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Recent Articles
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Better and Cheaper Estimates, If You Must
I don’t think you should estimate small tasks[^small-tasks] on software projects, but if you insist—or if your context demands it as a condition of your employment—then you might be able to benefit from one simple trick to balance accuracy with speed: identify one reason each why your estimate is reasonable and why it is overconfident.
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Breaking Free Of a Damaging Behavioral Pattern
I’ve been plagued by impatience, leading to annoying outbursts and harmful “venting” of emotional pain. I’ve never liked this behavioral pattern of mine and finally, after years of searching, a few key ideas have found me and they’re helping me break free of this pattern.
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Remind Yourself To Schedule A Thing
When practising GTD, it’s sometimes hard to frame a task as an action. If you want to remember to do something, but you’re not prepared to do it just yet, then remind yourself to schedule time to do it.
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Practical Steps to Delay Burnout
I have read many articles about avoiding or recovering from burnout. I usually find the advice true, but useless, due to a lack of concrete steps that can help me get started. Here, I try to augment an article that I recently read with the concrete steps I’ve taken and which seem to have helped.
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Managing the Uncertainty of Legacy Code: Part 5
How do we commit tiny changes without disrupting everything? And a case study of sorts.
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Managing the Uncertainty of Legacy Code: Part 4
You don’t need a test framework to start adding tests to legacy code.
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Managing the Uncertainty of Legacy Code: Part 3
Refactoring without tests carries risk, so take it seriously, but don’t let it block you entirely.
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Managing the Uncertainty of Legacy Code: Part 2
The role of exploratory refactoring and Approval Tests in rescuing legacy code.
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Managing the Uncertainty of Legacy Code: Part 1
It’s hard to know where to start. It’s hard to know whether to start at all!
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Broadcast from OBS Studio To Everything In Linux
OBS Studio 26.1 made this article mostly obsolete. If you’re stuck on an earlier version of OBS Studio, then you’ll need some help to enable a “virtual camera” for fancy backgrounds and other interesting uses.
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Lasting Change Demands Alignment
Alignment on fundamental organizational objectives will constrain how effectively you adopt changes to the way you work. Without alignment, success comes in the form of temporary compliance and failure lurks around every corner.
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Questions from the Legacy of SoCraTes 2020
Dealing with wayward micro-commits, why I prefer not to check e-mail in the morning, and one little piece of good news to come out of the COVID-19 radical realignment of workers.