View from the Potting Shed

What we carry into a new job

A while ago, I came across a post on Instagram from a psychologist. Sadly, I didn’t make a note of who wrote it.

The post was about dating after the end of a relationship. One idea in particular stayed with me: when you begin a new relationship, you don’t arrive as a blank slate. You bring aspects of the previous relationship with you.

He said, “Your nervous system is still calibrated to your last relationship.”

Not necessarily because you want it to be, but because experience shapes expectations. Things that happened before can affect what you notice, what you worry about and what feels safe.

And recently I’ve been thinking: the same is true when we start a new job.

Why a little apparent inefficiency can make you more adaptable

Most productivity advice encourages us to eliminate spare capacity.

We fill gaps in the diary, batch similar tasks and streamline recurring work. We try to make every part of the system earn its place.

This can certainly make us more efficient. But it can also make us less able to respond when circumstances change.

What happens when the Sprint is shorter than the development feedback loop?

A two-week Sprint creates the impression that a Scrum Team learns every two weeks.

But that is true only if useful feedback reaches the team within that period.

A Sprint may end while the work is still awaiting integration, testing, deployment or use by real customers. The Scrum events continue, but the most important feedback arrives several Sprints later.

Scrum creates opportunities for feedback, but XP makes feedback technically possible

I was speaking with a friend recently who told me that his Scrum team had not held a Sprint Retrospective for several months.

I found myself wondering: at what point does a team stop practising Scrum and merely retain some of its vocabulary?

The Sprint Retrospective is one of Scrum’s formal opportunities for feedback. Remove it and the team loses a regular opportunity to inspect and adapt how it works.

Scrum is built around such feedback loops.

The Scrum Team frequently inspects its progress, its ways of working and the Increment it is creating. At the Sprint Review, stakeholders can examine what has been produced and influence what happens next.

Yet simply holding every Scrum event is not enough. Creating an opportunity for feedback is not the same as being able to respond to it.

Why I swapped VLC for Screenbox on Windows 11

For as long as I can remember, VLC media player has been a staple on all my PCs and laptops. VLC is the ol’ reliable of software – feed it virtually any media format, and it just plays it without fuss.

But recently on Windows 11, I noticed a frustrating issue: launching VLC took anywhere between 10 to 30 seconds. Double-clicking an MP4 and sitting through a 15-second delay just to watch a local video quickly wore thin.

So, last week I replaced VLC with an app that uses the same VLC engine, but which opens instantly and is arguably prettier, Screenbox.

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