes the inner wiring bursts into flames and the whole thing goes up.

I always recommend keeping a cheap lil smoke alarm directly overhead any 3d printer, seriously. Those fuckers can very much spontaneously burst into flames lol

None of this stops the risk of fire.

Once a fire starts, the printer turning off won’t magically stop the fire from continuing to grow.

Printers can fail in all manner of ways.

Also, you should have a venting solution of printing ASA.

It’s pretty cheap to get a proper fire resistant heat cover for a printer.

Just get an emergency “space blanket”, they’re often only a couple bucks and quite good, but very fire resistant.

Sometimes its a physical issue in your setup.

Double check your cable, double check the carriage, and double check the rails, look for potential obstructions.

I had one print that kept failing in the exact same place each time, couldn’t figure it out, then I watched it live and the dang ribbon itself was physically catching on a specific part of the geometry mid print and then the print would twist a bit, lol.

Something to consider, I’d recommend visually watching that specific layer when it’s coming up to see if you see something happen.

There’s not really a nice way to frame “your post sounds like it was written by an extremely cringe teenager trying to cosplay as their idea of what constitutes a professional dev, demonstrated by the classic combination of ignoring everything prior written, attempting to represent a ball of mud as a badge of honor, and unironically trying to use lines of code count as a metric to measure by”

Literally checked off all the “lol sure bud” boxes in a single statement, and then if you aren’t picking up on the nuance, let me explain what I wrote after:

I hope you understand later how incredibly cringe what you wrote is, because the day you do is the day you have likely matured enough in knowledge and skill to call yourself a professional unironically, which is a good thing.

Until that day, stop prostrating shit like what you just wrote above if you ever want any developer worth their salt to take you even remotely seriously, otherwise you will likely find yourself the laughing stock very quickly of any serious circle.

Best of luck out there, and finally:

Next time someone is giving extremely useful advice, just write it down, don’t shit talk. That’s without a doubt the #1 divergence that separates the path between long term failure vs success.

Everything about what you just wrote, and the way you represented it, signals you are precisely the type of individual that should take everything about what I wrote above very much to heart, friend.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I hope one day you do :)

If you haven’t played it yet, OP you may really like Ultros.

Classic feeling metroidvania, modern game engine, but it’s visuals are fucking amazing and the colors, oh man.

They went for this incredible psychedelic art style and it’s just gorgeous and vibrant.

https://youtu.be/AyGZAzHu1QQ?si=AdEjVo3pjHZ-MuFn

That’s code review.

Only on very small projects.

As the team grows, having just 1 person review your code is simply not sufficient.

Even 2-3 may not be enough to sanity check if a larger new feature on a massive project is good. If it impacts the team and means a fundamental shift in methodology, then you need more voices weighing in.

Now, can you merge the PR in first, then have the meeting after? Sure, I guess, but why would you?

If the team reacts negatively to what you built, finds flaws in it, or simply just doesn’t get it because you overengineered, now you have to revert the PR and go back to the drawing board.

It makes tremendously more sense to bring folks impacted in on a swarmed live PR review as you go over what you did, where you did it, and why… before you merge it in.

At this point you can QnA, get suggestions, feedback, etc.

Now typically most of my response to live chat feedback is “aight, can you add that as a comment on the PR itself so I can see it after?” And then they go and do that asap, usually typing it up as I answer other folks questions. Because at this stage the PR is literally the perfect place for feedback to go.

I’ve been down the path of “1 person LGTMs the PR, huge new feature is added, I document it on the wiki rigorously, I post the new feature to chat… 1/10 people bother to use it and 9/10 give blank glassy stares when I bring it up”

It. Doesn’t. Work.

Period, lol. And don’t get me wrong, I wish it did, but people just don’t RTFM mate, that’s a fact of life a d the sooner you accept that, the easier the job gets.

it’s rare that a single PR introduces anything but a small slice of a feature

Yes, I never said this was a common occurrence. This is indeed rare but it dies happen.

And we’re not really talking about a PR review at this point

No, this is 100% still part of the PR review, I was pretty explicit about that. This process should happen for a large feature/service/etc as this simply cannot be covered by a “LGTM!” Comment on a PR.

These meetings primarily cover when you’ve established something that needs to be followed or used moving forward. IE: “This new feature makes our lives a lot easier and now (annoying thing) is much easier to implement. This is how I used it in my PR and I wanna make sure all the rest of the team is on the same page about it, and everyone else starts using it in the future.”

This 100% comes up here and there and it absolutely necessitates an actual meeting, because any dev worth their salt knows what happens if you dont get everyone on the same page on it…

The inevitable “why didn’t you use (thing I made explicitly for this purpose)?” Convo comes up a month or two later, because all you did was document the new thing and open a PR, get a couple "LGTM!"s, and you posted a blurb about it in the chat and pinged some folks.

And if you’ve gone through this process before you will know that simply just never works, full stop. Doesn’t matter the team, doesn’t matter how well documented, doesn’t matter how good your write up is… People. Don’t. Read.

There’s a reason “RTFM” is such a meme in linux communities, people don’t fuckin read mate, abd that’s why critical big PRs 100% need a 20-30 min QnA meeting so people can actually talk about it.

I’d estimate tops 10-20% of devs that should read your docs, will actually do it.

Do you not do demo meetings after introducing entirely new features?

Sometimes a PR can be quite large as it involves an entirely brand new feature that simply didn’t exist before.

And if it’s an internal tool/service for fellow devs to use to make their lives easier, yes, it likely deserves a meeting so the devs can have a chance to QnA about it. Usually 5-10 minutes going over the who/what/why/where/how, then 20 mins or whatever of any needed QnA if devs are curious for more info about specifics, like performance or extensibility or etc.

If you create a new tool like that abd then just hand it off with all the devs have to go on being “here’s the manual, figure it out” you know what happens?

Almost no one reads it, and pretty much no one uses it, because parsing a giant manual of info is difficult co.pared to seeing a live demo

1. Make branch for the ticket
2. Make periodic commits to branch
3. Open PR from branch to main
4. (optional) if the changes are big, I have a meeting with devs to discuss it. If I can’t easily explain to the junior devs what I did and why, it means I did something wrong.

As a senior dev, I’ve found “can the junior devs grok wtf I did/made” to be an excellent “did I overengineer?” Litmus test.

A good implementation should be not too hard to explain to the juniors, and they should be able to “get it” in a single short 20-30 minute meeting at most.

If they are curious/interested and ask questions, that’s a good sign I made something useful and worthwhile.

If I get a lot of “I’m not sure I get it” and blank stares, I probably have overcomplicated the solution.

If that “ooooh, okay!” Comes quickly, then we are good!

The automobile didn’t put cabbies out of jobs, it put horses out of work.

If anything it actually made demand for cabbies skyrocket, because now they could do the same job but way faster, so now they were more affordable abd not just a service reserved for wealthy.

In other words, expect that AI will increase demand for programmers exceptionally, as the bar for entry lowers.

An LLM still needs a “pilot” to “drive” it, and you need to still know code well enough to interpret the output and catch mistakes or hallucinations.

But typically when a field becomes more affordable, it goes up in demand, not down, because the target audience that can afford the service grows exponentially.

“But if it’s so easy to become program now, what’s to stop people from just using ChatGPT and never hiring a programmer?”

Same reason people still, today, hire cabs even if they can drive themselves.

Convenience. Time is money and just because 1 person can do all the jobs of a company, doesn’t mean they physically have the time to do it.

Ideals largely vaporize when you have bills to pay and you are facing homelessness.

Your best bet is start talking to local job recruiters, ask them what tech stacks and certs are in high demand, and go learn that stack and get those certs and take whatever job will pay you.

Once your bills are getting paid you probably will have time/energy to work on personal projects.

The vast majority of work is closed source proprietary stuff.

In fact to be more specific, the vast majority is mind numbing “thing” management CRUD applications.

Inventory management, people management, accounting, etc etc.

“We wanna make an app for managing (things)” is gonna be your life for awhile.

It’s also heavily a lot of “we had this (thing) management app made by someone 12 years ago. It’s now barely functional, riddled with bugs, has huge security holes, and has tens of thousands of users every day on it. We want you to add new features to it and not fix any of the existing massive issues at all. We have no idea how it works, it has zero documentation, we don’t even know where it is hosted atm, and you will count yourself lucky of you even get the git history”

You heavily want to focus your skills first and foremost on how to read other people’s code. How to interpret wtf this zero documented function does and how it works.

That’s your #1 skill.

It just sounds like Tim was no longer a developer and should have a manager title, as he was training and teaching and on boarding all the time.

If his title was no longer developer, because he wasn’t doing any development on his own, said metrics wouldn’t apply to him anymore, and the issue would be resolved in a reasonable way.

Heyo!

Query: Have you tried out Kavita yet? It’s what I have started for self hosting my books/PDFs/etc, and there’s a lot of free open license books out there that you can bulk load onto it and have a whole library at your fingertips.

I believe there’s a way to integrate it with kindle as well?

Cura has been great for me but I’m growing tired of needing to copy my print profiles from machine to machine on different OSes to slice my STL files.

AFAIK it should be possible to just automatically share the profile file (its just a text file IIRC) over your network, so if you modify it on machine A you automatically get the changes on machine B, though you may need to close and re-open cura