A Space for Me — A Hot Day without AC

Today was a particularly hot day. And it was without the air conditioning at Welcomm City. This is the summer I used to remember in Korea, and today made me realize that the summer is nearing its peak.

At Bitfinder, we’ve been using Atlassian JIRA for planning and coordinating software development tasks. In using it, one of the most difficult aspects was estimating how much we could accomplish during a given period of an agile sprint. We produced backlogs during the sprint planning and added them to sprint, but it ended up being only about 60–70% of the tasks (although have not quite quantified this yet; based on the hunch) being completed at the time of retrospective.

So what Hyeonjae Kim and I decided to do was convert all issues that did not have estimate field in our backlog to Stories and added time estimates for each Story for our sprint. Then, we had a total number of hours needed for that particular sprint. Divided that by 2 (since there are two developers; Hyeonjae Kim and I) and you divide that by 8 hours, time spent for work per day. So far, it seems like it has given us (at least me for sure) a better way of estimating how much time the sprint will require for the significant amount of its tasks to be completed. Also, for everyday progress, the estimate field is a good metric to compare against.

I begin to wonder if JIRA Agile can be applied to rest of my life; create a backlog of what needs accomplished, break that down into small, sizable chunks for a week or two worth of work, look back and plan again. Then, I realized that is how I usually work anyways. JIRA Agile tool just made me more consistent with the process. Now that I have a sense of how efficient I could be with careful planning, I will begin to apply this kind of process to the rest of my non-work related stuff.

During dinner, I watched a TED talk by a guy named Michel Laberge. He looked a goofy at first, but turns out he is a founder of a fusion energy company called General Fusion. I was firstly impressed by the fact that such high-technology energy company can be started by a single person and can be venture-backed (as opposed to nationally funded). It also made me interested in the fusion process in general. I remember in my Freshman year at Stanford, I took a seminar class called Future of the Cars (don’t remember the exact title) by Professor Gerdes at ME department. For the final project, I proposed that the nuclear energy was the most promising energy technology available to us because it is dense in terms of energy production and was relatively environmentally safe if controlled well. I might have been wrong about the environmentally safe part but my point was that when you are looking to solve the energy problem, it must be a “brawny” enough change (quoting Vinod Khosla during his Stanford talk that I attended many years ago). I will keep looking into the fusion process and the prospects of the technology down the road.

Another impressive feat I found out today was Bezos Expedition’s F-1 engine recovery. F-1 engines were used as in the Apollo program and is a great symbol for the extraordinary feat of the humans landing on moon. I thought that the crew including Bezos himself going through such difficulties to retrieve something so archaic but symbolic was a small testament to how ideals can drive people to do great things.

Lesson for today: I should hold dear my ideals and make good use of JIRA Agile board in planning and executing things throughout my life.