Of Happenings! and Agile

     

2016 election poster

I know it’s Wednesday, but I wanted to wait until after election day so I could provide my own spin on the results. If you’re not politically inclined, by all means, skip to the paragraph after next for the month’s agile objectives.

When populism originally emerged in the 1890’s it’s rallying cry was that “the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few” (sound familiar?) Over a century later populism seems to be popular again. It’s what handed president Obama the election in 2008 (“Hope and Change”) and it’s what gave president Trump this election (“Make America Great Again”). Both populist movements appealed to very different demographics, but they were both ‘targeted ads’ for silent majorities that felt that they were in some way disenfranchised by the status quo. In the case of Obama’s campaign everything was geared towards the young, educated minority voter. Trump went in the other direction, focusing on the older, blue-collar, white male majority voter. In both cases the targeted campaign worked. In the past populism meant trust-busting, an intentionally weak dollar, and extreme xenophobia. It remains to be seen the what populism will mean for national policy in the 21st century.

And now for November’s sprint objectives:

  1. Apply to 100 jobs (20 separate one hour chunks)
  2. Write 2 more blog entries (1 hour each, 2 total)
  3. Finish the remainder of the Cracking the Coding Interview ‘Moderate’ Problems (14 remain, 1 hour each means 14 hours)
  4. Create PHP login and comments section from scratch (24 hours)
  5. Attend Seattle Startup Week & networking (1 week)
  6. Create a Worldwide Equipment Guide API (8 hours)
  7. Create a simple Android app that pulls from that API and stores the results to SQLite (24 hours)

I decided to move away from the long/medium/short estimates because they’re not particularly helpful with generating future estimates or in budgeting my time, and because I log my time spent in hours anyway. To that end, if anyone’s curious I’ve logged 692 hours since leaving the Army in my journey to become a software developer. Of that, the top 3 investments have been job applications & interviews (109 hours), HackerRank (95 hours), and work on my website/blog (65 hours). I estimate that I have 112 hours left of work in this month (14 days not counting Startup Week x 8 hours per day ). Which means that I should be able to accomplish my 93 hours of objectives if I’m disciplined and the estimates are accurate (probably not).

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