Korthrun

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You’re absolutely right. For what it’s worth, it’s just the first part that’s important.

When you pick up a new concept from a “resource” such as a tutorial, take a minute to explore the concept and understand the semantics of what you’re doing. In the name of illustrating a concept tutorials can often be misleading in subtle ways.

An explanation of my “useless use of cat” example:

The command line has a concept called “piping”. This lets one command send output to a second command. It’s very handy. There is usually also a “cat” command, which will read a file and send the contents where you tell it. This is often your screen, or through a “pipe” to a second command. There is also a “grep” command that lets you search data for certain words.

Many “linux newbie” tutorials combine these tools to show how “piping” lets you send data from one command to another. “cat” some text file, then “pipe” the output to “grep” to search for your words. It usually looks something like cat ./my_address_book.txt | grep Giles to find lines in “./my_address_book.txt” that contain the word “Giles”. The thing is that “grep” can take a file name as an argument. You can just do grep Giles ./my_address_book.txt, and cat is for concatenating files into one. If you want to simply read a file there are more appropriate tools such as “less”. This by the way is the “useless use of cat”

When you’re a newbie though, it may be the first time you’re seeing either “grep” or “cat”. The tutorial is just trying to show you “pipes”. Along the way you’re picking up these “bad habits”. I’ve met professional sysadmins who didn’t know grep took a filename as an argument. It was always “cat blah | grep my_search”. I will see people type “cat /some/file | less” instead of “less /some/file”. It shows a lack of understanding of what these tools actually do, and IMO it just comes down to regurgitating tutorial actions without bothering to understand the semantics of what you’re being shown.

Don’t follow tutorials, understand them. I’m so tired of seeing useless uses of cat because some asshole writing a tutorial 20 years ago decided to illustrate how pipes work with a good ol cat file | grep string as if grep didn’t take a file name as an argument.

The more time I spend being mad about this the more I notice people using horrible practices in tutorials because they’re too lazy to setup a legit use case.

A new user sees this and thinks this is how grep works.

Loops are another common one. People going around not knowing you can pass a glob to a shell for loop. Because the tutorial they read was lazily written and they didn’t bother to understand the bits of what they were being shown, only how to reproduce/mangle the command until they manage to get close enough to what they want out of it.

Configuration management and build automation are definitely worth the time and effort of learning. It doesn’t have to be ansible, find which tool suits your needs.

I also have a small domain that is relatively low traffic. A lot of the “all in one” software on the list you linked looks pretty cool, I can’t deny.

What I found is that I make very few changes. I used to add mailbox aliases fairly often, but the fact is there are only two users and enabling the “+” syntax in addresses put a stop to me needing to make new aliases when I wanted a new address.

I just don’t feel like I need a management interface. Because of this I’ve just sort of frankensteined my own setup together and I love it. It operates how I expect it to, and enforces the standards I care about to the extent that I desire (e.g. which SPF result codes am I ok accepting?).

• Postfix as SMTP/Submission server. I chose to go w/PAM based for outbound SMTP auth.
• Courier for IMAPS
• Dovecot for LDA (sieve is delightful)
• Snappymail for webmail (served by apache httpd)

If cost isn’t too much of an issue check out The Mooltipass or one of its competitors.

I don’t remember the source, could have been anything from Stand Up Comedy to someone I know IRL, but I feel like they really cracked the “2 truths 1 lie” code.

• My name is Korthrun.
• I use Lemmy.
• I truly believe that this is a high value exercise that we should continue on with.

Good job getting the fuck out, that place sounds full to the brim with batshit insane management.

Sounds infuriating as hell. Props for your use of the past tense :D

Good job not doing a murder! I don’t know if I could keep my cool at whomever allowed “TBD” to get into an active sprint.

How can you provide acceptable results if there is no acceptance criteria defined? Was “literally reads minds” on your job posting?!

no one talks

met with deafening silence

This reminds me of children who will get their toothbrush wet, put a little paste on their tongue so it smells like mint, run the water for 2 minutes, but not actually brush their teeth. You know, because they don’t want to, and/or they don’t understand the point.

They just know that the parents say they need to do this thing, and they’d rather be off playing. You’re standing there for two minutes holding a wet toothbrush and staring at yourself in the mirror. Why not just brush your teeth?

I get it, they’re very busy. They’re already gonna be on the call for 15 minutes. Just participate ya know. Why choose to make that 15 minutes a complete waste? I expect the above from a child, not people with jobs in tech =/

It IS a great place to work, and I absolutely hate that 20 years ago I post under this handle on stuff like “Ubersite” about how “We should stop saying ‘sucks’ for negative things. How do we expect to get blowjobs if we keep saying bad things ‘suck dick’”. Like I just can’t tie that to my employer as much as I’d like to hype them up to dev/engineers online :p

I’m sure the internet super sleuths can figure it out, but I can’t imagine why they would bother :p

You didn’t mess it up, it wasn’t posted as a reply to me, I just saw it in other parts of the comments :)

My intension was to make a harmless little fun about scrum masters who extensively use colors and communicate like they have a conversation with children.

Man if I had taken the fucking time to check which community this was post to, I could have saved myself a lot of typing since I wouldn’t have bothered with the comment section :D Good post tho!

I am about 12 years into using Agile at my work place and I am about a decade in to being dumbfounded at the fucky implementations I read about in this type of post and it’s comments.

We are never asked to turn our cameras on during any of our agile related meetings. In any meetings really. Some people do it, some people don’t, I don’t think I’ve ever had someone ask me to turn my camera on at work.

How do you even set a color for a meeting? Is that an outlook thing? Are you scheduling meetings in JIRA? I honestly don’t even understand how one uses a color for a meeting. I would love an explanation of this :D

I’ve never once used a sticker, virtual or not, to tell others how I feel (at work). I’ll assume this is a retrospective thing. We mention anything that happened in the last sprint where we think we as a team need to do one of:

• Start doing X
• Keep doing X
• Stop doing X

Then the team has a quick anonymous vote and if we have a majority we either start, stop, or continue doing X.

e.g. “The slack workflow we implemented in our public channel last week was used 15 times. We should definitely keep prioritizing moving FAQ type items to slack workflows”

Quoting from some of the comments

Its literally hand holding and baby sitting.

That’s about your team and/or your teams leadership, not scrum.

checking in from the 45 minute “stand up” in which 10 people have their cameras on but only 3 people speak.

This is about your scrum masters inability to keep the meeting focused. We just do a straight up rotation, alphabetical by first name. Any time we are in danger of devolving into dev/engineering discussion our scrum master interjects and the conversation is saved for after standup or a meeting is setup depending on the topic. More often than not we give our updates and then say something like “JoBob I’ll need some time from you sometime today to discuss how to integrate with the thingamajig” or “After standup I’d like to talk to the team about XYZ”. We sometimes certainly have 3 people start trying to engineer a solution when someone says “I couldn’t figure out how to schoop the woop, so I’m still working on that.” but again our scrum master will say “Oh, JoBob is the schoop the woop SME, why don’t we chat it out after stand up”.

I hate that paragraph but I can’t find a good place to break it up, sorry.

Most of the complaints I see (overall, not just in this post/comments) come down to really basic shit:

• Your scrum master is fucking terrible at their job
• Your team actually does behave like a group of toddlers
• Your manager is actually a micromanager and this is just another micromanaging tool to them
• You’re bending your team/process to fit agile, and not bending agile to fit your team/process

I want to give two examples addressing my last list item.

First: We do not have stand ups scheduled 5 days a week. We found a cadence that makes sense for our teams work pace and our sprint duration.

Second: There’s such a thing as tasks that take less time/effort than writing the associated JIRA story would take. My team has agreed to just not bother with a story in these cases. It fits our workflow better and as a group of adult human beings we accept that it’s a waste of time/effort to write four paragraphs and a customer value statement for what essentially comes down to “type the number 70 into a form on a website and hit submit”.

Again as adult humans we also try to be aware of and avoid abuse of this mentality, and make sure we aren’t just doing mental gymnastics to avoid writing a story for something. When someone says “eeehhhh maybe we should throw a story on the backlog about that”, we just suck it up and do it.

This shit is so easy, and so helpful, it’s crazy to me how ridiculous y’all make the process.

edit: I will add that if you Masto-stalk me you’ll definitely find me bitching about long stand ups. FWIW that’s almost invariably when the scrum master is out and management has decided to run the meetings because none of the team felt like stepping up and doing it for a few days. i.e. it’s our own fault when it happens to us.

✨🌈 R E A D L I N E 🌈✨