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.

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.

“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.