This is spot on. I would add one little wrinkle: you not only have to accept that not everything works like it does in your home country, but also that not everything should.
You can be the kind of expat who spends all day griping about how much worse things are in your new home than your old one, or you can be the kind who shifts their mindset such that the new country’s ways become second nature.
I think the value of standups depends a ton on the team’s composition and maturity.
On a team with a lot of junior or low-performing devs who don’t have the experience or the ability to keep themselves on track, or a team with a culture that discourages asking for help as needed, a daily standup can keep people from going down useless rabbit holes or unwittingly blocking one another or slacking off every day without anyone noticing.
On a team of mostly mid-level and senior devs who are experienced enough to work autonomously and who have a culture of communicating in real time as problems and updates come up, a daily standup is pure ceremony with no informational value. It breaks flow and reduces people’s schedule flexibility for no benefit.
When I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to advocate for or against daily standups on a team, one angle I look at is aggregate time. On a team of, say, 6 people, a 15-minute daily standup eats 7.5 hours of engineering time a week just on the meetings themselves. The interruption and loss of focus is harder to quantify, but in some cases I don’t even need to try to quantify it: when I ask myself, “Is the daily standup consistently saving us a full person-day of engineering time every week?” the answer is often such a clear “yes” or “no” that accounting for the cost of interruptions wouldn’t change it.
Especially infuriating when the other person is in a very different time zone. I once worked on a project with a partner company in a time zone 10 hours ahead of mine and it was common for trivial things to take days purely because the other person insisted on typing “Hi,” waiting for my “Hi, what’s up?” response (which they didn’t see until the next day since our hours didn’t overlap), and then replying with their question, which I didn’t see until my next day. Answering the actual question often took like 30 seconds, but in the meantime two or three days had gone by.
I came to believe they were doing it on purpose so they could constantly slack off and tell their boss they were blocked waiting for my answer.
My frustration is less with the people who are late and more with the meeting host making the rest of the attendees sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the late person. Unless the late person’s presence is the point of the meeting, just get started and let them catch up.
“We’ll wait a few more minutes for person X to join, then get the meeting started,” like the other ten people who made the effort to show up on time deserve to be punished with extra meeting time for being responsible. Bonus points if this causes the meeting to run a few minutes long.
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Not the person you’re replying to, but I’m also a “try the local cuisine” person. A good percentage of the places I’ve visited have had some local thing that you’d have to really look for to find elsewhere. I don’t end up liking all of them, but I like the experience of trying something new. Some specific examples:
In my experience, if you talk to a few locals, one of them will usually think of a local specialty and tell you where to try it.
I think this is a more subtle question than it appears on the surface, especially if you don’t think of it as a one-off.
Whether or not Scientology deserves to be called a “religion,” it’s a safe bet there will be new religions with varying levels of legitimacy popping up in the future. And chances are some of them will have core beliefs that are related to the technology of the day, because it would be weird if that weren’t the case. “Swords” and “plowshares” are technological artifacts, after all.
Leaving aside the specific case of Scientology, the question becomes, how do laws that apply to classes of technology interact with laws that treat religious practices as highly protected activities? We’ve seen this kind of question come up in the context of otherwise illegal drugs that are used in traditional rituals. But religious-tech questions seem like they could have a bunch of unique wrinkles.
Depends on where I’m going, whether I’ve been there before, and how long my trip is, but as a rule I’ll always seek out the local food and try to see a mix of famous big-name sights and weird niche things that interest me. For example, when I was in Tokyo last, I went to the top of Tokyo Tower at sunset (normal tourist sightseeing thing) and also went to see their underground flood-control tunnels.
I don’t enjoy “sit on a beach and do nothing” vacations, but more power to you if that’s your style.
lemm.ee’s admin is Estonian, so that one at least makes sense.
I’ve been under a few times but the most memorable (in one sense) was when I had some minor surgery as a kid. From my point of view, it was like teleportation: I was in the operating room, I blinked, and I was suddenly on a bed in a completely different room. No sense of the passage of time.
Tunic, but that was kind of the point.
Yes, and I even have it as an automatic scheduled payment so I don’t forget. Even with its flaws, it remains one of the shining gems of the Internet, and a resource I use frequently in both my professional life and my personal one. I remember how it was to suddenly want to learn more about a random topic before Wikipedia and I don’t want to go back.
I also donate to The Internet Archive.
No, just broadcast thinly-veiled resentment at them (in my experience having been the person with allergies in that situation).
Their track record isn’t that bad, is it? Castlevania and Edgerunners were pretty good adaptations. Dragon Age was all right. And Arcane was amazing, though Netflix wasn’t involved in that one early on. So there’s reason to be at least cautiously optimistic, IMO.
Not just by the time of Kirk. He’s already gone by the time of “The Cage.”
EDIT: No, I got my timeline screwed up. “The Cage” predates SNW. Oops.
When I first heard AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” as a kid, I thought they were singing, “Dirty Deeds and The Thunder Chief” and assumed it was the street names of a pair of Native American hit men. I didn’t learn the actual lyrics until a decade or so later, but I choose to continue hearing it the other way.
US here, and yes, easily. I have WhatsApp installed on my phone but it’s probably been over a year since I used it last. SMS, email, and Facebook Messenger are the media of choice in my social circle. Work communication is over Slack and email.
But if someone wanted to use WhatsApp to talk to me, I’d use it without being bothered much.
Saw this at the Comic-Con screening and it works better than I expected, especially the physical comedy. The exaggerated cartoon antics are still there, but toned down just enough to not seem out of place in live action.
I don’t think Netflix actually cancels shows after two seasons any more often than other networks do.
Somehow people got it into their heads that Netflix is far more cancel-happy than its competitors, but if you look at the numbers, traditional TV networks have had like a 50% cancellation rate for decades.
Even TOS was cancelled after two seasons!
If Netflix is more prone to cancelling shows at all, which I’m not convinced is even true, it can’t be by an enormous margin.