My previous employer used to plan "express checkout" weeks for developers. In between two larger projects, you'd get the chance to spend two weeks doing nothing other than picking low-hanging fruits off the bug-tracker tree.
It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would thematically fit in.
Some devs even went out of their way to spend those two weeks on a single, irritating, deeply-rooted bug that nobody in their right mind would even want to fix.
I've been at a few orgs that do this kind of thing and most have found it valuable - but it is a double edged sword that will need to be managed. For the time not specifically allocated to "fixing bugs" or "removing tech debt" or whatever choice of phrasing there is, the rest of the time there is a (misguided) implicit pressure to permit quality to drop to make gains in delivery because "we have time allocated to fix things like this" - so the moral of this post is it is possibly more important to keep encouraging maintenance of quality throughout your team's cycle, and not let maintenance be ring fenced!
That works as long as there's no scoring system, no leaderboard and won't affect your performance review at the end of the year, or you'll just create another version of the Cobra Effect.
"The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased."
This is a great idea and every company should set time aside for it. Not just a "oh we reserve X percent for issues", but a dedicated, "nothing on the todo list" period.
I worked at a place once where my favorite time was at the end of the year; most people were off on vacation but they needed a skeleton crew in case of issues. This was when we did tons of small bugfixes, improvements and refactorings, and honestly that's the best part of the job IMO. Screw building features and adding customer value, just let me do janitorial jobs :D
I have a theory that if you did away with the "big projects" and just maintained a clean environment you would find that most of the big projects suddenly become "oh yeah, we could do that with a couple of scripts now"
It's amazing what we live with in tech debt and what a clean environment would enable.
I was on a team that did three week sprints separated by a one week “do whatever you want” while the manager and tech lead planned the next three week sprint. I lived for those weeks! It was great for fixing bugs, refactoring for the hell of it, or adding new internal features. I probably learned the most during those one weeks, because someone would inevitably refactor something and we would all learn from the approach. Sometimes we didn’t even commit the new code, but would steal successful patterns for future code.
Sometimes, we would “invent” something novel and truly impressive that would open doors to future features that were previously impossible.
We do that after every sprint and it does work wonders. So 2 or 3 weeks sprint then a week of this, sprint again, a week on the list, which can also be features - we maintain some 40 internal projects and not all projects get (or need) a sprint.
I personally like it because the issues are more diverse and I get to pick. For example, my last task was something a colleague complained about in a reporting tool that was also bothering me and I also got to learn something new
He's the author of Gnus. The news/email reader. It's a little crazy but a huge piece of work. Related to this was http://gmane.io/ which is a mailing list to NNTP gateway (so that they can be read using Gnus).
He wrote the Gnus news reader. Many years ago I found a bug in it on a Friday morning, I searched around and found out how to report it to him, by the afternoon of the same day he had notified me of a work around!
Idea for famous billionaires: support FOSS software and bug squashing streaks like this.
It automatically ensues positive image and accelerates advancement of humanity in science and tech, especially for programs that are core to everyday life of developers, like editors.
I think you overestimate the positive image boon. The only people who would care about supporting free software are fairly techy, and they're likely either already Musk supporters or so anti Musk they'd only see the move in a cynical light.
You can see this with Microsoft. Most people have no idea that "Microsoft Loves Open Source" is a thing. A few people seem to think Microsoft deserve the benefit of the doubt, some view it from a purely pragmatic view, and some will never forget "embrace, extend, extinguish."
The practical benefits might end up worthwhile for them though.
I mean the big tech companies rely heavily on these tools; surely they have the money to pay people a full-time wage, without using it as leverage to steer projects in their own direction?
They owe it to the open source community; they built trillion-dollar companies on top of open source.
Tag Mr Buffet. Don't tag anyone who will preside over the project as their own creation and will ultimately destroy any community momentum by turning it their own ego project that will destabilise the somewhat quiet community. We need funding, not more zealots
I find it inspiring to see how a interpreter that outlives me has such passionate and skilled contributors keeping it alive or rather, rejuvenating it with new life. Also impressed by the notion that someone could obtain such a strong command of, what I would consider, a somewhat "intimidating" codebase to own.
Happy Emacs user here and excited/grateful to see how well the ecosystem is currently doing.
Emacs bugs I've reported can vary from "I'd like this behaviour" to "something ain't right here" to "docs are borked on <subject>". Emacs is so stable there's not many crashing bugs to report.
Emacs devs are great btw, tolerant of occasional n00bishness and very responsive.
hmmm. I'm a regular emacs user w/ Doom configuration on top of emacs. I love emacs and I use it exclusively, however it does crash sometimes for me. It's enough to notice, but not enough for me to care.
Why would you want an image-manipulation feature in a text editor (unless you were a developer who thought that it'd be a fun thing to work on)? That sounds like bloat of the worst kind...
Emacs is more of a Lisp interpreter with a text editor front-end interface. That said, being able to work with images can be useful. For example, while documenting the workflow of a GUI application it can be useful to open some screenshots and highlight relevant sections.
While it is true that dedicated applications are usually more capable and convenient for specialised tasks, having tools integrated together like in Emacs also has its strengths (e.g. it can allow for heavy scripting of a workflow).
[+] [-] once_inc|3 years ago|reply
It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would thematically fit in.
Some devs even went out of their way to spend those two weeks on a single, irritating, deeply-rooted bug that nobody in their right mind would even want to fix.
[+] [-] Jenk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sph|3 years ago|reply
"The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|3 years ago|reply
I worked at a place once where my favorite time was at the end of the year; most people were off on vacation but they needed a skeleton crew in case of issues. This was when we did tons of small bugfixes, improvements and refactorings, and honestly that's the best part of the job IMO. Screw building features and adding customer value, just let me do janitorial jobs :D
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|3 years ago|reply
It's amazing what we live with in tech debt and what a clean environment would enable.
[+] [-] withinboredom|3 years ago|reply
Sometimes, we would “invent” something novel and truly impressive that would open doors to future features that were previously impossible.
[+] [-] kioleanu|3 years ago|reply
I personally like it because the issues are more diverse and I get to pick. For example, my last task was something a colleague complained about in a reporting tool that was also bothering me and I also got to learn something new
[+] [-] hammock|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keyle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e19293001|3 years ago|reply
https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/category/emacs/
A banking CTO who contributes a lot in emacs.
I really like the image editing he did. Thank you for posting this. Made my day.
[+] [-] sph|3 years ago|reply
1. A suit-wearing person that's so far removed from technology he's just a glorified manager hunt-and-pecking in Outlook all day.
2. A suit-wearing person with a permanent PuTTY window connected to the ageing AS-400 system still running in the basement.
[+] [-] noufalibrahim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ducktective|3 years ago|reply
It automatically ensues positive image and accelerates advancement of humanity in science and tech, especially for programs that are core to everyday life of developers, like editors.
Someone tag Mr Musk.
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|3 years ago|reply
You can see this with Microsoft. Most people have no idea that "Microsoft Loves Open Source" is a thing. A few people seem to think Microsoft deserve the benefit of the doubt, some view it from a purely pragmatic view, and some will never forget "embrace, extend, extinguish."
The practical benefits might end up worthwhile for them though.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|3 years ago|reply
They owe it to the open source community; they built trillion-dollar companies on top of open source.
[+] [-] tetris11|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidbina|3 years ago|reply
Happy Emacs user here and excited/grateful to see how well the ecosystem is currently doing.
[+] [-] zasdffaa|3 years ago|reply
Emacs bugs I've reported can vary from "I'd like this behaviour" to "something ain't right here" to "docs are borked on <subject>". Emacs is so stable there's not many crashing bugs to report.
Emacs devs are great btw, tolerant of occasional n00bishness and very responsive.
[+] [-] andorsk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sloucher|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmtvl|3 years ago|reply
While it is true that dedicated applications are usually more capable and convenient for specialised tasks, having tools integrated together like in Emacs also has its strengths (e.g. it can allow for heavy scripting of a workflow).
[+] [-] 098799|3 years ago|reply
- image cropping in an image viewer is useful if you'd like to quickly crop screenshots before posting,
- you can already view images in emacs.
So the irksome bloat is likely already there, and stems from emacs not only being a text editor, but an operating system onto itself.
[+] [-] lupire|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nebqr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] G3rn0ti|3 years ago|reply
https://github.com/alexmurray/emacs-snap
I am using it as a daily driver for months already without issues so far.
[+] [-] ungamedplayer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhoechtl|3 years ago|reply
Download from https://github.com/kiennq/emacs-build/releases
Unzip into a folder of your liking, C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Emacs would be a sensible start
[+] [-] pabs3|3 years ago|reply
https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?package=emacs
[+] [-] nanna|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zasdffaa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvba|3 years ago|reply
I much prefer the full chart. Of course one could say that they dont see the details in the full chart, but it is not the situation here.
Also good work.
[+] [-] pvaldes|3 years ago|reply
I hope somebody checked the bugociraptor fences.