You might as well not have a naming convention then, since the project is going to be full of different conventions.

Oh, I skipped this. Lol. Obviously not. As a team, they can implement whatever convention change they want, every two weeks.

As manager, I expect them to update all active projects, in their entirety, to the new convention, each time.

And as I mentioned in my other comment, if their test coverage isn’t at a level that makes me confident in that kind of global change (70% tends to be plenty), then I reserve the right to table it - until they bring the test coverage up (on all impacted projects).

You allow naming schemes to change every two weeks? That’s just insane!

Yes. Everything is open for discussion every two weeks, during our retrospective meeting.

Of course, that doesn’t mean things will actually change that fast.

But let me push back a bit, too - a global find and replace on our entire source code would take maybe a couple hours. A substantial naming convention refactor would take maybe a couple of days.

The reason we don’t do anything that aggressive is we don’t trust ourselves to make the change correctly - not because it’s actually a difficult change to make. Where our test coverage is where it should be, it’s a perfectly safe change.

If my team tells me (in agreement with each other) that a change like that is necessary, my job is to go make time for them to get it done.

On the scale of requests my team has given me, a couple days to rename some variables is no big deal.

There’s absolutely stuff I won’t allow, as team manager, but flip flopping on variable naming is owned by the team, and I would allow it, within reason.

A couple fair-game manager reasons I might shut down a variable naming convention change are:

• The test coverage on that part of the code doesn’t inspire enough confidence to make any unnecessary changes. Improve the test coverage, and we will revisit.
• (Hypothetically) We made two similar changes in recent memory, and as manager, this is affecting our team reputation. Let’s make a plan to make this change in a way that does not impact our team reputation.

Anything short of those two scenarios, and - should my team present it to me in agreement - I go make the time for them to make the change.

A shorter version is: I’ll discuss and do my best to support whatever my team wants to change - every two weeks. It’s a small price to pay for some peace for 9 out of every 10 business days! (And honestly, it’s a big part of my success formula.)

Yeah. Usually different hardware, sometimes just virtualization.

Thanks to the open container initiative (OCI), I haven’t been tempted to dual boot in a several years.

But otherwise, is there a reason to use it rather than starting with Ubuntu and just install your own cutting edge features as you choose your own upgrade cycle?

I’m ride-or-die Debian, but I switch to Fedora when I need a more recent package set.

I do so to avoid Ubuntu/Snaps, which contains some closed proprietary bullshit, which I personally find to be a pain in the ass.

Exactly. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that Google’s clever privacy engineering isn’t enough to keep any of us safe.

Google’s expectation that we be okay with these practices feels like corporate gaslighting, to me.

To the best of my knowledge - from a spirited but doomed attempt to read Google’s privacy policies - Google is committed to deleting your location history after sharing it with 10,000 or so vendor partners.

Each of those vendor partners have pinky promised to comply with the rules outlined in the same privacy policy that I failed to read.

For context, I’m not convinced any living person has read the entirety of Google’s privacy policies.

Sadly, I’m quite confident - by the law of averages, human nature, and corporate corruption - that not all 10,000 trusted partners also deletes our location data history.

Google does take privacy preserving steps to anonymyze what it shares.

My educated opinion is that no amount of attempted anonymozation is sufficient for the breadth, scope and quantity of data that Google collections.

Shorter answer for you: yes, I believe that is a corporate lie. True only in technicality, but likely false by any reasonable persons expectation of what “delete” means.

Ooh, great point!

Simon Tatham’s Puzzles contains many classic puzzle games and many more that are destined to be future classics.

Pixel Dungeon a rogue-like that is very like Rogue.

Luanti a game engine that runs an Open Source massively moddable Minecraft clone, among other games.

An important and timely warning that will probably go unheeded.

Powerful people sucking at tech is one of the ways we get a different batch of powerful people who suck at tech.

TL;DR - Google makes (arguably insane) claim that it previously acted responsibly with regards to fingerprinting, and says they will begin acting irresponsibility with fingerprinting in February.

Practical take-aways you probably already knew:

• Today’s Google may do or say anything to make an extra nickel.
• Today’s Google, while it employs some excellent privacy minded engineers, has not demonstrated an organizational commitment to user privacy.
• It is probably wise to assume that the next serious data breach at Google will end marriages, get politicians arrested, get famous people canceled, fuel successful scammers, and have every other privacy impact you can imagine. We know the Google data pool is massive, and we have reason to believe it is incredibly personal. I’m aware that Google has anonymozation solutions in play, and I do not believe those solutions will be effective in a breach scenario.
• I believe that the average person will likely be better off ten years from now if they interact less with Google services.

I don’t think that’s survivable? I’m just imagining some of the space battles…lol.

Oof. This is a pet peeve of mine.

As manager, I shut this conversation down via direct messages to each team member involved.

I remind them that they agreed during retro to live with the current set of decisions for exactly two weeks until next retro.

I don’t dictate much, but I do dictate that Slack isn’t an acceptable place for this kind of discussion, on my team.

The only related thing, that belongs in slack, on my team, is a link to the current accepted team standard - which will be open for review and changes again during next retro.

Alternately, if there’s no standard for this yet then my team knows they’re encouraged to wing it until we discuss at next retro.

And yeah, I’ve had to open an issue to revisit a variable name after retro, lol.

My team are an opinionated bunch, and they’re often perfectionists.

If we need to ask whether something belongs on this list, the answer is yes.

Except Babylon 5. For Babylon 5, the answer is a new language concept called a triple-yes.

Good point. Most people suck.

I do miss the goofballs from my old WoW server though. They were pretty great.

Yeah. I buy so few AAA games, I figure I would get my money’s worth. But only if they ran on SteamDeck. I don’t find time to sit at my PC and play, during this phase of life.

Oof.

“The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult,”

Makes me suspect they were woefully behind the rest of the field in development practices. My team, and many others, gained productivity when all the wasteful manager ego stroking in-person meetings stopped.

Alternately, it tells us they rely on a weird dev kit with a lot of esoteric hardware. Though I would still call that out as being super out of date. Nothing is particularly hard to emulate today, for teams that prioritize having rebuildable test environmenta.

Just wild.

Bummer about the layoffs. Probably won’t fix their agility problem, though.

Right. Becubs my node id cyogged.