Just this guy, you know?

I’ve continued making sourdough and have been tinkering with the recipe:

1. The flour mix now will always have granary in. Around 30% of the 500g.
2. More salt (2 spoons). Salt is great.
3. Mixing the flour, water, and salt together first before adding the starter. I’ve found it easier to feel when it’s thoroughly mixed. As soon as it’s mixed whack the starter in and give it a little knead together then autolyse.
4. A little more water than previous
5. I now take the new starter out just before the final shaping. It’s one fewer time to come back to the dough.
6. The number of stretch and folds has come down to about 3 from the original 5.
7. The banneton has been put away. Absolutely pointless and if your dough decides to stick to it then you’re in a world of pain.
8. Don’t bother scoring it, let it crack naturally.
9. Bake for 2 hours with the lid on, don’t bother taking it off for a bit.

These tweaks mean I’ve been putting in less work and getting better results. A recent loaf was what I’d call my best yet.

I’ve bought a Clever Dripper and put the Aeropress and cafetière in the loft. Whilst the Clever can’t do the volumes a large cafetière can, it makes great coffee with no sludge and easy clean-up (that’s compostable).

The brew method for two cups is:

1. Fold the edges of your unbleached size 4 filter and put it in the Clever Dripper
2. Rinse out the filter with warm water from the tap
3. Grind 20g of beans to a little finer than a cafetière grind and boil your water
4. Add 300g of water to the Clever Dripper, careful here because that’s very full
5. Add coffee to water, do not stir
6. Add 200g of water, it’ll be very full
7. Leave for 5min as the coffee grounds create a crust
8. Stir the crust in
9. Leave for 5min
10. Draw down into a carafe/thermos

Everywhere I’ve seen agile used it seems to stutter and fail as people get tied up in process and bike shedding. That led me to think about how I’d like to run agile sprints.

So here it is:

• There’s a ranked and ready backlog of tasks going into sprint planning. This will be a persons full time job. They’ll gather test data, acceptance criteria, and work with stakeholders to get the priorities sorted.
• You’ll have short refinement sessions where the team helps with breaking tasks down and pointing them. Having some archetypal tasks to point against is useful.
• Don’t split hairs when pointing stories. If in doubt use the higher score.
• Only commit to as many points during a sprint as your velocity indicates you can complete[0].
• During the sprint you’re allowed to bring in extra tasks if you’ve finished everything already or you are reasonably sure it will get finished in the sprint.
• At the end of the sprint update your sprint velocity and reflect on how well you pointed.

And on the subject of agile ceremonies:

I’m a white white cishet software engineer who’s growing a man bun and trying to eat less meat so it must follow that I also make sourdough. I’ve been making it for a year and it’s great. It’s also incredibly simple. You don’t need all the ceremony you see online.

First you need your starter. Get this from a friend because it’s easier. I summoned my own but you don’t have to[1]. I store mine in a modified Kilner jar as below.

As mentioned on various social media, podcasts, and documented on a damn wiki I went to the Sabaton Open Air festival in Falun! It was fantastic.

I wont bore you with the details. I’ll just highlight the most interesting bits.

Thursday’s highlight was Svartsot. I’ve listened to them for a few years and enjoyed them. A friend described them as “penny whistle metal” which isn’t technically correct but definitely gets across their folky and slightly repetitive theme. Glad I saw them.

We got a Roomba-like. The Eufy RoboVac 11. The idea has always appealed because I know I should vacuum more but I’m really lazy. In the new house we’ve got a white kitchen floor which could be a pain to keep clean. So we got the Eufy.

Why not just use a vacuum cleaner? But how often do you actually get it out of the cupboard and use it? Not as often as you’d like? … Exactly. I wanted to be able to press a button/set a timer and just have the thing run. That way the floor gets cleaned far more than it ever would previously.

TLDR: I’m still using Todoist but a bit less extremely.

I’ve almost finished my free trial of Todoist so I figured I’d dump my thoughts about it again.

It’s still the best TODO service I’ve seen. All my tasks still go in it and I still refer to it daily. Which is better than previous attempts at stuff like that.

Recurring tasks don’t seem to work as I’d like. For example I’d like to set up a recurring task to change the sheets on the bed. However I find if I miss the day and do it later, it seems to mess up the scheduling which sucks. I’ve not managed to reproduce it exactly so I’ve not submitted a bug report.

Since the SU&SD review of Food Chain Magnate (FCM) back in February 2016 I’ve wanted to play it. Earlier this year there as a reprint/people found some spare stock/someone made bootleg copies of it. Jen said it was worth the price tag so I got a copy and just played it.

It took a good while to get to the table. It’s very complicated and needs a lot of space. The space issue meant that we waited until we got a bigger table. The complexity meant that Ele and I would play it first before inflicting a potential negative gameplay experience on friends. We actually got the game out a few weeks ago but ended up just reading the rules because we had to go out 2 hours later.

Imagine you’re writing some code. Maybe you’re putting your recipes in git and doing CI/CD on them. Imagine you’ve got tests written in python using pytest. You’re not a complete scrub and you’re using a virtualenv. You’ve got pylint to lint your code. Your tests run. VS Code is highlighting import pytest and saying that pylint cant find the module. WAT?

You’ll spend a while Googling but you wont find anything. Then you thing “hey, what interpreter am I using?”. You click the interpreter in the bottom left of VS Code and see a list:

About a month ago Niklas from the Sixgun Discord sent me an invite to this service called Todist. Little did I know how much I needed it!

Imagine a Project Tracking system like Jira but designed for life as well as being not terrible. You can make tasks, assign them to people[0], give a deadline, add some comments, and put them in projects. Pretty simple CRUD right? Well yes but the execution is where the magic is.