At the start of the year, I thought of a new blog idea. I could pick certain days to give a run-down of the day’s work, including some banter. I drafted this up before the lock-down when we were working in the office. I hoped to write a few blogs in the series before posting them, but that didn’t work out. I suppose I could still write some based on working from home, but there won’t be as much banter to write about. So here it is. Note, this was when I was in a team doing a Web-based project:
I get into the office and give my previous day’s work a quick test before I send a Code Review to my team. I load up the website, open the menu… the menu is screwed up and won’t open at all.
I couldn’t understand what happened. I’m sure this was working yesterday. I spent some time analysing my changes; I really can’t see how this has happened.
The Junior Developer gets in and I ask him if he can give me any ideas on how this can happen. “Oh, I saw this happen yesterday.“
“What? You saw it, and never said anything? You didn’t log it, or even post it on Slack for the team to see?“
“No, it is a minor issue“.
I was outraged. I’ve told him not to ignore issues. We are paid to make things work. Also, if it was logged, I wouldn’t have wasted time analysing my changes when the bug isn’t even caused by my changes. If a bug is logged, if someone assigns it to themselves, then you know not to waste time looking at it, because it is being investigated. If the issue isn’t logged, you can end up with 2 team members looking into it because they think it’s a newly discovered problem.
We end up finding the cause, and we correct it.
Someone talks about a Pop music concert involving the groups: A1, Five, Damage and 911. “Sounds like a traffic report“, Seth says. We all laugh.
It’s time for the Scrum Of Scrums. Dean is currently occupying the meeting room on his own, but on a conference call. Helen waits outside and debates with a nearby colleague if she should kick him out of the room. Josh says “maybe Dean is waiting for the Scrum of Scrums?“. Helen says it wasn’t the case. Dean sees them awkwardly queuing outside, so he quickly leaves the room. The rest of the participants for the meeting show up. A minute later, Dean comes running back exclaiming “I should be in the meeting!“. I laugh at him.
A colleague tells me about a massive rant on Slack about the poor communication from management. I read it. It is brutal, but they make a good point. The upper management have kept quiet, when they used to hype up projects all the time. Additionally, new staff members have been quietly hired, some have even quietly left. We used to get emails to welcome the new starters, and also got emails to arrange leaving parties for departing staff.
Shortly after, some guy I have never seen before is asking a manager, Tim, about the progress of some important bug fixes. When he leaves, another manager asks “who the hell was that?” Tim replies “he has been here for 5 months, he is the latest Project Manager”.
Well, that certainly validates the Slack rant about the quiet hirings. No one in my team knew who he was either.
I’m happy with my work, so I send a Code Review to my team. I check to see if there’s any outstanding Code Reviews that I can review. Last week, I had left a comment about lack of test coverage. The developer hasn’t bothered adding any more tests. I ask him about it, he seems to be playing dumb. I told him I would sort it. So that is tomorrow’s work sorted.
Stranger Coding Tings 