14 ms·

20×10%

250 points by _emacsomancer_ 4y ago

once_inc 4y ago
My previous employer used to plan "express checkout" weeks for developers. In between two larger projects, you'd get the chance to spend two weeks doing nothing other than picking low-hanging fruits off the bug-tracker tree. It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would thematically fit in. Some devs even went out of their way to spend those two weeks on a single, irritating, deeply-rooted bug that nobody in their right mind would even want to fix.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  This is a great idea and every company should set time aside for it. Not just a "oh we reserve X percent for issues", but a dedicated, "nothing on the todo list" period. I worked at a place once where my favorite time was at the end of the year; most people were off on vacation but they needed a skeleton crew in case of issues. This was when we did tons of small bugfixes, improvements and refactorings, and honestly that's the best part of the job IMO. Screw building features and adding customer value, just let me do janitorial jobs :D
- keyle 4y ago
  That's a great idea. Sounds like they cared about the product long term.
- kioleanu 4y ago
  We do that after every sprint and it does work wonders. So 2 or 3 weeks sprint then a week of this, sprint again, a week on the list, which can also be features - we maintain some 40 internal projects and not all projects get (or need) a sprint. I personally like it because the issues are more diverse and I get to pick. For example, my last task was something a colleague complained about in a reporting tool that was also bothering me and I also got to learn something new
- Jenk 4y ago
  I've been at a few orgs that do this kind of thing and most have found it valuable - but it is a double edged sword that will need to be managed. For the time not specifically allocated to "fixing bugs" or "removing tech debt" or whatever choice of phrasing there is, the rest of the time there is a (misguided) implicit pressure to permit quality to drop to make gains in delivery because "we have time allocated to fix things like this" - so the moral of this post is it is possibly more important to keep encouraging maintenance of quality throughout your team's cycle, and not let maintenance be ring fenced!
  - giantg2 4y ago
    Yeah, our "gap sprints" end up just working on stuff we didn't get done in the regular sprints. Really nothing different.
- sph 4y ago
  That works as long as there's no scoring system, no leaderboard and won't affect your performance review at the end of the year, or you'll just create another version of the Cobra Effect. "The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
  - Heyso 4y ago
    I know the story, but still find myself smiling everytime I read it.
    - howaboutnope 4y ago
      > Hacktoberfest is an October-long celebration to promote contributions to the free and open-source software communities. In 2020, participants were encouraged to submit four or more pull requests to any public free or open-source (FOS) repository, with a free "Hacktoberfest 2020" T-shirt for the first 75,000 participants to do so. The free T-shirts caused thousands of frivolous pull requests on FOS projects. A large volume of pull requests made by users amounted to counterproductive changes to code, including: changing project names from "My Project" to "My Awesome Project"; changing bullet points to dashes; and in some cases, even breaking working code :/
      - lupire 4y ago
        It's a good resume filter though. "Hacktoberfest" => No Hire.
        htkibar 4y ago
        This is a ridiculous idea; if anything goes on to show how random hiring processes are imho. Check the contributions obviously but why flat out say "you joined a hackathon we don't like your kind here"?
- withinboredom 4y ago
  I was on a team that did three week sprints separated by a one week “do whatever you want” while the manager and tech lead planned the next three week sprint. I lived for those weeks! It was great for fixing bugs, refactoring for the hell of it, or adding new internal features. I probably learned the most during those one weeks, because someone would inevitably refactor something and we would all learn from the approach. Sometimes we didn’t even commit the new code, but would steal successful patterns for future code. Sometimes, we would “invent” something novel and truly impressive that would open doors to future features that were previously impossible.
  - lupire 4y ago
    How awful were your main sprints that were foisted on your without you being involved in the planning?
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      We were involved in the planning, but the tech lead and manager were dealing with the details and priorities from stakeholders. So the last/first couple of days were usually us giving feedback on their plan. But it actually worked out quite well. We were a small team (4-5 of us total), so there was constant communication and no dictation, but someone had to order the cards around and keep things organized.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  I have a theory that if you did away with the "big projects" and just maintained a clean environment you would find that most of the big projects suddenly become "oh yeah, we could do that with a couple of scripts now" It's amazing what we live with in tech debt and what a clean environment would enable.
- hammock 4y ago
  Love this idea. How many total weeks of the year be spent in such a way on average?
  - once_inc 4y ago
    It varied, but it was often 2 weeks after a 3-6 month project. Not a lot, but enough to really make a dent in backlogs.
ducktective 4y ago
Idea for famous billionaires: support FOSS software and bug squashing streaks like this. It automatically ensues positive image and accelerates advancement of humanity in science and tech, especially for programs that are core to everyday life of developers, like editors. Someone tag Mr Musk.
- tetris11 4y ago
  Tag Mr Buffet. Don't tag anyone who will preside over the project as their own creation and will ultimately destroy any community momentum by turning it their own ego project that will destabilise the somewhat quiet community. We need funding, not more zealots
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  I think you overestimate the positive image boon. The only people who would care about supporting free software are fairly techy, and they're likely either already Musk supporters or so anti Musk they'd only see the move in a cynical light. You can see this with Microsoft. Most people have no idea that "Microsoft Loves Open Source" is a thing. A few people seem to think Microsoft deserve the benefit of the doubt, some view it from a purely pragmatic view, and some will never forget "embrace, extend, extinguish." The practical benefits might end up worthwhile for them though.
  - swores 4y ago
    I think a lot of people have had their feelings about MS improved by their OSS contributions (myself included, and I'm not even a dev). Of course it's not a binary thing for most people of flipping from "MS bad!" to "MS good!", some already liked MS and like them even more, some still hate them, still say "why should I trust them given their history / given they're not 100% lovely even now", but still surely a bit less hate than if they were still acting as they did 20-30 years ago. I've no idea if my gut feeling is more or less right than yours, Id imagine companies as big as MS do actually do research to see how things like this affect public perception (not just for end users/businesses but also for tech workers), but I'm not aware of any research being made public on the PR benefits (or lack thereof) from contributing to open source stuff.
e19293001 4y ago
I didn't know this person before: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/category/emacs/ https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/category/emacs/ A banking CTO who contributes a lot in emacs. I really like the image editing he did. Thank you for posting this. Made my day.
- noufalibrahim 4y ago
  He's the author of Gnus. The news/email reader. It's a little crazy but a huge piece of work. Related to this was http://gmane.io/ http://gmane.io/ which is a mailing list to NNTP gateway (so that they can be read using Gnus).
- donio 4y ago
  He is Programmerer Ingebrigtsen.
- sph 4y ago
  I imagine a director-level tech executive at a bank or other slow-moving industry to fit one of two possible archetypes: 1. A suit-wearing person that's so far removed from technology he's just a glorified manager hunt-and-pecking in Outlook all day. 2. A suit-wearing person with a permanent PuTTY window connected to the ageing AS-400 system still running in the basement.
  - ducktective 4y ago
    Bon soir, Elliot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmHSx0R3p3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmHSx0R3p3A
    - sph 4y ago
      God, I miss that show. I completely forgot about Tyrell, I was mostly thinking of actual UNIX greybeards disguised as banking CTOs I've met earlier in my career :)
  - bluedino 4y ago
    Putty? You mean iAccess!
nebqr 4y ago
It’s a shame most distros are still rocking emacs 27 and not including libgccjit makes installing 28+ a pain on windows.
- G3rn0ti 4y ago
  On Ubuntu there is a snap available shipping Emacs 28 including native compilation turned on: https://github.com/alexmurray/emacs-snap https://github.com/alexmurray/emacs-snap I am using it as a daily driver for months already without issues so far.
- ungamedplayer 4y ago
  Maybe the buntus are lagging behind in Emacs. I think most others have 28 in their releases.
- pabs3 4y ago
  Debian has 28 in unstable, looks like there are some issues to fix before it can reach bookworm. https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?package=emacs https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?package=emacs
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    I used to build my own emacs, but after being annoyed with it breaking after each upgrade on unstable, I use the emacs-snapshot repo on http://emacs.secretsauce.net/ http://emacs.secretsauce.net/ with bleeding edge packages for Debian sid.
- nanna 4y ago
  If you're on a distro which doesn't have Emacs 28+, one option is to pick it up from guix.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jhoechtl 4y ago
  On Windows it's very easy: Download from https://github.com/kiennq/emacs-build/releases https://github.com/kiennq/emacs-build/releases Unzip into a folder of your liking, C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Emacs would be a sensible start
vidbina 4y ago
I find it inspiring to see how a interpreter that outlives me has such passionate and skilled contributors keeping it alive or rather, rejuvenating it with new life. Also impressed by the notion that someone could obtain such a strong command of, what I would consider, a somewhat "intimidating" codebase to own. Happy Emacs user here and excited/grateful to see how well the ecosystem is currently doing.
pvaldes 4y ago
Is going too well... Hum. I hope somebody checked the bugociraptor fences.
zasdffaa 4y ago
Heh! He closed one of mine! Emacs bugs I've reported can vary from "I'd like this behaviour" to "something ain't right here" to "docs are borked on <subject>". Emacs is so stable there's not many crashing bugs to report. Emacs devs are great btw, tolerant of occasional n00bishness and very responsive.
- andorsk 4y ago
  hmmm. I'm a regular emacs user w/ Doom configuration on top of emacs. I love emacs and I use it exclusively, however it does crash sometimes for me. It's enough to notice, but not enough for me to care.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    Only consistent 'disaster' I get from emacs is it freezes up totally in low memory conditions. I haven't had time to repro + report this yet. If you can repeat a crash, please do report it.
  - e3bc54b2 4y ago
    As a fellow doom user, Emacs became lot more stable (and faster) after disabling bunch of default doom packages and modules. In its default config, doom really is intended for use on semi-modern processors with SSDs.That fancy modeline et al come at a cost.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    What surprised me about the article was how many features emacs has. Seems they want to do a lot outside of text editing?
    - zasdffaa 4y ago
      If you impose structure on text you can do stuff like org-mode. If you allow networking, you can do emails like gnus. If you allow pictures and HTML parsing, you can do a web browser like eww. I guess you don't have to add too much to get a new domain.
    - 4y ago
sloucher 4y ago
Why would you want an image-manipulation feature in a text editor (unless you were a developer who thought that it'd be a fun thing to work on)? That sounds like bloat of the worst kind...
- 098799 4y ago
  I mostly agree. But: - image cropping in an image viewer is useful if you'd like to quickly crop screenshots before posting, - you can already view images in emacs. So the irksome bloat is likely already there, and stems from emacs not only being a text editor, but an operating system onto itself.
- lupire 4y ago
  It's an IDE not a text editor.
  - pram 4y ago
    It's an operating system not an IDE.
    - awestroke 4y ago
      In that case, VS Code is also an operating system
      - tmtvl 4y ago
        I think Emacs goes a little further than VS Code, I don't think it has an X11 window manager, for example.
        awestroke 4y ago
        No, but VS Code has its own "window manager" that programs (extensions) can use
- tmtvl 4y ago
  Emacs is more of a Lisp interpreter with a text editor front-end interface. That said, being able to work with images can be useful. For example, while documenting the workflow of a GUI application it can be useful to open some screenshots and highlight relevant sections. While it is true that dedicated applications are usually more capable and convenient for specialised tasks, having tools integrated together like in Emacs also has its strengths (e.g. it can allow for heavy scripting of a workflow).
rvba 4y ago
I really dont like the first chart that shows only data between 1900 and ~2600. For me it is "lying with statistics 101". I much prefer the full chart. Of course one could say that they dont see the details in the full chart, but it is not the situation here. Also good work.

My previous employer used to plan "express checkout" weeks for developers. In between two larger projects, you'd get the chance to spend two weeks doing nothing other than picking low-hanging fruits off the bug-tracker tree. It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would thematically fit in. Some devs even went out of their way to spend those two weeks on a single, irritating, deeply-rooted bug that nobody in their right mind would even want to fix.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
This is a great idea and every company should set time aside for it. Not just a "oh we reserve X percent for issues", but a dedicated, "nothing on the todo list" period. I worked at a place once where my favorite time was at the end of the year; most people were off on vacation but they needed a skeleton crew in case of issues. This was when we did tons of small bugfixes, improvements and refactorings, and honestly that's the best part of the job IMO. Screw building features and adding customer value, just let me do janitorial jobs :D
keyle 4y ago
That's a great idea. Sounds like they cared about the product long term.
kioleanu 4y ago
We do that after every sprint and it does work wonders. So 2 or 3 weeks sprint then a week of this, sprint again, a week on the list, which can also be features - we maintain some 40 internal projects and not all projects get (or need) a sprint. I personally like it because the issues are more diverse and I get to pick. For example, my last task was something a colleague complained about in a reporting tool that was also bothering me and I also got to learn something new
Jenk 4y ago
I've been at a few orgs that do this kind of thing and most have found it valuable - but it is a double edged sword that will need to be managed. For the time not specifically allocated to "fixing bugs" or "removing tech debt" or whatever choice of phrasing there is, the rest of the time there is a (misguided) implicit pressure to permit quality to drop to make gains in delivery because "we have time allocated to fix things like this" - so the moral of this post is it is possibly more important to keep encouraging maintenance of quality throughout your team's cycle, and not let maintenance be ring fenced!
- giantg2 4y ago
  Yeah, our "gap sprints" end up just working on stuff we didn't get done in the regular sprints. Really nothing different.
sph 4y ago
That works as long as there's no scoring system, no leaderboard and won't affect your performance review at the end of the year, or you'll just create another version of the Cobra Effect. "The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
- Heyso 4y ago
  I know the story, but still find myself smiling everytime I read it.
  - howaboutnope 4y ago
    > Hacktoberfest is an October-long celebration to promote contributions to the free and open-source software communities. In 2020, participants were encouraged to submit four or more pull requests to any public free or open-source (FOS) repository, with a free "Hacktoberfest 2020" T-shirt for the first 75,000 participants to do so. The free T-shirts caused thousands of frivolous pull requests on FOS projects. A large volume of pull requests made by users amounted to counterproductive changes to code, including: changing project names from "My Project" to "My Awesome Project"; changing bullet points to dashes; and in some cases, even breaking working code :/
    - lupire 4y ago
      It's a good resume filter though. "Hacktoberfest" => No Hire.
      - htkibar 4y ago
        This is a ridiculous idea; if anything goes on to show how random hiring processes are imho. Check the contributions obviously but why flat out say "you joined a hackathon we don't like your kind here"?
withinboredom 4y ago
I was on a team that did three week sprints separated by a one week “do whatever you want” while the manager and tech lead planned the next three week sprint. I lived for those weeks! It was great for fixing bugs, refactoring for the hell of it, or adding new internal features. I probably learned the most during those one weeks, because someone would inevitably refactor something and we would all learn from the approach. Sometimes we didn’t even commit the new code, but would steal successful patterns for future code. Sometimes, we would “invent” something novel and truly impressive that would open doors to future features that were previously impossible.
- lupire 4y ago
  How awful were your main sprints that were foisted on your without you being involved in the planning?
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    We were involved in the planning, but the tech lead and manager were dealing with the details and priorities from stakeholders. So the last/first couple of days were usually us giving feedback on their plan. But it actually worked out quite well. We were a small team (4-5 of us total), so there was constant communication and no dictation, but someone had to order the cards around and keep things organized.
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
I have a theory that if you did away with the "big projects" and just maintained a clean environment you would find that most of the big projects suddenly become "oh yeah, we could do that with a couple of scripts now" It's amazing what we live with in tech debt and what a clean environment would enable.
hammock 4y ago
Love this idea. How many total weeks of the year be spent in such a way on average?
- once_inc 4y ago
  It varied, but it was often 2 weeks after a 3-6 month project. Not a lot, but enough to really make a dent in backlogs.

ducktective 4y ago

Idea for famous billionaires: support FOSS software and bug squashing streaks like this. It automatically ensues positive image and accelerates advancement of humanity in science and tech, especially for programs that are core to everyday life of developers, like editors. Someone tag Mr Musk.

tetris11 4y ago
Tag Mr Buffet. Don't tag anyone who will preside over the project as their own creation and will ultimately destroy any community momentum by turning it their own ego project that will destabilise the somewhat quiet community. We need funding, not more zealots
boomboomsubban 4y ago
I think you overestimate the positive image boon. The only people who would care about supporting free software are fairly techy, and they're likely either already Musk supporters or so anti Musk they'd only see the move in a cynical light. You can see this with Microsoft. Most people have no idea that "Microsoft Loves Open Source" is a thing. A few people seem to think Microsoft deserve the benefit of the doubt, some view it from a purely pragmatic view, and some will never forget "embrace, extend, extinguish." The practical benefits might end up worthwhile for them though.
- swores 4y ago
  I think a lot of people have had their feelings about MS improved by their OSS contributions (myself included, and I'm not even a dev). Of course it's not a binary thing for most people of flipping from "MS bad!" to "MS good!", some already liked MS and like them even more, some still hate them, still say "why should I trust them given their history / given they're not 100% lovely even now", but still surely a bit less hate than if they were still acting as they did 20-30 years ago. I've no idea if my gut feeling is more or less right than yours, Id imagine companies as big as MS do actually do research to see how things like this affect public perception (not just for end users/businesses but also for tech workers), but I'm not aware of any research being made public on the PR benefits (or lack thereof) from contributing to open source stuff.

e19293001 4y ago

I didn't know this person before: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/category/emacs/ https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/category/emacs/ A banking CTO who contributes a lot in emacs. I really like the image editing he did. Thank you for posting this. Made my day.

noufalibrahim 4y ago
He's the author of Gnus. The news/email reader. It's a little crazy but a huge piece of work. Related to this was http://gmane.io/ http://gmane.io/ which is a mailing list to NNTP gateway (so that they can be read using Gnus).
donio 4y ago
He is Programmerer Ingebrigtsen.
sph 4y ago
I imagine a director-level tech executive at a bank or other slow-moving industry to fit one of two possible archetypes: 1. A suit-wearing person that's so far removed from technology he's just a glorified manager hunt-and-pecking in Outlook all day. 2. A suit-wearing person with a permanent PuTTY window connected to the ageing AS-400 system still running in the basement.
- ducktective 4y ago
  Bon soir, Elliot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmHSx0R3p3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmHSx0R3p3A
  - sph 4y ago
    God, I miss that show. I completely forgot about Tyrell, I was mostly thinking of actual UNIX greybeards disguised as banking CTOs I've met earlier in my career :)
- bluedino 4y ago
  Putty? You mean iAccess!

nebqr 4y ago

It’s a shame most distros are still rocking emacs 27 and not including libgccjit makes installing 28+ a pain on windows.

G3rn0ti 4y ago
On Ubuntu there is a snap available shipping Emacs 28 including native compilation turned on: https://github.com/alexmurray/emacs-snap https://github.com/alexmurray/emacs-snap I am using it as a daily driver for months already without issues so far.
ungamedplayer 4y ago
Maybe the buntus are lagging behind in Emacs. I think most others have 28 in their releases.
pabs3 4y ago
Debian has 28 in unstable, looks like there are some issues to fix before it can reach bookworm. https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?package=emacs https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?package=emacs
- gpderetta 4y ago
  I used to build my own emacs, but after being annoyed with it breaking after each upgrade on unstable, I use the emacs-snapshot repo on http://emacs.secretsauce.net/ http://emacs.secretsauce.net/ with bleeding edge packages for Debian sid.
nanna 4y ago
If you're on a distro which doesn't have Emacs 28+, one option is to pick it up from guix.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jhoechtl 4y ago
On Windows it's very easy: Download from https://github.com/kiennq/emacs-build/releases https://github.com/kiennq/emacs-build/releases Unzip into a folder of your liking, C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Emacs would be a sensible start

vidbina 4y ago

I find it inspiring to see how a interpreter that outlives me has such passionate and skilled contributors keeping it alive or rather, rejuvenating it with new life. Also impressed by the notion that someone could obtain such a strong command of, what I would consider, a somewhat "intimidating" codebase to own. Happy Emacs user here and excited/grateful to see how well the ecosystem is currently doing.

pvaldes 4y ago

Is going too well... Hum. I hope somebody checked the bugociraptor fences.

zasdffaa 4y ago

Heh! He closed one of mine! Emacs bugs I've reported can vary from "I'd like this behaviour" to "something ain't right here" to "docs are borked on <subject>". Emacs is so stable there's not many crashing bugs to report. Emacs devs are great btw, tolerant of occasional n00bishness and very responsive.

andorsk 4y ago
hmmm. I'm a regular emacs user w/ Doom configuration on top of emacs. I love emacs and I use it exclusively, however it does crash sometimes for me. It's enough to notice, but not enough for me to care.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  Only consistent 'disaster' I get from emacs is it freezes up totally in low memory conditions. I haven't had time to repro + report this yet. If you can repeat a crash, please do report it.
- e3bc54b2 4y ago
  As a fellow doom user, Emacs became lot more stable (and faster) after disabling bunch of default doom packages and modules. In its default config, doom really is intended for use on semi-modern processors with SSDs.That fancy modeline et al come at a cost.
- roflyear 4y ago
  What surprised me about the article was how many features emacs has. Seems they want to do a lot outside of text editing?
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    If you impose structure on text you can do stuff like org-mode. If you allow networking, you can do emails like gnus. If you allow pictures and HTML parsing, you can do a web browser like eww. I guess you don't have to add too much to get a new domain.
  - 4y ago

sloucher 4y ago

Why would you want an image-manipulation feature in a text editor (unless you were a developer who thought that it'd be a fun thing to work on)? That sounds like bloat of the worst kind...

098799 4y ago
I mostly agree. But: - image cropping in an image viewer is useful if you'd like to quickly crop screenshots before posting, - you can already view images in emacs. So the irksome bloat is likely already there, and stems from emacs not only being a text editor, but an operating system onto itself.
lupire 4y ago
It's an IDE not a text editor.
- pram 4y ago
  It's an operating system not an IDE.
  - awestroke 4y ago
    In that case, VS Code is also an operating system
    - tmtvl 4y ago
      I think Emacs goes a little further than VS Code, I don't think it has an X11 window manager, for example.
      - awestroke 4y ago
        No, but VS Code has its own "window manager" that programs (extensions) can use
tmtvl 4y ago
Emacs is more of a Lisp interpreter with a text editor front-end interface. That said, being able to work with images can be useful. For example, while documenting the workflow of a GUI application it can be useful to open some screenshots and highlight relevant sections. While it is true that dedicated applications are usually more capable and convenient for specialised tasks, having tools integrated together like in Emacs also has its strengths (e.g. it can allow for heavy scripting of a workflow).

rvba 4y ago

I really dont like the first chart that shows only data between 1900 and ~2600. For me it is "lying with statistics 101". I much prefer the full chart. Of course one could say that they dont see the details in the full chart, but it is not the situation here. Also good work.