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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: February 13th, 2025

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  • I’m a developer, so my chances are pretty good. But I take your point.

    Even if I weren’t, there’s enough software options out there that I don’t have to pick between paying for proprietary software and living with abandonware.

    So I think the need for this security is exaggerated.

    Of course. I used proprietary software for a long time. Having things I relied on get abandoned got old, but it worked.

    I just expect more from most of my software, now.






  • Another tip I haven’t seen yet:

    • It varies by client, but Markdown generally works, here.

    • Spoiler tags seem to still be a separate extension from regular Markdown.

    • Many of us try to be more careful to include ALT Text with images, as it supports both blind users, and anyone whose server is just being slow to load images:

    Example of Image with Alt text in Markdown:

    ![alt text](/path/to/img.jpg "Title")
    

  • Here’s one I haven’t seen mentioned yet: many of us explicitly state our intended tone after our comments, to avoid miscommunication. Particularly in busy threads.

    We have some great accessibility outreach communicators here, some of whom have shared how much it helps them or people they know.

    Some examples:

    • (Sarcasm)
    • (Genuine)
    • (Joke)

    Sometimes these are abbreviated, but we often even avoid abbreviation - for general clarity, but probably mainly because we’re always gaining new users who might not recognize the abbreviation.








  • That’s a great way to handle it.

    I like to pass them the ticket and schedule the next open hour on their calendar for them to teach me how to do it, if they’re a developer. Sometimes they do, because I was genuinely missing something easy. Usually they get to awkwardly discuss why they don’t have it done yet, either.

    When the person isn’t even a developer, I’ll explain the usual process between developers, and give them a chance to beg their way out of it.

    If they don’t beg off, I schedule them anyway and see if they can actually at least “rubber duck” me through the problem. (Sometimes it even works.)

    I’ve had a couple peers discover (or rekindle) their love for development this way. Most just make up a reason not to make the meeting, though.




  • They worked well for us

    Yeah. I used story points successfully for years.

    After learning about the above data, I asked my team to trial just counting tickets for velocity, and it also works fine.

    The outcomes weren’t noticably different, so now we just don’t spend the couple hours each sprint that estimating story sizes was costing us.

    My team was hesitant to give up story point estimation, because they didn’t want to give up the communication with leadership about which stories were XXL.

    So we kept using the XXL issue tag, but dropped the rest of the estimation process.