MindFreak

Just came back from the first four hour meeting, Sprint Planning. We hit a dead end because we are 6 developers and 2 testers. The testers have enough work for one sprint (2 weeks) and thus, we developers cannot take in any more tasks because the goal is to close tickets. So we will continue working on the tasks we brought into the sprint but under the radar. We will then see if we can put some of those tasks into the next sprint so that they can be formally closed. But I guess next sprint will see the same issues... Good lord, this is really bad. It's clearly a management thing. I asked who would complain if a task is not completely done during a sprint and the answer was something akin to "Well, we promised our clients that we could deliver this and this during a sprint so if we cannot deliver that they may not trust us and will start bugging us again with estimates on how much time remains". It makes me sad. Hopefully, in a month or so, things will work better.

We didn't really use any framework. We had a team manager who would ensure that the team members had tasks to work on and if we ran out of tasks they could always get something from another team. This. I need to talk to a developer who is working with Scrum and actually find it better than another non-waterfall methodology. It's always managers who want to implement stuff like this. I just want to work with the code and do my job...

It's going completely by the book now. I hope things change after we get more accustomed to it but at the moment, it really feels like they are taking a lot of time where I actually do some work. Up to now, I've had about 2-3 hours of meetings a week, with scrum they have made that 4 hours on average and that's not including the meetings I would normally have (for clearing out stuff with the business side of things).

Ugghhhh. We have converted into full-blown Scrum at work. Meaning that every second Monday we have two meetings of two hours (10-12am and 1-3pm) and then Tuesdays 9am-1pm. This week I have spent four hours on "refinement meetings" which means that we try to talk about some of the tasks that lie ahead. I hope it doesn't become as much a waste of time as I fear.

Official unboxing video if someone cares:

I wish I hadn't seen that.... But it's still not enough of an upgrade for me to buy the OLED version.

True. But being repetitive is something both genres may suffer from.

It was a decent Direct. Not much new but it was great to see footage from Bayonetta and Mario Party: Superstars. Kirby and the Forgotten Lands looks promising, might be a Kirby game that I want to play (through). Triangle Strategy also looks decent but I never finished Octopath Traveler due to it being repetitive. Hopefully they have learned from that mistake in this.

They'll probably have a 20 minutes long interview with some developers about how to cook food for a new food game they are bringing.

I'd expect them to announce something for March latest. It's too late for me to watch it live, unfortunately. But I'm looking forward to seeing if they come with some good surprises. There's nothing for me until Arceus and after that, well, Zelda, Metroid, Bayonetta, but not holding my breath for either of those until mid 2022.

First day at work after moving. Things have settled but phew, the days have just flown by, working on the house and getting everything ready for us to move in. It was exhausting and I'm glad it's mostly the fun stuff left now.

That's actually a great trailer. Wasn't that interested in the show but there was a great vibe. Looking forward to seeing it now.

Yeah, removing it completely is a bad decision. It should be an option instead.

I'll believe it when I see it.

The Wheel of TIme is coming to Amazon Prime on November 19th - and a new trailer promotes it: Looks like it could very well become the next big fantasy hit along with The Witcher season 2. Might have to subscribe to Amazon Prime at some point for this (but will probably wait for The Boys season 3 before I go back to AP).

Got the keys to the house on Friday and have spent the time since then to fix it. Laying new floors, taking down stuff, removed a door opening, and getting the house ready for being painted. The painter starts (or maybe he even has started) now. So now the process has finally started and we are now packing down stuff. We got 100 moving boxes and I reckon we have filled about 30 or 40 now. I'm a bit worried that we didn't get enough!

It surprisingly wasn't announced - it came out of the blue yesterday.

Oh, I agree. It's mainly the liveliness of the city, the environments and the effects, i.e. the visuals. I don't particularly like the art style and the game is probably not very good. But it goes to show how a monster collecting game could look like.

That... would make very much sense.

This got revealed at Gamescom yesterday: It's currently not clear if this will come to Switch (probably not, though). If Legends: Arceus looked half as clean as this, noone would complain...

Niantic keeps the extended interaction radius! That's great news!

I'm leaning towards the basic as well. It'll most likely meet my requirements. It wouldn't change anything. You get to buy the computer anyways (it's like £80 for a three years old MacBook Pro - that's basically giving it away). Of courrse, you can always say no to buying it but due to the market values of MacBooks I figure that would be stupid. I'll certainly buy the one I currently have as we have no spare computer in the house and we just sometimes need one for both of us.

X-Com but with Marvel? It certainly raised my interest, even without any gameplay. I look forwarrd to seeing more of it.

I have to pick a new computer for work for the next three years. I currently have a top-end MacBook Pro 15" from late 2018 with 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD HDD and an Intel i7 core @ 2.2 GHz. A fine machine but battery is dying and keyboard is a bit weird (repeating key syndrome). Now, I can choose between three MacBook Pro 16"s: A Basic, a Premium and a Premium+. Basic is well, almost identical to my current machine except a better graphics cars (Radeon 5300M, 4 GB) and 1 TB SSD HHD. Fine machine but not much of an upgrade. Then Premium is the Basic but with 32 GB RAM instead of 16 GB, and Premium+ has an Intel i9 processor and an even better graphics card (Radeon 5500M, 8 GB). The catch is that while Basic is free for me, Premium costs about £10 a month for 36 months and Premium+ is £15 a month, 36 months. If I choose to end my employment, the money is wasted. If I go through another three years, I can buy the machines for almost nothing - but they have also cost me some money. I don't quite know what to choose. My current setup is just fine but I could do with more RAM. I just don't want to pay extra for those RAM - especially since I'm uncertain that I'll stay there for three more years. If I hadn't just bought a house, I would just pick the Premium+ as the money wouldn't matter but I do feel that I should try to save some money now that we are moving. So I'm at a bit of a loss.

It's a spiritual successor.