Lucas F. Costa:

In this blog post, I’ll elucidate why backlogs exist and why they never shrink. Then, I’ll expound on why they’re useless and harmful. Finally, I’ll demonstrate how one can work without a backlog and explain why it’s much more productive to do so.

I agree whole heartedly with his “why they never shrink” logic, but I’m not willing to say that makes them “useless and harmful.” I’m not sure Lucas even believes that, since his advice of what to do instead at the end of the post boils down to “keep a short backlog.”

Still, I enjoy Lucas’s thought process and you might too. Recommended reading.

This week we’re talking about product development structures as systems with Lucas da Costa. The last time we had Lucas on the show he was living the text-mode only life, and now we’re more than 3 years later, Lucas has doubled down on all things text mode. Today’s conversation with Lucas maps several ideas he’s shared recently on his blog. We talk about deadlines being pointless, trajectory vs roadmap and the downfall of long-term planning, the practices of daily stand-ups and what to do instead, measuring queues not cycle time, and probably the most controversial of them all — actually talking to your customers. Have you heard? It’s this newly disruptive Agile framework that seems to be working well.

Daily stand-ups are a classic example of learned helplessness. We all know they’re useless, but we tell ourselves “that’s just how things are” and do nothing about it.

Lucas provides a set of five symptoms that indicate you’re doing stand-ups wrong and says if your team hits at least three of the five, your stand-ups are useless.

But, instead of just telling you to stop doing them (like I probably would), he provides a bunch of solid advice on how to make them useful again.

This piece by Lucas F Costa starts off right where I live:

There are many ways of estimating how long a software project will take. All of them are a waste of time.

It then goes on to describe a different way of doing it:

Instead of making “informed” guesses or multiplying estimations by N, we can embrace the randomness and variability involved in writing software and use more suitable statical methods, in this case, stochastic modeling techniques, to devise better forecasts. One of these techniques is the Monte Carlo method, which I’ll use to make projections in the rest of this post.

We’re talking all things text mode with Lucas da Costa — we logged his post “How I’m still not using GUIs in 2019” a guide focused on making the terminal your IDE. We talked through his Terminal starter pack which includes: neovim, tmux, iterm2, and zsh by way of oh-my-zsh, his rules for learning vim, the awesomeness of CLI’s, and the pros and cons of graphical and plain text editors.

“GUIs are bloatware” — Terminal rules…a guide to the terminal…

In this post, I’ll walk you through everything you need to start making your terminal a complete development environment: how to edit text efficiently, configure its appearance, run and combine a myriad of programs, and dynamically create, resize and close tabs and windows.