Friday Hodgepodge

Four Lists

1. Maarten Dalmijn heads his list of "11 Laws of Software Estimation for Complex Work" with the following admonition: "Wrong estimates aren't your fault, but they are definitely your problem."

Yes.

After a brief story about a complex project, Dalmijn states each law and elaborates on it in turn.

In my ... estimation ... the seventh one is the most important: The biggest value in estimating isn't the estimate but checking if there is a common understanding.

Image by Drew Beamer, via Unsplash, license.

2. In the same field, but in a humorous vein, Carl Svensson offers a small collection of "Short Thoughts on Computers and Programming," which he tells us are not quite aphorisms. My favorite of the lot is the last: The future was better in the past.

3. It's a rabbit hole containing nuggets of good advice: Alison Green of Ask a Manager fame recently held "speed rounds" at her blog, in which she answered as many short questions as she could in two hours. She hit eighty last time, and has posted them in Q&A form.

No. 78, my favorite of the ones that caught my attention, contained advice I could have used at a younger age: I like telling people who are being weird that they are being weird. As in: "It's weird that you're so fixated on this."

4. In the realm of travel advice an ordinary person might not think of, we have "10 Hotel Safety Tips from a Former Intelligence Officer" at Security Magazine.

Some of these will seem cumbersome or borderline paranoid to people whose travel experience is all in the United States, but the author gives his reasoning, which makes them easier to remember and apply -- and might make you think again about some of your own practices. Even if you don't use this advice every time, it's good to know about it.

Hotel safe, I'm looking at you.

-- CAV