#bookclub Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die (🇫🇮, Viimeinen Pirulainen), ISBN 978-951-1-43427-6

That’s it for that saga. For now. This book took a lot longer to complete than the previous ones, I had a lot breaks while reading it due to other, more important things™ .

jussipekonen.10centuries.org.

Yes, I am still alive. The end of the year was, to put it mildly, busy.

#bookclub George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5: A Dance with Dragons (🇬🇧), ISBN 978-0-553-84112-1

Indeed. Those comments and questions came from the project's mismanager, and both the product owner and the project manager of the mobile app were, how would I put this, rather surprised when those were presented. They (and I as well) were under the impression that the mobile would just implement that one planned feature by the end of the year. Those 2 additional things have been planned and approved to be implemented next year, but apparently that information had not reached the project either.

I am expecting to be asked about an estimate on how much work those 2 features would require and, as it is always the utmost important question, when they would be ready… 🙄

matigo.ca.

Well, that was an interesting meeting…

A project had promised to its steering group that all project functionalities would be ready by the end of the year (insert surprised response here…) and they were asking about when the mobile app we work on would release the remaining 2 major features (a third one is planned and will be released before the end of the year). Well, did you ask us if this timetable would even be feasible? Of course you did not, because why should you… 🙄 Yes, while those 2 major features are on our roadmap and backlog, their implementation will very likely start next year at earliest as we don't have enough resources to work on them (or all the other things that are wanted from us) at the moment.

Speaking of resources, a "fun" comment from the same meeting: "we did not reserve any budget for the mobile development from the project". Well, duh, if you would have given money to the mobile development, which serves also a bunch of other projects, we could have had extra hands to help us and the different features would have been possible to be done earlier. But no, that would be… I don't know, something reasonable?

New blog post: On my personal "brand" [pekonen.cc]

Indeed… The project has been pushing a lot of stuff to be done on the client side that should have been done on the backend in the first place. I have rejected every single one of those requests. You can imagine how frustrated our meetings have been…

matigo.ca.

This week starts in a great way… Have a meeting at 0830 about the status of the chat feature. I ask a question about the text formatting returned by the backend, and it would seem that it can be either HTML or plain Markdown depending on the chat status (HTML for chat bot, Markdown for agents). When asked if we could get HTML also for the agent messages, the backend provider replied that they probably cannot provide that because the other frontend solutions have parsed the Markdown themselves1.

So, either we would need to add Markdown conversion somewhere or the backend provider would need to provide the texts as HTML. I would not hold my breath for the latter, but this needs to be resolved first before we can go to production with this feature.


  1. A really stupid decision, if you ask me…

8 years ago today I joined the company I work for. Also, yesterday our youngest had his 11th birthday, which means that it is also 11 years ago when I joined App.net and met many of you online.