This has been an emotional week. I was supposed to get married last Thursday (23rd) and I had to postpone the wedding because there was no way that I could travel to Sri Lanka due to the current situation. It’s even more devastating because, now that the Vic governement decided to lock the state down, I cannot even travel to Melbourne to be with my girlfriend in this week because. Such extra-ordinary times and it kills me simply because none of this is under my control.
What have I been upto last week?
It was a very busy week. My goal was to finish a feature that I was working on within this week and I tried to help the team get the feature across. However, last Friday, I discovered a small piece of code that we didn’t implement and had to implement that. But, I could not get the feature tagged as COMPLETE because I could not get the review done.
I was spending a lot of time setting up Cygwin and my work dev environment from the scratch. It’s so damn hard! I think Friday I managed to fix all the dev environment related issues. Need to check it out next week.
How is everything else?
I’m slowly starting to realize that it stresses me out when I lose the grip of a goal. I guess t’s the way my brain is wired, quite possibly due to the way that I was conditioned during my school time, uni time and heavily during my early work life. I feel that when you said someone that you are going to achieve something, no matter the sacrifices, you must achieve it. That’s the only way to become a man of a word. However, when it comes to software, being ‘that’ man means working overtime. It’s so damn easy to get estimations all wrong when working with complex software systems. Moreover, when there is a team involved, you need to take the team dynamics into the picture as well. Therefore, if you really take it personal, you are going to screw the whole experience up for yourself.
So, what is the solution? What affects a software estimation?
- Complexity of the current codebase
- Complexity of the new requirements
- Team experties
- Team size (Not more, not less)
- Overheads (Meetings and other committments)
These are few things that I should evaluate before extimating the next feature. If we measure all the features with this metric and record the output, then we might be able to come up with a reasonable equation to do the estimates.
Just like what’s happening with the world these days, even a software work is really not under my control. However, if possible, we can always use some metric to calculate the estimation risk and associate that risk with the original estimation to get better at forecasting the completion date of our projects.
What am I reading?
This is embarassing! because it is still the same two books, - Rich Dad, Poor Dad - The English Spy
Any good TV shows or movies?
Watched this TV Series about New York City vs Mafia and was blown away by how the FBI cracked it. As an Electronics Engineer, the orgasmic few minutes was when they were developing the circuits for the bug. This was early ’80s where Analog electronics reigned. The bug looks like a simple mic contented to a RF transmitter, it’s a simple, handmade circuit. Put a few of them together to good use and you can bring down a multi-billion dollar Mafia. Power of Electronics in correct hands yo!
I’m intrigued to learn about the communication mechanisms used in these bugs. Let’s see!
Any new learnings?
Some AWS. And did a lot of configuration script changes for bash and vim. It was fun.
That’s a week!
-Pradeepa