steverb's comments

I mean you're correct, in that since > 80% of Americans got all their required vaccines in childhood there was no need to mandate it for adults, but it's a very oblique sort of correctness.

And yes, if everyone who was unvaccinated went out today and got the vaccine, the COVID infection rate would drop precipitously.

Not sure why you think that's a problem. The vaccines offer better protection against variants than having had COVID and recovering.

Edit: Apparently this is new information to people: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

And yet they can have enough of a viral load to pass it along to any non-healthy people they come in contact with. Which is why this NOT a personal health issue, it's a public health issue.

As I have explained to several of my children's young friends "you are correct, COVID will probably not make you sick, but how will you feel when you find out you killed your grandmother by giving it to her".

You're forgetting about driver's licenses, pilots licenses, cosmetology licenses, ID requirements and searches to fly on a plane, having to be over 21 to buy alcohol and tobacco, selective service, income taxes, property taxes, traffic laws, building codes...

I predict that by December of 2021 enough people will have gotten the vaccine or have had COVID that the hospitalization numbers will drop precipitously and then we can all go back to a normal life.

The OSHA requirement will hang around, but people won't be freaking out about it because it will be normal. Within two years there will be a childhood COVID vaccine that is safe and effective and it will be required for school attendance like all the other shots.

All the people freaking out about the vaccine/mask requirements will have matured out of it or will find something else to be outraged about.

If I'm wrong, I will come back and say I was wrong. :-) I may lose an internet point or two.

Am I misunderstanding the article, or is it basically just describing sprint planning?

I was set to be annoyed by the article, since it seems to me that a lot of PM practices put way more emphasis on planning to do things, versus actually doing them, but after reading it it just seemed like a slightly modified version of what most teams I have worked on do for sprint planning.

Which makes me feel like I missed something in the article. Perhaps it is geared towards PMs who don't have any experience or appreciation for "agile" methods?

Here's my beef with estimates.

I can give you a really really accurate estimate, but in order to do so we're going to have to spend a lot of time going through the request, building and verifying actual requirements, designing the solution and then validating it.

The process will require dev resources, business resources and probably people from the support team and will take a lot of time.

I'm happy to do it. It's actually my favorite part of the job. But the business invariably doesn't want to spend the time and money to do that.

They'd generally much rather start with a fairly vague description of what they need and let the devs keep throwing stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

Good and accurate estimation is not just a dev function. It requires buy in and input from the entire business stack.

Yes, I've found that a useful way around this is to go back to the non-technical user and ask them why. Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to do this in this manner?

That usually either gives the implementor enough information to wholeheartedly agree with the proposed solution, or to suggest something more appropriate.

I had to open it incognito to see the story.

Your labor and skills are not owed because they got lucky, they are owed because that is what you are exchanging with the owner for money.

They may tolerate (and even enjoy) your personal quirks and causes, but they are paying you to get things done that they don't have the time or skill to do themselves.

[Edit: Accidentally left ou a letter]

Yeah, you'd be looking at 80 - 100 here in TN. You might be able to get 150, but if you only have 6 years of experience you probably wouldn't be considered senior here either.

I have used this at several work places for particularly thorny issues and architectural changes that require group buy in.

It's powerful, but it's also very expensive, especially if you have several opinionated devs on the team.

I wonder if bed bug infestations also declined with less travel.

Yeah, I need to make a personal rule about posting questions before I've had any caffeine.

Nevermind, I see that I misread, they are comparing second shot rates of covid against second shot rates of the shingles vaccine.

Wait... the second dose of the covid vaccine protects you from shingles? This is news to me.

Does anyone have a source for that? My quick google search doesn't give me any results that aren't about the Shingrix vaccine.

I believe you can now query across DBs in Azure via a Linked Server. It still feels a little clunky to me though.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/li...

Oh yeah, there are certain things that I know I am going to really care about the quality of.

Never ever buy cheap jack stands for instance. The extra money you spend on the good ones is just life insurance.

The thing to remember with battery powered tools is that you are not just buying a tool. You are buying into a battery ecosystem. Plan accordingly.

Fortunately, you can buy batteries for most popular tool brands long after the brand stops supporting them, and in a pinch you can buy adapters to make brand a batteries work on brand b tools

I have a rule for buying tools. The first one I buy, I buy the cheaper version (Harbor Freight house brand for instance). If I use it enough to break it within3 years, or become frustrated with its shortcomings, then I go buy a "pro" version.

Yes, it does mean I have spent more money than absolutely necessary, but on the other hand I have a lot of cheap tools that are perfectly serviceable for the two times a year I actually need to use them.

It works for me, you go do what works for you.