The Nineteenth Byte

Our CEO said "We are [some] percent more productive than were five months ago before we started doing Sprints and practicing Scrum." Someone piped up and said "Does that take into account the extra developers we have gained?" and he said yes. So I piped up and said "Does that take into account the overtime we put in every three weeks?" and he looked astonished that I even dared to bring that up. I was sincerely interested, but it apparently came out like a complaint.

Martin Büttner

@Optimizer I have given you two advantages, I'm sure there are more

Rainbolt

Before we started doing Sprints, we only really stayed late once every four months or so when a major release was due. Now that we Sprint, we have a drop every three weeks. So we stay late every three weeks.

I thought that might have skewed his statistic.

Optimizer

4:06 PM

I think its really error prone. - is for binary subtraction, but wait , if you have just 1 element in your stack, it negates it.

Nathan Merrill

sprints are great, as long as there are no meetings

Martin Büttner

well you never have just one element on your stack. you always have tons of zeroes on your stack.

Optimizer

then .. ; pops 1 element from stack, but wait, it can never empty the stack.

Martin Büttner

the stack is effectively empty if there are only 0s on it

Rainbolt

@NathanMerrill I can't tell if that was sarcasm or not

Optimizer

4:07 PM

I think putting input on stack , which GS does is a good idea, but not infinite 0s

Nathan Merrill

@Rainbolt Yes and no?

I actually think they make me more effective

Martin Büttner

well anyway, it's your fork and it's your call, but it seemed to be a standard in other stack-based languages, and it also seems useful, so I thought you might be interested.

Nathan Merrill

but I hate the time in meetings

Rainbolt

Scrum calls for day long meetings twice every three weeks. We've gotten quite a bit leaner than that.

Martin Büttner

@Optimizer I would say that every possible situation in which CJam could throw an error is an opportunity to squeeze in more behaviour into a single byte.

2

githubphagocyte

4:08 PM

@Rainbolt Sounds like a good point to me. Do you know him well enough to guess whether he was irked at you for pointing it out or irked at the people who report to him for not mentioning this factor?

Rainbolt

We started with a day long meetings. Now we meet for two hours at the end to discuss what we did wrong, what we did right, and what we don't know. Then we plan for about four hours at the beginning of the next sprint

Nathan Merrill

even the 20-minute day meetings I don't like

Martin Büttner

anyway, I think I'll write PreJam at some point. Prelude is a lot of fun, and I think with a similar instruction set to CJam it could be a nice golfing language, too.

Rainbolt

@NathanMerrill Yea we have those too. They are 15 minutes long but we almost never take up the full slot. Everyone on the team must answer "What did I do yesterday, what will I do today, and what are my impediments?"

Meanwhile, the "scrum master" writes down all of the impediments and makes some effort to eliminate them.

Nathan Merrill

yeah. we do the same thing, but I'm on a 15-man team. It takes a long time

Rainbolt

4:11 PM

15 people all working on one product?

Nathan Merrill

we all support the websites for our university

Rainbolt

Does that include management, upper management, testers, and developers?

And support?

And your mother?

Nathan Merrill

lol

only includes 1 management person, and 14 developers

Rainbolt

We have five developers and two testers. And that's big for a scrum team.

Nathan Merrill

oh, 2 of them are designers

Rainbolt

4:12 PM

We actually have 2 developers + 3 developers, but our products communicate so much that we have to work together

Have they ever thought of splitting you into groups like "Group A works on this set of sites. Group B gets this set. Etc."?

Nathan Merrill

well, we do

Rainbolt

Do you ever sit at the meeting and think "Wow, what this guy did yesterday is of zero concern to me."?

Nathan Merrill

yep

all the time

especially because I'm working on 1 site

Rainbolt

If so, I think you should tell your manager that you have separate concerns and should hold separate meetings.

Nathan Merrill

that nobody else is working on

Rainbolt

4:16 PM

Your time is his time, so it would be in his best interest

Nathan Merrill

well, each meeting he presents stuff, and we discuss more abstract topcis

topics*

so, for the first 10-15 minutes, its boring, but the last half is pretty good

Rainbolt

We do that during lunch every Thursday. We all sit down and watch a Pluralsight video for 30 minutes while we eat sandwiches, and then we talk about it. All of the groups come together for it, so a lot of it is noise to me.

But it's lunch. I would otherwise be listening to Howard Stern.

I must say the number one awesome thing we gained from Sprinting is that we start each Sprint with zero or very close to zero bugs.

I can do my work without being superstitious that bug #12345 is actually the cause of all of my problems.

Nathan Merrill

that is nice

Rainbolt

We used to do all of the work, then do all of the testing, then fix all of the bugs. It was awful.

The main reason was because testing couldn't even run the tests. The product was broken from beginning until right before the end.

If you Sprint, you have to have a working product at least every X weeks.

Optimizer

4:42 PM

how is automate saving the world getting so many views ?

ProgramFOX

@Optimizer It's on the Hot Network Questions list.

Optimizer

still

ProgramFOX

yep

Optimizer

it went there because it was getting so many views

and answers

feersum

is there some specific time when it's good to post a challenge?

Optimizer

4:50 PM

now

Martin Büttner

@feersum Yeah, UTC afternoon is quite good.

feersum

I guess my time is almost out then?

Optimizer

i think its still time

but depends

if the question is a bit trivial, it will quickly get answers and thus everything else will follow for some time

Martin Büttner

@feersum basically, as long as it's not evening in the states yet, you're good

Optimizer

then depending upon the likeness of the question, it might stick to HNQ

Martin Büttner

4:54 PM

@Optimizer it's definitely not trivial :D

Optimizer

the weekly one ?

Martin Büttner

I think that's what he's talking about, yeah

Optimizer

oh, then its a bad time :P

Martin Büttner

@Optimizer there isn't really a good time for difficult challenges

Optimizer

that is what i meant

Martin Büttner

4:56 PM

before the weekend is actually not bad, because most people will still see it (as they are online on Fridays), and might decide to spend some time over the weekend on the challenge. if you post it on the weekend, they might miss it, because they don't check, and if you post it early in the week, they might not find the spare time to tackle the problem.

2

Martin Büttner

5:26 PM

nice, swish's wolfram answer to the stroustrup challenge is on the way to winning :)

Rainbolt

It's 35 degrees outside and now it's raining :(

feersum

does a code snippet in a post have to be HTML?

Martin Büttner

@Rainbolt for a second there I thought "lucky you"

@feersum no

feersum

is it going to mess up the code?

Martin Büttner

@feersum if anything it'll mess up the highlighting, but I don't even think you need specify that

feersum

6:08 PM

I think that post was so long it made Windows explode

Martin Büttner

lol

feersum

It was getting sluggish, I just managed to post it, then BSOD

Nathan Merrill

lol

Martin Büttner

@Doorknob I think I managed to get most of the bookkeeping for the weekly challenge done myself. A few mod/room owner things are left: unpin the old chat. pin the new chat (I'll post the message after this one). freeze the old chat.

Join the chatroom for discussion of this week's challenge (theme: Genetic Algorithms) here!

6

New Sandboxed Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Weekly Challenge #3 - Genetic Algorithms Join us in the Weekly Challenge Chat to work out the details of this challenge! [For now, this is just a placeholder post, which we can use to keep track of ideas. Ultimately, we can work on the spec in this post.]

Martin Büttner

6:31 PM

@feersum edited the weekly challenge header into your post. I hope you don't mind

Doorknob

6:58 PM

@MartinBüttner Thanks! I'm busy at the moment, but since you're obviously not going to abuse power or anything...

Stack Exchange

Doorknob has added Martin Büttner to the list of this room's owners.

Optimizer

whoah

Doorknob

I'll freeze the old room.

Nathan Merrill

oO

Martin Büttner

@Doorknob oh, thank you.

Peter Taylor

7:20 PM

@Doorknob, since the subject of pinning chat messages came up, I think that eight days is more than long enough for everyone who's going to vote on community ads to do so.

Doorknob

7:38 PM

@PeterTaylor Yep, it is. Unpinned the chat message, thanks

Martin Büttner

8:54 PM

nice job @xnor. this is the kind of answer for which I've been campaigning for golfing advice questions:

2

A: All primes from 0 to 1000

First, a word about algorithm. Before golfing your code, you should think about the best overall strategy to get the result. You're checking primality by doing trial division -- testing each potential divisor p of i. That's costly in characters because it takes two loops. So, testing primality w...

xnor

thanks!

maybe i should make a general writeup for the general golfing tips

this seems to come up a lot, both in my golfs and in people looking for advice

Optimizer

you should totally write C code though

should not be that hard.

xnor

ok, i'll give it a stab

should be interesting

Also, we should have Golf Practice for C! Anyone up for making it?

feersum

9:32 PM

I might do that

xnor

10:16 PM

does SE silently revert upvotes when you upvote multiple answers on a question in quick succession?

there's golfs that i feel like i definitely upvoted, but there's no record of it

Doorknob

@xnor The only serial vote reversal that's done automatically is an excessive amount of votes on a specific user.

And looking at the mod tools on your profile, you don't have any invalidated votes.

xnor

ok, thanks

githubphagocyte

@xnor I get the opposite. I find interesting old questions I've never seen before but then find I've already upvoted. Memory like a sieve.

vzn

11:25 PM

hi all any robotics enthusiasts? guessing some crossover with coders/ hackers

5 hours ago, by Martin Büttner

Join the chatroom for discussion of this week's challenge (theme: Genetic Algorithms) here!

re GAs heres a GA prj (in ruby) that might interest some

in Number theory, Jan 1 at 21:47, by vzn

ambitious Collatz genetic algorithm code/ graph results! / Tmachine blog

DK you seemed to cause some commotion over in mos eisley recently what was that all about anyway :\

New Sandboxed Posts

11:59 PM

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Code Golf Image Downloader In many image-processing challenges, the post contains images, which must be saved to a file in order to be able to work on the problem. This is an especially tedious manual task. We programmers should not have to be subjected to such drudgery. Your task is to automa...

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