General

As usual, a weekend with kids at home being quasi isolated is always hard. Saturdays work great but Sundays are tough.

Thanks to time change (back to summer timing), somehow our daily routine got out of sync. From the past, I think the next 2-3 days will be a bit chaotic until we settle down again.

It's really cold, and it even snowed on a Monday, 30th April 2020. Like an early april fool joke. But real. Check the video below:

Work

So two weeks in, another review meeting.

As usual, our Reviews are way more focused. People are asking questions via Chat first and after each topic has been presented our Product Manager reads them out loud and answers them.
If there is still a need for clarification, people can signal by enabling video or audio.

This set of rules works well and I think in the future this is one way of keeping them. Even in the office, there is no way 30+ people are listening. Meeting rooms are always short on availability.

We also had our refinement meeting (grooming). Yet it was more confusing than helpful. Sometimes questions were asked in the group and it was unclear who should answer (backend / frontend / ux ?). I will see how our Retrospective on Tuesday will work as I believe more people realized how a 90 minutes hangout isn't productive enough.

One outcome is that we will do more on our Chrome Extension. And there is still a lot of legacy, tight-coupling in it. I have to keep up the refactoring and need to think more about architectural design.

TIL

Don't attend a meeting without a clear agenda. Speak up if you think something is unclear.

Experiment Toggles / Feature Toggles are really important. Even more when you can't easily deploy and rollback, for example in the Chrome Web App Store. Now that most work is done there, it is really easy to support new AB-Tests, monitor them and act quickly.

Cheers,

Ferit