I noticed that as well. That'll be pushed back against, and the leadership is going to decided that they must respond to SOME issues to appear responsive, and let's be honest, it's going to have to happen regardless of project ideology. There'll be some silly rule put in place that only priority "X" issues get looked at mid sprint, and suddenly every issue is going to be priority "X", and now someone gets to spend the time they would have spent fixing the issue going "Ok, is this really a priority 'X' issue?" and fighting with whoever raised it.
Decent iterations cannot be done without immediate management playing defense, period. As long as anyone is allowed to interrupt the iteration, then iterations are just going through the motions and won't solve any actual problems - because the problem is a lack of control.
The engineer's response to unplanned work should be "Go talk to my manager", and the manager's response must be "Wait til next iteration". If the team can't defend its own boundaries, it's hosed, period.
The problem I've seen with this approach is when issues cross org boundaries and have externalities.
Say the event subsystem is shared or is under control of another group. They do maintenance, and the app doesn't restart and stays down because it had bad retry logic and won't retry after the connection is closed. Stupid bug, easy fix.
You're now hobbling that other group from doing their work, and depending on the discipline of the app team to fix it, and that bug may stay in the backlog a long time. Meanwhile, it's going to come up in a handful of meetings with a handful of people as it gets estimated, prioritized, assigned, touched again and again...
Coming to someone after diagnosing and helping them recover from a problem, only to be told "we're busy, come back three weeks from now" sucks.
I've never know immediate management to understand the business nor the system as well as the ones with boots on the ground. I've yet to see a situation where the manager doesn't end up coming out of his office and asking someone on the team "so, what's this mean?"
It's not management's job to understand details of the code (and it's probably a problem if they do). And it's not their problem to understand the business perfectly (and it's probably a problem if they do). It's their job to facilitate getting work done. That means helping their developers work as effectively as possible. And in most cases, that means keeping customers from end-running around whatever work management process is in place. If you're doing agile, the manager's job is to protect the iteration, and shield the developers from politics and pressure so they can work well.
I often use a bread-baking analogy here. Making software is like baking bread. This iteration, we get some flour, water, yeast, and salt, mix them together, knead, rise, and bake. And if someone comes in five minutes before baking is done and says "Can't you just add some raisins now? It's just a handful of raisins, it's not much work". No. It means starting over.
This is another time to ask uncomfortable questions. Why are issues coming up in the middle of the iteration that "take higher priority"? Why can't they wait?
Is it a production bug? If it is, can it wait? Just because it's a production bug doesn't mean it must be addressed outside the normal iteration cycle. Criticality should matter.
If it's not a production bug...
Is it a missed critical requirement? WHY??? How did the entire team miss something that must be done right now? That's a major process failure.
If it's not a missed critical requirement...
Is it someone with great power just disrupting your iterations for their pet project? Do you have multiple customers who are competing for your team as a resource, and not hashing priorities out together in iteration planning?
Following from that...
Are they directly in your chain of command? Is it your superior changing horses in midstream, or your customer? Because you can tell customers no. Even if they scream and shout and say they're gonna tell Mom. The customer is not always right. Learn to say no.
And if you still feel like you have no authority and no control over your work...
I don't even think it's a good rule because if something critical/high priority comes up it could be because of planning or it could be because of multiple external forces and or a bug.
Maybe it's a good general workflow but as a hard rule it seems rather silly... but I would love to work somewhere where there wasn't a flipflop on priorities every week or so :)
Many projects have often predictable periods of intense testing and bugfixing without new feature development.
On the other hand, distinguishing between "the product doesn't do X properly" and "the product doesn't do X yet" isn't necessarily important or meaningful.
Guy Debord used "images" as a metaphor but with Instagram it's not even a metaphor anymore.
> The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
> The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role.
Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered .... They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption.
> Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle [...] naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. It is the opposite of dialogue.
Same with Instagram. I don't use it but I concede that it is useful to some people as a platform for promoting businesses.
FB on the other hand, deserves to die in a fire.
I've all but dropped off Facebook but made an Instagram account earlier this year and am enjoying it. The photo-centric nature seems to eliminate 99% of the toxicity of Facebook. I've subscribed to the accounts of friends, architecture/design centers, Archillect, and accounts that post pictures of owls and otters. None of this promotes deep thinking or meaningful discussion, but it's a nice five-minute addition to my day. Plus it gives me a place to post my own photography where friends and others will see it.
That said, I'm hardly a Facebook/Zuckerberg fan and will jump ship the moment another platform becomes viable.
IG is the same IMO. You won't see the blatant bigotry and politics, but you will see a monoculture of self-promoters and brand builders which are similarly exhausting, just in a different way.
And I say this as someone who is subscribed to some niche meme pages on IG and enjoy them. It's just that if the page were to disappear tomorrow, I would have forgotten about it within a week. It wouldn't be missed. The value it gives me is very limited. I'd wager it's the same for a lot of other people. Social media's value is geared towards advertisers, not users.
> If your app or website uses a Unicode character which isn't supported on a device, the user will usually see � - a replacement character. If you include Unifont, they'll see the correct character.
Neat idea. I think the transition to UTF-8 is practically done, I'm not seeing � anymore these days (used to be extremely common a while back).
Most systems, when called to display a character which they're unable to render, will render a placeholder. This is most often a dotted box of some sort, roughly the size of a large character. In some systems the dotted box (assuming it's large enough for them to be readable) contains the Unicode codepoint number that the system couldn't render. In a few the box contains some representative symbol that gives you a hint what sort of thing is missing, e.g. maybe it's a Han glyph to suggest that you should look for a Chinese font.
I haven't seen any (they may exist of course) where they render U+FFFD the replacement character �.
The most common reason to see U+FFFD is the reason it was created, something was encoded or decoded in a way that is gibberish and the best option in that case is to replace the minimum chunk of gibberish with U+FFFD and then keep trying. On the Web you'd often see pages which claimed to be UTF-8 but were actually ISO-8859-1 or Windows codepage 1252, neither of which is UTF-8 but they share the most common Latin characters, these days most browsers will auto-detect this goof, and besides most web pages really are UTF-8, but when browsers were less good at guessing and more pages were wrong you'd see it more often.
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I've found HackerRank to be great at acing the algorithmic/data structures questions during interviews. You don't even need to finish Cracking the Coding Interview (which is incredibly hard to do with ruby as it's mostly performance based).
I don't see this happening, even if that's a good rule, because issues come up that take higher priority than existing issues.