DEV Community: Marcus Orochena

The Road Trip Analogy - Agile vs Waterfall

Marcus Orochena — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 16:36:00 +0000

Recently I’ve seen a lot of confusion around Waterfall and Agile. I wanted to provide a high-level analogy to help people understand the difference.

Imagine you’re planning a cross-country road trip with friends. You carefully select your destination, listing all the exciting places to stop and see. You map out the entire route, including where you’ll sleep each night.

This is Waterfall.

Now, picture the same road trip, but this time, you only decide the first stop. Each morning, you and your friends discuss where to head next, based on what you enjoyed the day before and the new opportunities that arose. If everyone agrees they’ve had enough at any point, you end the trip and head home.

This is Agile.

The Waterfall approach is excellent when you know exactly what you want and how to get there. It works very well with a fixed budget and/or timeline. The Agile approach is great when you’re unsure of what you want or want to discover new things along the way.

Mixing the two approaches is where things get messy and where most people go wrong. Understanding which method best fits your problem and sticking to it is essential. Agile is not a panacea and does not magically make your team more productive - it’s a different way of working that can be more effective in certain situations.

Original post: https://www.orochena.net/blog/roadtrip-waterfall-agile

Energy Management

Marcus Orochena — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to productivity, one of the biggest issues I deal with regularly is energy management. I generally feel like I have enough time to accomplish my goals, however, I don't always feel like I'm up for doing them. For the past couple of years, I've started to focus on how various activities affect my energy levels and developed a small framework for it. I mentally categorize all activities into three categories which I describe below.

Work

This is defined as time and energy spent working towards goals in my life. I want to maximize the amount of work I can perform in order to more effectively reach my goals and live a fuller, happier life.

Working at my job
Side projects or hobbies
Cleaning, tidying up, errands
Exercising
Socializing or spending time with family

Active Rest

Active Rest describes activities that make me feel re-energized after I've done them, which will allow me to do more work.

Taking a nap
Chilling in a hammock
Going on a walk
Playing with my dogs
Having a fun chat with a friend

Passive Rest (the bad stuff)

These activities are similar to Active Rest activities, in that they are things I do when I need a break from working. The difference is, these don't make me feel recharged. At best, I'm recharged a little - at worst, I actually have less energy than when I started. These will vary from person to person, but for reference, these are things I consider Passive Rest activities:

Browsing social media / Reddit
Most video games
Watching TV / shows

Conclusion

Like I mentioned before, my goal is to maximize my ability to do Work. I view it similar to a mana bar - working decreases my energy over time, and both Active Rest and Passive Rest increase it. However, Active Rest is much more effective at restoring energy than Passive Rest.

TLDR; Focus on activities that lead you towards your goals. If you don't have the energy to work on those things, effectively rest and avoid activities that aren't truly recharging.

My Development Setup

Marcus Orochena — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 19:07:00 +0000

I thought I would post my personal development setup notes as a reference to myself and for anyone else who was interested.

In terms of hardware, I currently use a beefy desktop with dual monitors and an MSI G65 Stealth laptop. They're both configured the same way.

Priorities:

Lightweight
Little/No configuration
Low Friction (easy to jump into and use)

OS: Manjaro

Any Linux distro would probably work, I prefer Manjaro because I like having access to the AUR and it works out of the box for my desktop and laptop setups.

My desktop triple boots into Manjaro, Windows and MacOS so I can switch if needed (ie. building for iOS). Windows, especially with WSL2 is great for develoment nowadays but it's still a bit clunky compared to the other options. MacOS is fine, but since I'm running a Hackintosh with an NVidia card I'm stuck on High Sierra. Additionally I find it requires more configuration to set it up the way I want.

I may try to virtualize the other environments in the future instead of booting into them.

DE/WM: i3

I highly prefer i3 over heavier DE's. I generally have a lot of windows open and without a tiling WM I spend a lot of time managing them. Other options would work, but Manjaro comes with an i3 distribution that I don't need to configure. :)

Shell: Fish

I used Zsh for a long time, but I had a pretty customized configuration and relied on plugins for certain functionality. Fish handles 95% of that out of the box.

Editor: Doom Emacs

Why not an IDE?

Sometimes I'll use one, but for dynamic languages like Ruby/Javascript a lot of an IDE's power is lost. I'm a fan of Jetbrains software.

Why not Atom or VSCode?

VSCode is pretty great, I would feel fine using this instead of Doom. People make arguments about performance, but personally I don't notice any performance issues while using VSCode over more lightweight editors. Atom I haven't tried in years, but when I did it felt very slow.

Why not Spacemacs?

I used to use Spacemacs as my daily driver. I found it a little too heavy for my tastes.

Why not Vim?

I spent a lot of time configuring Vim in the past. I just want something that works out of the box with some features.

Browser: Firefox Development Edition

Extensions :

uBlock
Privacy Badger
HTTPS Everywhere
LastPass
Tree Style Tabs

Search Engine : DuckDuckGo

Static References : Regular bookmarks. I don't use these very much. I make work/project specific folders that include all the links like github repos, bug trackers, etc but that's about it.

Read Later : Pocket. I actually signed up for an awesome service called Reread.io that emails me a random Pocket link from my list each day. When I click the link in the email it takes me to the article and archives it. It's greatly helped reduce my backlog of articles.

Tech News : https://devurls.com

'Real' News : https://allsides.com - but I Hate the News

Productivity & Organization: Inkdrop & E-mail

Inkdrop is probably my favorite, and definitely most used app outside of code editors. It's an auto-syncing markdown based note editor. Every day one of the first things I do is create a new note and write down my goals and todos for the day (personal & work). Throughout the day I'll add other things (standup notes, development notes, random thoughts, etc). In addition, on Fridays I'll compile my daily notes into a weekly summary because those are easier to reference. I could probably do monthly summaries too, but I haven't found the need yet.

For one-off todos I use my consolidated email inbox. I archive every e-mail that I receive as soon as I've read it, unless there's a pending task related to it (phone calls, appointments or meetings, paying a bill, etc). If that's the case I archive the e-mail once I've completed the task. Sometimes I send e-mails to myself.

Over the past 15 years or so I've played around with all sorts of productivity systems and apps but I've found the notes + email system works the best for me.

(For work I just use whatever system they have in place and lightly integrate it into my notes.)

Chat: Franz (Slack & other communications)

A great app to consolidate Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, etc. Why open 7 Electron apps when you can open 1?

Email: Thunderbird

It's back! I tried using Mutt... too much configuration.

I think that's it! Obviously there are language/framework specific configurations, but each one would be its own post. Let me know if you have any suggestions!