Tag: work

The Global Agile Summit ended on May 6. I watched these five recordings a couple of weeks later, after Oikosofy released them to the video library. A mob-programming workshop from Woody Zuill, four live Q&A follow-ups with Jason Little, Marcus Bullock, Clinton Keith, and Joshua Thaler, roughly five hours of material compressed into a week of evenings.

The delay was unintentional but turned out to be productive. Watching sessions that happened days apart, back to back, in a quiet week, surfaced a thread I would not have caught live: every one of these speakers, from different angles and different tracks, kept arriving at the same operational question — how do you keep the human directive when the tools are fast enough to make the human optional?

Zuill answered with a game. Little built a folder structure. Bullock discovered it when four weeks of automation passed without anyone talking to a customer, and Keith when a parking-lot headcount measured the wrong thing. Thaler brought a sword.

I cover 3+ positions at a startup. The mode-switching cost shows up in Slack. Across a normal day there are decisions and judgments that only move when I look — and when I am deep in another problem, I do not look for hours.

I had a Slack digest skill I had built earlier this year. It scanned channels, summarised the noise, gave me a readable view — useful, but I had to remember to run it. On the mornings when I was already lost in something, I forgot, which is exactly when I most needed it. So I made it run itself at the start of every workday and land in the one place I cannot ignore.

I watched these seven the day after Global Agile Summit 2026 ended. Day 1’s live Q&As needed an advance ticket I missed until the slots had closed; Ethan Chazin’s and Adam Hoots’s talks I couldn’t find on YouTube — they look like Oikosofy Library exclusives. Five missed Q&As and two library latecomers, watched back-to-back. The two threads from earlier in the week — where execution gets cheaper, judgment moves; direct observation of users still beats indirect signal — came up here too, with the speakers getting specific this time about how those threads show up in a working week.

A separate piece covers the four live Q&As I caught on Day Two. This is the recorded sessions — thirteen of them across four parallel tracks plus the two bookending keynotes. The Q&As surface what speakers say off-script; the recorded talks are what they prepared.

Going through Day Two in air-time order, the convergence was different from Day One’s. Day One kept arguing at the level of ideas — where judgment should live, why watching beats theorizing, how clarity feeds back into burnout. Day Two was operator-voice. People kept showing the tactics they actually run.

The summit ran fully online this year. Four parallel tracks at most slots, two keynotes bookending the day. Watching from Bulgaria meant I caught everything in catch-up rather than choosing in real time — which has its own benefits, since I could rewind talks and skip ones that didn’t earn the attention.

What surprised me by the end of the day: how much the five tracks (Keynotes, AI in Organizations, People, Agile in Gaming, Agile in Construction) kept arguing the same things from different angles. None of the arguments were new. The convergence was — speakers working in their own corners for decades, landing in roughly the same place at roughly the same time.

Going through the talks in air-time order.

Last week, I attended the DEV.BG All in One Expo Edition 2.0. The travel to the event took two workdays and was a bit more costly for me as an hourly wage earner than the previous year’s weekend event. However, the venue, covering areas 1 and 2 of the Expo Center, was more spacious than the previous one in areas 5 and 6. This made it easier to move between stands.

Having already sought out the interesting swag last year, my interest in games and lotteries at the booths was now waning. However, Luxoft remained generous, giving out USB flash drives to all willing to share contact data. I was specifically looking for a compact charging cable since the one from the previous year was damaged during a train journey.

Unfortunately, I missed a few games where I could win such cables. So, I decided to return to DXC Technology, which has more such charging cables. To obtain one, I had to solve puzzles at a physical obstacle station. In the end, I got the same type of cable I got last year. I hope this one endures more than just a few train journeys.

I wondered if it ok or isn’t ok to criticize and humiliate someone in public. I’ve found this article about that: https://link.medium.com/fvArUC5flAb (it’s a premium one)

It was helpful reading. I found that some and even most people don’t like to be praised in public. It’s mostly a new thing for me. I’ll try to pay attention to that and figure out if this is a thing and what praise needs.

And about criticism, there is the pretty intuitive suggestion that negative feedback should be done right away, preferably in private or semi-private surroundings if possible.

I haven't done a public year-in-review in a long time. Everyone's saying how bad this year was globally, just like 2014, but, just like 2014, this year has been fairly positive for me. Especially compared to 2015.

I didn't write about 2015. Let me briefly recall it too. There was a repeat trip to Minsk, which left far less of an impression compared to the first visit. On the other hand, there was the first trip outside the CIS, to Bulgaria. I got a long-term visa for Bulgaria, but the end of the year crossed out everything positive… Just losing both the backup drive and the main one within a month was bad enough; in the end almost all the photos and logs were lost, only the most important stuff that was in the cloud remained.

Happy New Year!

The New Year is making its way across the planet. To some it has already come. Time to sum things up, to look back at what was important for me. The year will definitely be one to remember. It had changes, both good and not so good. My views on life changed, my values shifted.

On the whole, the year turned out positive, with changes, even though there was bad too. But on New Year's Eve you shouldn't be sad, you should have fun. I see that many of the people I know don't like the holiday atmosphere. I wish that everyone could welcome the coming year the way they want to, so that this kind of night could be spent pleasantly. Happy New Year, coming and already arrived!

For some of the sites, the submitted messages and data go to the manager, because the clients who ordered the site don't use email themselves. Today he received a message like this from Yura B :

Is "Info-Region" ripping you off for money too??? that's the kind of website developers you get in Kherson =(

If you look at the service information, the Sender is: obsessioner@gmail.com

With that data, a certain Yuriy HopE-r Bogdanov instantly turns up on Google http://vkontakte.ru/obsessioner along with his web and design studio http://artilap.com in the town of Skadovsk, Kherson region.

Funny, though, that even here they can't earn an honest living and stuff like this starts, even though there are plenty of clients and many aren't willing to pay the market price for a site.

I know it's not original, but I decided to write this to let off some steam. Since my parents have spent their whole lives working at a combine plant, I decided to describe the kinds of requirements we deal with at work in a way they'd understand, even though I myself know next to nothing about combines.

Hello, we have purchased an American "John Deere" grain-harvesting combine; from the look of it and from the reviews it's very high-quality and functional, but it lacks a couple of mechanisms and its appearance doesn't suit us, so put the body of the Ukrainian "Slavutych" combine on it and build the mechanisms we saw in it, and also such-and-such mechanisms from the Belarusian "Palesse". There are no blueprints or documentation for the combine, since it's a closed development and we don't anticipate modification by others, and therefore there's no way to get in touch with the engineers of the original machine.

All rights to the resulting combine will belong to our company; don't forget to paint our logo on it; it will be used in Russia under the brand "Sverdlovsk".

A year later.

We noticed that after the body was installed and the combine repainted, some of the American mechanisms jam or don't work the way they should — fix them, and also we decided to use the combine for harvesting a larger number of grain crops, so the mechanisms you built earlier need to be expanded and reworked.

The year is drawing to a close, and for some of my friends it's already over. Everyone's looking back over the year, so I'll try to note what made the passing year memorable as well.

Work started playing a bigger role; I spent the year wading through tons of crappy PHP code, and the number of completed projects has probably topped a hundred — honestly, I lost count long ago. The only break I got from work was the week exactly a year ago, but that's not in the cards for me now, since the first week this year is a working one, which means I'll have to work despite being hundreds of kilometers away from the boss.   A couple of weeks ago I started building a mid-sized project from scratch on the Yii framework, and oddly enough, this is my first genuinely serious site — before that I used ready-made solutions, and I hope that in the new year I'll get to do more programming rather than digging around in someone else's code.

I got promoted to lead programmer, my salary went up — laughable for such a position, though normal for Kherson. It's enough for me for now, and the work isn't too stressful, sometimes interesting, and I keep growing. 

There were quite a few material acquisitions: two game consoles, a DSLR camera, a new laptop, an e-book reader... I think I've started switching to licensed games thanks to the PlayStation 3 and even the New Year sale on Steam. I lost an excellent Nokia E61 smartphone — one more argument, it turns out, not to rush to work in the mornings, since it only brings losses. Well, I can't fully grasp the point of a rigid work schedule for developers. To replace the lost phone I got the simplest one from the same company, the 2323 — happy with it in every way :)

My real-life social circle shrank due to finishing university and being busy at work. Which I'm even glad about — it's calmer this way, I can control who I talk to and, for example, I don't have to deal with the old senile guy who likes to humiliate and bully others. Online I picked up a few new interesting contacts, which I'm glad about. I started fighting with myself less.

This year I stopped seeing the world through rose-colored glasses even more. I became convinced of the universal idiocy, not-giving-a-fuck, and incompetence of people in all spheres. I'm increasingly becoming like that myself, but what can you do, the place and time are what they are. At least online you can still shut it out for now.

If you look at the results online, then first of all, this year I paid for virtual hosting with a domain and moved my site to it from my home computer. Though I have neither the time nor the desire to work on it, since it's just a home page. I attached several domains to it, including a Cyrillic one. Also, exactly a year ago minus 12 hours, I switched to a paid LiveJournal account; in the summer I found time to change the look of the blog, made it more white-lion-ish. I started being more active on the social networks Twitter and Facebook, but compared to everyone else my activity is low.

And now about the most important thing. This was the year of the tiger, the year of the big striped fluffy cat. And with the tigers I got really lucky. I managed to capture unique shots of a clash between two tigresses at the Mykolaiv Zoo, which then ended up in the British newspaper Daily Mail and in top blogs, and they also talked about them on the radio. You can see all the photos of the clash via the image link at the start of the post. I never did manage to get money for the photos, but that doesn't matter.

It's funny that I lost my phone on the day I wanted to buy a new camera, and in the end I only managed to get it a week later, after which I immediately headed to the zoo to test it out and photographed the tigers. If it weren't for losing the smartphone, maybe there wouldn't have been any photos — an interesting coincidence.

All in all, 2010 can confidently be given a "+", unlike its predecessor. Let's see what my year brings, and what it brings to those who'll be turning another decade. I wish everyone a happy New Year — the one that has arrived and the one still coming. Happiness, luck, and the accomplishment of your planned goals or successful progress in your chosen direction.

Today marks exactly a year since I started working at "Info-Region" and started working at all — the 4 days at another firm don't really count as work (working as a programmer 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, for a salary of 1k UAH), since I was there without being officially registered and got nothing for those days.

The time flew by pretty fast, at times quite intensely; a lot happened over this period, and I gained a lot of experience, though there could have been even more. Maybe if someone experienced had been around, I'd have learned even more, but as it was I had to figure out almost everything on my own, which I like and am good at.

Yes, there was a crisis during this period, but it got resolved too. The web-programming work paid off; once I was made lead programmer I started picking up even more. I should count how many websites I made over this time — it'd come to about fifty, and I've probably already worked on a hundred. I haven't built anything big from scratch myself, I used ready-made solutions and modified them, since that's better than writing something buggy and non-working due to lack of experience. In the next working year that should change and I'll be able to design and make something of my own.

Looking back, I see that everything turned out fairly well, it could have been worse, and given where things stand, they're actually good; things outside my control helped a lot.

anyutt82 announced the site http://www.edasovkusom.ru/. So it can be considered launched. I'm not into cooking, so I can't judge its content, but I worked on its software side and want to write about that. Before this I hadn't made such complex sites on Joomla, though initially nothing foretold trouble, except for the fact that the whole functionality and design was begging to be done on WordPress, but the client's categorical requirement was Joomla! The outwardly simple little site was handed over to a new programmer, and I went off on vacation to finish up the three online stores hanging on me.

Remotely I helped with building the site all week, but in the end the boss handed the development over to me entirely, since the deadline was running out and the project had to be finished urgently. The functionality turned out to be unusual, it was the first time we were making something like a blog on Joomla. I had to use the Tag component for adding tags to recipes and the MultiCategories component, which replaces the standard Content component, since a single recipe has to be in several categories. To display a thumbnail image in the intro text the JA News module was used.

All in all, I enjoyed the work on the project and it stuck with me. I see in the office it got the others pretty fed up, and some even cringe at it. But I like that kind of thing, I like it when the client knows specifically what they want, even if the requirements are a bit unusual and strict. That's better than when you have to come up with part of the site's functionality on the fly during the build, and then rewrite it on top of that when, after showing it to the client, it turns out they want to redo part of it.

I set up a library on my site using the BookLibrary component. Yes, the quality of the component leaves much to be desired, since it was originally written for Joomla! 1.0, doesn't use MVC, and everything in the code is jumbled together. But I couldn't find anything better for building a library for Joomla! Plus, thanks to its simplicity, some bits of the code can be tweaked to get proper display and operation. It would also be nice to attach SEF links to it, but after JoomGallery's SEF links that shouldn't be a problem, if only the will were there. If I end up doing it for someone, maybe I'll get around to little details like that — not for nothing did I work on an electronic library for my thesis in my 4th year, only it was in ASP.NET.

I did this not only to explore the component's capabilities, but also to organize my home library. I added only the books I bought myself. Two bookcases of my parents' books, my childhood books, and textbooks would be too much to add to such a catalog. It's a pity that the chance to buy literature for myself came only after I got a computer, by which point I'd almost stopped reading books... The desire is there, but I can't manage to read. The last work of fiction was "When the Mountains Fall (The Eternal Bride)" by Chinghiz Aitmatov, which I read over the course of the winter on a smartphone that I've since lost. I can't recall the work of fiction or non-technical book before that.

Today I added four more books to the library, three of them needed for professional work, and one finally about lions — a book by Craig Packer that more than one article about these big cats references. Here's the link to my library with books about lions and a few technical ones on development.