Monthly Archives: February 2017

Clean Coder Chapters 9 and 10

Chapter 9: Time Management
This is a very interesting chapter as everything revolves around time and it is something that we never seem to have enough of am I right? Of course I am. I myself have been trying for years to come up with some sort of consistence as far as a schedule goes, but with my situation up until I started with college was different as I am on disability so I tried to keep to a regular schedule so I didn’t get caught in some weird time continuum while I figured out my next step. I have found it difficult to manage time while in school though and try to set a schedule, but each semester that changes and well I get out of sync. Thank goodness this is the final semester (well until grad school if I go that route) and I will hopefully be gainfully employed shortly thereafter. Anyways I suppose I should get back to the chapter at hand, time management. I found it amusing how he referred to meetings as necessary and huge time wasters because it is so true no matter what your job is. I never gave much thought about how much per person it actually costs for a meeting. There are a lot of good points in the chapter concerning meetings in general, but a lot of it is in my opinion common sense. Have and agenda and a goal. Well of course there is an agenda and a goal, I know there are a lot of times where meetings don’t seem to have either but there generally is. I really like the stand up meeting like we are suppose to do for Agile development. Twenty seconds per question, no more than a minute per person; in, out, done the way it should be in my opinion. Short, sweet, and to the point I say. No beating around the bush. I liked his quote from Kent Beck, “Any argument that can’t be settled in five minutes can’t be settled by arguing.”. Awesome words of wisdom. There are a decent amount of items in this chapter I really enjoyed, especially how he compared stuff to D & D type games, like focus manna, if you use up all your focus manna in the meeting, you’ll have none left for coding, how very true indeed.
Time Boxing and Tomatoes. I am definitely going to give this a shot. I think it is a really great idea to set a timer and let nothing interfere with your plan, actually carrying out to a tee may be a different story but still worth a shot none the less. I love it; dividing your time between tomato and non tomato time. I am actually laughing right now thinking about it, how many tomato’s did you get done today Jim?  Only 15, slacker! Over all I thought this chapter was well done and a very important, if not one of the most important things that needs to be worked out. If you can’t learn how to manage time effectively and overcome adversity when something hinders your plans, you will have a hard time getting things done and you will probably find yourself moving out of a job versus up in the job.
Chapter 10 Estimation:
I really like how he put it right out there in the first sentence. “Estimation is one of the simplest, yet most frightening activities that software professionals face. So much business value depends on it. So much of our reputations ride on it. So much of our angst and failure are caused by it. It is
the primary wedge that has been driven between business people and developers. It is the source of nearly all the distrust that rules that relationship.”

He hits the nail on the head as far as what an estimate is and how they are interpreted differently. As commitments and guesses. In reality an estimate is just a guess at when you think you will be done, however they are never set hard in stone, but the issue is that the business man hears oh it will be done by such and such date, great. I mean there really isn’t much that I have to say on this chapter other than when I give an estimate, I try and be as clear as possible and look at all the facts and take in all the information that I have and add on some extra time just in case it falls through. I also make sure that I communicate if anything isn’t going according to plan and adjust accordingly. There were a lot of great techniques he described, but I think it is something that has to be learned by doing, and by making mistakes.

From the blog format c: /s by c-braley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Clean Coder Chapter 9 & 10 (2/14 – 2/21)

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes! That is literally all I will be doing now (The Pomodoro Technique). Chapter 9 goes into great depth about time management and the different ways of professionally managing your valuable hours and even though I am already efficient at time management (at least I would like to think so, haha) the contents of this chapter was more than helpful! As someone who likes to play role-playing games in my spare time, I love the comparison about “focus-mana” and I find it to be so true! I can recall countless times when I tried to bang out a programming assignment in one night and fall short because I ran out of focus-mana and the code eventually just looked like a blob of random words.

Chapter 10 was about estimations and up until now, I had no idea how to make estimations when it comes to user stories as a part of the Scrum agile model. Of course, I knew how to make estimations as just a number but I didn’t know how to give clear-cut precise estimations that business owners could use as part of their planning. I am still confused about some of the estimation methods because of how much mathematical calculations are used in it but that is probably something that you get better at through practice and experience.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tan Trieu's Blog by tanminhtrieu and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Clean Coders Chapter 9 and 10 (2/21/207) Week 4

In the 9th chapter of Clean Coder, the author talk about the concept of time management in programming.  Throughout the chapter he explains how meetings are required but at the same time end up being a waste of time. the fact that $200 an hour is being spent per person in a meeting and how it wastes time getting the project done by the deadline is a bad call. While meetings are optional, it may ruin the reputation of people and one would have to depend of their manager to get kept up to date. The rest pretty much talks about keeping healthy and prepared while attempting to maintain your goals.

What I found interesting in the chapter is that the author mentioned you don’t have to go to a meeting even though it is required to? Does that mean that people do not keep track of who goes or not, or are the meetings are not a serious as I thought they originally were?  I find it interesting how he talks about getting sleep and being aware around you and staying organized, i have a tough time doing that currently in my last semester.

The 10th chapter of Clean coders that us to the topic about estimation where the author describes the concept of estimation as fearful and risky since having an estimate is deemed an unsure, finalized choice. The big difference about estimation that the author pointed out is that businesses see it as commitment and developers see it as guesses. The best bet is to be safe on the estimation side when it comes to finding a completion date.

What remarks me is that how businesses and developers tend to have different interpretations of words such as estimation. It forces developers to become more cautious when telling their clients how the project should pan out. I agree with the part that the estimations are fearful and risky as one can never know the exact solution to how everything will pan out.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Dan's Tech Rant by danbarbara and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint Review 2

It’s finally the end to an extend sprint and in all honestly, i’m disappointed with the progress that I’ve made individually. I told myself that I would get through everything on the task board, but there were many roadblocks for me in this sprint. I had a tough time connecting the OpenMRS standalone to the AMPATH. It took me a really long time to do it, but I eventually diagnosed my problems and got it to work. What I did was add a piece of code in the web.xml file, and installed a chrome plugin called ‘Allow Control Allow-Origin’ and it allowed me to connect to the database.

As of now the majority of the group is on the same page and we are looking forward to improving our performance in the next sprint by holding each other accountable for the work that we commit to do.

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Blog by justcodeit94 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Clean Coder (Week 5)

This blog will revolve around chapters 9 & 10

Chapter 9

This chapter is about time management and how it’s imperative to have this skill. The book talks on the topic of how meetings are a waste of time. I honestly agree with this to a certain extent. Whenever i’m in a meeting at my job, I find that most of the time, the meeting usually goes nowhere and is not very beneficial for everyone. I also find that when meetings occur, there would be a selected few who will hold the group back by asking repetitive questions that could be answered on their own time and not the time of everyone in the room.  In programming, I find that meetings are imperative if they don’t last long. Meetings that don’t last long, can be very beneficial for everyone in the room, by  keeping everyone focus and happy.

Chapter 10

This chapter talks about estimation and how it’s important to make valid estimations. It’s tough to give an accurate answer when someone asks you how long something will take, because you really don’t know. In the programming world, there could be a plethora of obstacles that will hinder the progress of the project so it’s best to give options to when something will be done to the answer seeker so that they won’t be disappointed. This chapter also talks about commitment. This is different than an estimation, because a commitment is something you MUST see through.

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Blog by justcodeit94 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Review Sprint 2

We all managed to get the OpenMRS and AMPATH running and working together, every though it took us a while. We did not finish modifying the angular code for the login page, so we will have to throw this back on our sprint tasks. As of now we are all on the same page.

This sprint was a little bit unorganized. Rather than working as a group we kind of did out own thing, and left others behind. In the future i think we should have one person project their screen, and have the group follow what they are doing. This way we make sure that everyone is on the same page. During this sprint some people finished almost all of the tasks, and others finished them almost a week later. This made it hard to progress as a group.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by jonathanpaizblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Clean Coder Chap 9+10, Week 5

Time Management:

Time management is key to accomplishing most tasks in life especially programming. Time is precious; do not waste time. Meetings are necessary, but often are time wasters. Keep discussions brief within meetings, try not to keep everyone there trying to solve a problem in the meantime. Keeping focus all the time is a tough task, especially with software development, but you can break up your day with simpler tasks. This directly applies to us but more in the sense of managing other classes/work on top of our programming.

Estimation:

Estimation will always cause uncertainty. One of the hardest questions a developer will ever have to answer is how long something will take. The PERT technique computes distributions based off best-case, nominal, and worst-case estimates for the project.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Kyle Polewaczyk by kpolewaczyk and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Clean Coder 9 & 10, (Week 5)

The ninth chapter of the Clean Coder book is about time management. The is only 28,800 seconds in a working day and it is the duty of a professional to use those precious few seconds effectively. According to the author meetings take a lot of time and money; as professional you need to know when to go to a meeting you are invited and when to decline.

The advice that I found most interesting was the following: any argument that can’t be settled in five minutes can’t be settled by arguing; and so there is no point wasting meeting time to try and resolve the issue. The other interesting thing is the Pomodoro technique to manage time and focus.

The tenth chapter of the book was about estimation and how to make valid estimations. The author explains and differentiates between the concept of an estimation vs. a commitment. He also talks about the different ways to make estimations.

There is not much that is new to me in chapter 9, but I found some of the estimation techniques useful. I plan to try out those techniques in our ng2-amrs project.

From the blog CS448 – The blog about software by Sudarshan and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Clean Coder 9 & 10 Week 5

In the first section of the reading time management was discussed. One of the biggest time wasters could be meetings, they may seem important but many times they are not manditory. If you feel you are getting nothing out of a meeting, then leave. A big issue with wasting time is if you are not focused. Do your best to stay focused because if you’re not you’re not going to get anything done. A few strategies to help stay focused is take breaks, get enough sleep, drink caffeine, etc. I know if I’m tired and can’t focus it takes me twice as long as if I were focused.

The next section talks about estimations in your project. Theres a big difference between a commitment and an estimate. A commitment you must follow through with in your professional career, an estimate is a guess on your part and most likely will not be accurate. The best way to estimate tasks is to ask the people around you, they might actually know more about when you can complete a certain task. As a professional software developer you will become better at estimates, even though things could still happen that will throw your estimate way off.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Software Testing by kyleottblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Clean Coder: Chapters 9 & 10

Chapter 9 covers the topic of time management. The first thing that is talked about is meetings. They are necessary yet frequently very wasteful of time. The author lays out some guidelines to approach work day meetings. The first suggestion is to not attend every meeting. Only choose the ones that are of value to you or require your attendance. Next is to politely decline meetings which aren’t well structured. Meetings should have an outline of talking topics and talking times clearly defined. Lastly is to not be afraid to excuse yourself from a meeting which has either gone off topic or possibly dragging on. Next the author touches upon some things you can do to help keep focused at work. He mentions adequate sleep, consuming some caffeine (but not too much), and breaking with non-work activities to include exercise. The author goes on to mention a time interval strategy called tomatoes which is a Pomodoro technique. Basically you set a 25 minute timer and during the time you deflect any phone calls, issues, or other distractions. After the 25 minutes is up you deal with side tasks and possibly take a short break. When you’re ready, you start the timer again. Lastly, the author talks about blind alleys and software messes. The main message is to never go too far into something that can’t be abandoned. Furthermore it is always easier to turn back at the current time than to keep moving in the wrong direction.

After reading chapter 9 there are definitely some good tips to keep in mind to improve time management skills. The tomatoes technique seems like it would be an effective way to stay productive during the workday. Each time you start the clock you are dedicating 25 undistracted minutes towards completing a main work task. This is something I will try to put in practice especially on days that seem like they may be slipping away. Another tip I will keep in mind is to avoid priority inversion. I am definitely guilty of changing my priorities based on how I feel about tasks rather than doing them in the order they truly should be done. Recognizing that I do this, I will try to be more aware of how I rank my daily tasks and make sure they are correctly prioritized. I thought the section on “focus-manna” was not entirely necessary. Every working adult knows that sleep, exercise, and coffee are going to help performance on just about anything. I also wasn’t in complete agreement about leaving a meeting. If you have committed to attend a meeting I think it would be rude to leave before it is over and it may rub off the wrong way on co-workers. I would finish the meeting I was in but be more mindful of what meetings I attended in the future. Overall this has probably been my least liked chapter so far. I think that chapter assumed too many ideals and I didn’t agree with everything that was mentioned. Still, it is important to remember that the author is one of the most respected software professionals there are so his advice should always be digested and considered.

Chapter 10 covers the topic of estimating completion dates. It is made clear that a commitment and estimation are very different from each other. A commitment is something that must be accomplished and has a hard date associated with it. An estimation is not a promise but a likelihood or ballpark figure. As the author mentions it is best to outline a probability distribution for the likelihood of different time frames. One technique he mentions is PERT which uses a trivariate analysis. Basically a developer will make an optimistic, nominal, and pessimistic estimate and rate the likelihood of each. This gives management a planning guideline they can work with and better communicates deadlines. The author also mentions a popular estimation technique which has many forms called “wideband delphi.”  The main idea of this strategy is to make group estimates of tasks and projects. This gives more accurate estimates as well as ensures the entire team is in agreement. Lastly the author refers to the Law of Large Numbers in the sense that projects should be broken down into smaller tasks and each of those tasks should be given an individual estimate. The total of the all these tasks added up should be more accurate due to the better attention of detail the project may require.  In conclusion, the author suggests being cautious with commitments because they must be mandatorily met. A well thought estimate is usually the best course of action for a professional developer.

After reading chapter 10 I will be more careful of things I fully commit myself to. I definitely think that team estimating would be the most effective and accurate strategy. As a new developer it would be tough to give confident estimates so a group setting would surely help guide accuracy. If a team is implementing the Scrum framework then they are already following most of the guidelines in this chapter. While I think the trivariate analysis is also a good strategy to gauge likelihood, actually calculating a probability distribution seems like overkill. I may be wrong but I don’t think most work environments will require such calculations for every task and project. In summary, Scrum continues to be a framework which encompasses many of the guidelines and suggestions covered in this book

From the blog CS@Worcester – Software Development Blog by dcafferky and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.