David's blog

Err and err and err but less and less and less

David's blog

Err and err and err but less and less and less

Uncategorized

The one question not to ask at the standup meeting

What is the very first question one is supposed to answer during a standup meeting? If your answer is: What did you do since the last standup? then congratulations. You have given the canonical answer recommended by Mike Cohn himself. But I am now convinced that this is the wrong question to ask. When you […]

The SIM4Blocks project kick-off meeting

The SIM4Blocks European project held its kick-off meeting on 5 and 6 April 2016 in Stuttgart, Germany. A consortium of 17 European partners (including 3 Swiss organisations) have answered the H2020-EE-2015-2-RIA call for proposals for: … real time optimisation of energy demand, storage and supply (including self-production when applicable) using intelligent energy management systems with […]

C++: when delete doesn’t delete

We once spent almost a week chasing after a mysterious memory leak in our application, built on top of the highly regarded eCos real-time operating system. The leak appeared after we had rewritten some of our code in C++ after recognising that C’s object-oriented capabilities were no longer adequate for our needs. After about half […]

Going for one-week sprints: a good wrong idea

A few weeks ago, our team held a sprint retrospective (which I unfortunately couldn’t attend) during which it was decided to shorten our sprint length from two weeks to one. The team was right in their decision, but probably for the wrong reasons and here’s why I think so. The main driver behind this decision […]

Scrum stories that are juuuust right

On thing has been bugging me for quite some time now as I observe our team at Neurobat. Most stories on our sprint board are being worked on by one developer each, leading to daily scrums where everyone reports on work that is completely independent from that of the others. Even though we encourage people […]

Running CARNOT models under OSX

CARNOT (Conventional And Renewable eNergy systems Optimization Toolbox) is a set of MATLAB & Simulink models for simulating buildings and building systems, e.g. boilers, heat distributors etc. It’s been developed by a collaboration involving several companies and universities and is generally well-regarded. It’s one of several MATLAB toolboxes dedicated to the problem of simulating building […]

The only problem with daily scrums

Over the past five years, our team has attended more than 120 daily standup meetings, carefully following the “canonical” format and having each team member answer the usual questions: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Any impediments?   There seems to be one flaw with this format, however. The flaw is […]

How to fix rotation problems with iPhone pictures

When I take a picture with my vertically-held iPhone, here is what happens when I insert it as-is in this blog: But the picture shows up correctly when I open it in any OSX application, such as Preview. The issue is that when you take a picture with your iPhone, a meta-data tag gets written […]

Scroll to top