Noise Generators & The Conservatory (Work)

That moment you tell someone you're going to go do some programming work in the conservatory during a rain storm and their mind melts as they can't figure how the sound of rain helps with your concentrating and keeping the alpha brain waves flowing....

I use noise generators whilst I'm working all the time, such as this one:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/campingRainNoiseGenerator.php

And I really like this one:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/thunderNoiseGenerator.php

But my favourite is this:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/primevalEuropeanForestSoundscapeGenerator.php

They're works of genius.

And as the new lock-down looms I'm relying on them more and more for that little taste of the outdoors whilst stick in doors.

Computing Education 2017

Here in the UK there have been several waves of trying to educate new generations as to the art of compute science, this started when I was a boy with the BBC Computer Literacy project and concluded soon after with a drought of interest from non-technical educators and politicians a like through until fairly recently.

The BBC reports that there has been a low amount of uptake of new Computer Science GCSE studies.

And I can believe this, however the neither the BBC nor government seems to even point as to why this is, they talk about pupil disengagement or lack of interest.

I however contend that the government and educators and indeed the BBC completely fail to spot the elephant in the room, kids study not for jobs or skills, however they do study what is emphasised, IT has always been an "also ran" topic, it's not Maths, nor English nor seemingly as important in appearance as any other topic out there.

In my day this was the case because few understood computing, today however it seems IT is still an unimportant subject, today it's seen as unimportant because of it's ubiquitity.  Kids see easy to use computers, they walk around with them on their wrists, on their pockets, they are the always online generation.  If they need now know how to do more than turn the wifi on why should they care?

Likewise the educators see using a modern computer as easy, so why should it be a subject of study really?

And finally, the basest of problems, is the employers, if employers are willing to employ a programmer who studied horticulture, why should one study computing?  If the employer will take on an IT support operative who has no qualifications but whom is handy with a screw driver and knows how to plug the right parts of a PC together, then why should they bother to get formal qualifications?

Ultimately, for computing to be taken seriously, you need a passion for it, you also however need a reason to study it, and until that reason exists in the form of accessible all tier jobs that actually require a formal computing qualification there is little hope in pushing back up the chain to educators or government that computing is important and needs to be studied.

Development : Scrum & Leveraging Virtualisation (My Hobby Team)

Recently in one of the Scrum teams I oversee as their Scrum Master, I saw a common problem, one or two members of the team were being blocked by mundane issues once or twice a week.  For one member of the team this was a physical PC fault, for the other it was disk-space.

They are running their own equipment, outside the remit of my authority or the company control, therefore I had to clear the decks in some manner, the solution?

Well, the development was all Linux, I created a standard Ubuntu image and issued it to all concerned and asked that these be the ONLY virtual machines run to complete work.

The first week of this resulted in a slow time, I found people were not using; as per the original specification; virtual machines at all, I found they had a mish-mash of development materials, and importantly nearly every person asked me to allow them rights to install software.

I didn't allow this, instead I used the Scrum management software I've put together and collected all their ideas about editors, tools and software to add to the image, and we had an additional 10 minute open discussion going around the group to assess the merits of each piece of software, what it would be used for and how it might leverage either an easier time to task completion route or how it might introduce potential benefits in other ways.

I started with the proposer of the software, then alternated between those in the group whom had indicated they liked the software option and those that had not, in cased where no-one objected to a piece of software, I simply took the concensus benefits and added them as points below each item listed.

In the end we had reduced the pile of suggestions to three, the first a lightweight text editor, many were split between "just using nano, pico or vi" and those "desparate to use sublime".  This came down to a simple choice, one was free, one was not, we have a sub-zero budget since having to source those drive caddys last month... Everyone was going to use my preference "nano".

The second was a performance measuring tool option, to monitor the system, I opted to leave this decision to the testers in the group they have yet to advocate a choice, but I decided to take the option out of the scrum teams scope of interest, their code has to be fast and that's the end of that discussion.

The third was an art package, there were many options, one person wanted to do all their art in Paint.NET on a windows machine then move it into the main project, another wanted to create assets with GIMP and another wanted to use Photoshop. on his Mac, an easy decision GIMP.  It's native to Linux and free.

The standards were set, we would use tar and gzip on the image I had issued, Nano, GIMP, Code::Blocks and the compiler was the GCC for the group.

For diskspace, problems, every individual member was issued a brand new 1TB drive, the Ubuntu Image and they had to host this virtual machine however they wanted, it needed a single CPU core and 1GB of RAM minimum.  Many of the developers were able to tweak and give the machine 4 cores and 4gb of RAM.

Since then the team has run a lot more smoothly, issues with your software, pull the VM image down again... Issues with the source tree?  Delete your local working copy and resync with the repo server!  Need a place holder image?  Fire up GIMP.

This was the first time, since the New Years, that I had reviewed the team in any depth, as a Scrum master in this situation I don't have a lot of blocking or shielding duty, individuals work in their own time and in their own homes, so they have to deliver or fall short.  It is a hobby project after all.

However, our first Sprint feedback is in from yesterday evening, the overwhelming feel is that the team is now working much more quickly, they are verging on out stripping all previous schedule expectations (which were secret from them) and yet they all feel this is easy gliding development time, moving from product point to product point without the hassle of their machine or not being sure how to run an item, or not having the same set up.

My next task?  To do the same with the tester group... What a bag of cats they might be....

What TLA are you today?

TLA... TLA... A kingdom for your TLA... That's three letter acronym by the way... Well, strictly three letters is not the limit, but I'm extremely annoyed this week at hearing all these random seeming strange acronyms being thrown around...

I've heard....

CCNA, ITIL, MSCE, CIT, BACCT and EMECH today alone...

Some I have heard of, some I've not, the last is so generic as to be equivalent to "I read a book, once".

So lets cover my opinion of  a few of these, the Cisco certification, it's clearly fine and required to work with their kit, I've always found reading Cisco manuals to be a torture; but as a pfSense convert I no longer have many issues with Cisco kit.

ITIL, I actually myself started to read this course, it was... It wasn't that useful, practicality wise at least, it relied a lot on Microsoft specific software, run to Linux and be set free!

MSCE, this was the classic "well you did graduate a few years ago, but now you need this" qualification.... However, now... Not so much, at all... Especially when you use a compiler other than Microsoft's more often than not!

The rest, well... I'll be honest I'd never heard of them... However, I don't take an effective CV as being one containing a whole bunch of these acronyms.  I am not the kind of reader, or reviewer, to just think "shit I don't know that acronym the writer of this CV must be real smart!"... No, I actually look it up, and you know if I google for your qualification and can find only adverts for places offering the course, I think the course is only good for those selling it, it's not actually very good for those of us trying to decipher your ability....

Lets draw a line under this discussion and just focus on something else...

I just talked about your ability, if you want to quantify your ability go right a head, but I'll personally take your worth, how much do you value the work, how do you communicate your wish and will to succeed?... That's more important than any paid to read cookie cutter course in my opinion.