Ever wondered what people mean when they RSVP to your event? Here is a guide:
Earlier this month, I went on a night photography course around Leeds.
I didn’t really learn anything because I knew all the techniques, but having an experienced photography tutor there to remind you all the stuff you have forgotten and who has an eye for the perfect angle, is invaluable in getting great shots. And it was a lot of fun.
Earlier this month, Elina and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary. By my calculations, we will probably get in another two after this, before the divorce year. So, it’s important we make the most of them.
Storm Ophelia was sweeping in. However, given the very limited amount of baby-free time we get, we decided to brave it and cycle up to Appley Bridge for a pub lunch.
The food at the Stansfield Arms was okay. They put onion in Elina’s salad, despite us requesting it to be onion-free. When they returned from the kitchen with a new one, it still stank of onion, so we had to give that a wide berth.
On the ride home, we were treated to a beautiful sky.
Venla is now a year old. How time flies, etc. Grandma and Grandad were kind enough to host her birthday party, which was attended by friends and family alike. Of course, it’s quite easy to get most of your friends there when you’re only 12 months old and have two friends.
She received so many presents that we had to bring them back to our flat in two journies. Ah to be a child again.
I tried to order three scoops of ice cream at Kaspas. Instead, they brought me three separate ice creams. It was very lucky that my ice cream helper was on hand to get the job finished.
Last Saturday I completed my 131st Parkrun. I was feeling good so was determined to make it a PB (personal best) day. Of course, intentions don’t always match up to how you feel on the morning.
As it happens, the wind as with me. Not literally, there was a headwind on the back straight. But I pushed, and having only set my current PB back in August, managed to set a lower one of:
24:37
I’m pretty pleased with that, especially with the Abbey Dash looming large. Here is an updated graph of my Parkrun history:
You’ll notice that with the trend line, I should be world champion sometime next week. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.
Every bike shop is stacked to the rafters with expensive accessories. But, wanting to be frugal, I rejected the idea that you needed them. I bought a bike and nothing else. No accessories at all. I refused to be pulled into this expensive world.
And then the real world hit me, and I realised how wrong I was.
This is my story. A story of how you actually do need a bunch of accessories, and will massively regret it if you don’t get them.
True, you don’t really need these. Just like you don’t need a cup even if someone is going to kick you in the genitals over and over again. But any sustained time on the bike and you’re going to start getting sore.
I managed one ride. By the end of the first hour, my bottom was regretting it. Padded shorts are well worth the investment.
Human beings literally die if they don’t get water on a regular basis. Even by re-using a sports bottle that I already owned, I still had to buy a cage to put it in.
Oh, you want to fit that cage to your bike? Too bad, because the Allen key size doesn’t quite match the six different ones you have left over from Ikea. So, you have two options. One is to go cap in hand around to your dad’s every time you want to change your saddle height. Or two is to buy a multitool.
I tried to get away with option one. But my parents go on holiday too often for it to work.
Great, so, I’ve now got my water, but nowhere to put an energy bar. Or my wallet or keys, or basically anything. This is because if you have a regular pocket on a bike, things fall out of it. So, you either need to use shorts or trousers will jip pockets (of which I do not have loads), or buy something with pockets.
Like a jersey. Which has three. For things like keys. It’s that or use some kind of elaborate wave system to try and tell your wife you’re home and want to be let back in.
On my fifth bike ride, my back wheel fell off. I don’t know how to change a wheel. But even if I did, it wouldn’t have been much use because I don’t own a pump or a spare inner tube. Useful purchases, then.
Oh, you want to have those things for when you need them in an emergency? Looks like you will be buying a saddle back to store them in, then.
Now we’re rocking and rolling. Sure, we’ve had to give in and buy seven accessories, but now we’re set, right?
Well, yes, unless you have any friends. Or want to ride your back to any kind of location. Because if you wanted to do any of that, you’re going to need a bike lock to lock it up at your destination.
Again, you have options.
You could get your friend to use their bike lock to secure both your bikes, for example. In which case, hope you have a generous friend with a suitably flexible bike lock.
Or you could move to Oxford, where nobody really uses them.
Short of that, you will be investing in an expensive lock because even the expensive ones only provide about a minute’s protection from determined thieves. And one lock is pretty much a starting point: you will want to get a second one to try and hang on to your wheels as well.
Now your bike is covered in expensive things in a country where it rains all of the time. Maybe you have an indoor storage area. We live in a flat, so the bikes have to live on the balcony. That means investing in a rain cover.
I don’t bother with a helmet because the evidence for them is mixed. But a lot of people look at my weirdly. And if I want to ride any organised events or competitions, a helmet will be mandatory.
Lights are optional, unless, of course, you ever plan on commuting on your bike. In which case, you best hope you only work 10 am to 3 pm, otherwise, you’ll be riding to and from work illegally.
Glasses aren’t required unless you want to a) see where you are going in the sun and b) ever ride near a canal or river. If you do want to ride by a waterway, you have the choice of either wearing some glasses or repeatedly being hit in the eye by insects until you blindly ride your bike into said waterway.
You can live without gloves unless you want to be able to use your hands at the end of the cycle. For example, being able to use a keyboard in the office or operate your keys to unlock your front door when you get home.
In either of these scenarios seem likely, you will want to ensure there is at least some heat left in your hands when you arrive at your destination.
I don’t care about getting muddy when I go cycling. However, if you ever plan on riding when anyone else, you might start to care. And, if you go out with a cycling club, they are likely to be mandatory.
There is one thing you genuinely don’t need to buy for your bike, and that is a computer. The one thing that is actually fun and interesting. Which really digs the claw in. If you want to be frugal, you need to buy every single cycling accessory except the one you actually want.
People sometimes say that you should avoid spending a fortune on cycling accessories.
However, that is a little unrealistic. I tried it. I bought zero accessories for my bike. But, one after another, I was forced to invest in them. Cycling is a tricky thing to do on a budget.
As a software consultant, I spent a lot of time going into big, slow-moving organisations with legacy software and helping them sort it out. One persistent feature of these organisations is regular but infrequent releases of their platform and a fear of moving to anything more rapid.
By infrequent, I mean they might release a few times a week (Tuesday and Thursday are fairly common), or maybe each weekday, or maybe even just once a week. In the world of agile, all of these schedules are infrequent. Modern, agile platforms release constantly.
Typically, these companies will be afraid to move to anything more agile because they have a system in place and they think that it works. They say things like “we can’t risk continuous delivery (CD), people depend on our platform”.
This, in my view, is a mistake. And in this post, I am going to set out the reasons why it is safer to use CD. Not why it is better for the product owners, makes more money and keeps your developers happy, though those are all good reasons. I will make this case purely from the view of change management and their worry that it will damage the integrity of their system.
The old model involves people from every team merging their code into a release branch, that branch being put on a staging environment and then manual tests being run against this.
This is a terrible way to do things. As everyone merges in their code you get conflicts. Some of which will be resolved correctly, some will not.
The changes interfere with each other in ways that you cannot predict and there is just too much ground for the manual test engineers to cover.
Worse, when everything does break because you have pushed 20 features live at the same time, it is then really difficult to do anything about it because you have to check whether you can roll back, then check whether there is anything critical that needs to go out, then do a fix branch or a new release branch and rush through the whole process again.
And it produces a huge number of incidents. If you have zero incidents right now, you have a good system. But does anybody have that?
Such companies often say “we will move to CD when we have 100% automated test coverage”. But this is an unrealistic standard because they do not have 100% manual test coverage now.
Worse, because people rely on the manual test engineers to do the regression test, they don’t bother to put in place the correct level of automation. Maybe someday there will be a company that magically finds out how to do that. But nobody I have seen has so far.
The only way to force your engineers to do it is to move to a CD model and let them know that if they don’t put the automation in place there is no safety net and it will be traced back to them.
Under the CD model, you release one feature at a time. So, gone are the days when two changes are merged in and don’t play nicely with each other. Each change goes out separately having passed all of the tests.
Sometimes, you have to push something out that is really important.
Under the traditional model, this is a major issue. Either you push it out as part of the scheduled release, and risk another feature breaking and you having to rollback your critical change. Or you block out the entire release and stop everyone else releasing for a few days. Which, as you can imagine, creates an even bigger big bang release later down the line.
These problems are eliminated with the one-feature-at-a-time CD model.
If you do get a problem, it is super easy to roll back. You just hit the rollback button.
Under the traditional model, you have to check if you can roll back (due to all of the dependencies) and then if you are allowed to roll back (checking with the product owners that they are all okay with it) and then do some complicated rollback script.
All of this is simplified under a one-feature-at-a-time CD model where if it doesn’t work, you just roll it back straight away and don’t block anything else from releasing their features.
If something does slip through the net, you can get a fix out of the door faster than ever before. Gone are the days when you make the fix, try to work out what release branch it needs to go in, do all of your manual testing and then push it out the door.
Instead, you just write the fix and release it. And it’s fixed, way faster than it could be using the traditional model.
Yes, continuous delivery will make for happier product owners, happier developers and a faster-moving business.
But, and this is most important of all, it will also make your platform safer and more reliable. People think it will make things riskier, but, as I have outlined above, this is simply not the case.
With the CD model, you isolate every feature and every release, which is the gold standard of good change management. And, if anything does go wrong, it’s easier than ever to rollback and push a fix out.
Companies often believe that they cannot risk moving to a continious delivery model. However, if their platform truly is important, then they cannot risk not moving to the CD model.
On Tuesday, the NFL announced they would be partially refunding all of their European Game Pass customers because of the problems people experienced with the streaming service.
The announcement comes just six hours after I published my article setting out the problems. I’m not saying my blog post was solely responsible for their announcement, but the timing is clearly too similar to ignore.
They’re giving everyone 20% back, which is fair, though not beyond expectations.
However, the real test will be whether they sort the streaming issues out. Roll on Sunday…
I’m not sure Leeds City Council have quite mastered this marketing thing yet…
