Month: September 2021

Book: Richard Knaster, Dean Leffingwell “SAFe 4.0 Distilled”

No comments

It’s impossible not to know about Agile development nowadays. Heaven forbid someone catches you unaware—it’s practically a career-ending move. I’m joking, of course, but the fact remains: every developer and manager in IT can talk at length about how they’ve implemented Scrum, Kanban, sprints, and plenty of other fancy terms in their teams. However, in practice, it turns out that very few people actually know how to make all this work properly (and the author of these lines harbors no illusions about his own expertise, even though I’ve been working in this field for a long time). While these methodologies have been actively used for many years, it eventually became clear that in their pure form, they work well for small teams, but when applied to projects with a large number of participants, the results are less impressive. That’s when the next wave of development began, as people started thinking and experimenting with how to scale these practices.

A lot of new methodologies emerged—some faded away, while others developed through trial and error and found their use. Among them are Scrum of Scrums, LeSS, and SAFe, though there are many others as well. It’s hard to say which one is clearly the best, but SAFe has recently gained a lot of followers and seems to be leading the pack statistically. At some point, I couldn’t ignore it because every methodology has its advantages. Even if it doesn’t fully take root for you or your team, you can always borrow some elements, implement them first, then move on to the next… and so on, as long as it genuinely improves quality, transparency, and, of course, the final result.

Read more

How Else to Show Off

No comments

I was browsing through different editions of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro series and discovered that the entire trilogy has been released in a single volume. There are also editions with different illustrations. One has a rather dull cover, while the other features artwork from the latest game in the series, Metro: Exodus. The latter looks very beautiful and perfectly fits the theme of the book (even though it’s based on the game).

But then I saw previews of individual pages from the edition and was quite surprised by the original approach taken by the typesetter (or designer) of this edition. Here’s an example of one of the printed pages:

It’s rather unexpected and very unusual to see text laid out in two columns on a page, making a total of four columns across a spread. Of course, it looks fresh and grabs attention. But for me, it would be inconvenient to read. And it’s unclear why it was done this way. What problem was the designer trying to solve?

Tell me, would it be comfortable for you to read like that?

Book: Jan T. Gross “Neighbors”

No comments

It might seem strange to begin a discussion about the book Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross with reflections on management, but for some reason, that’s the thought that came to me as I considered the book after finishing it.

Having managed people for many years, I’ve developed a few principles that I’ve always tried to adhere to in both work and life. One of them is to speak openly about what has happened and to draw lessons from both one’s own missteps and the events of history, even when they are extremely unpleasant. For me, Neighbors is precisely such an example. It is an honest account of events that took place in several small towns in Poland in 1941, when the areas around Białystok, previously occupied by the Red Army, were taken over by German forces following the launch of their war against the USSR.

The main focus of the book is on the pogrom in the village of Jedwabne, where, on July 10, the majority of the Jewish population was massacred. For many years, it was believed that the Jews were killed by German soldiers, specifically the so-called Einsatzgruppen. However, facts emerged that shocked many in Poland. It turned out that there were no Germans in the village at the time, and that all the atrocities were committed by Poles—the Jewish neighbors with whom they had lived side by side for decades—once the new authorities made it clear they would turn a blind eye to everything. And from there, it was just a short step to taking Jewish property and dividing up the spoils.

Read more

Affiliate Programs of Bookstores: Description and Review of Popular Ones

No comments

There is a concept known as affiliate (referral) programs. In short: you promote a store’s products, and in return, the store gives you a percentage of each sale. It’s generally beneficial for everyone: the store gains new customers thanks to advertising on external platforms, and the authors of popular resources get a small cut from the stores if their readers decide to make a purchase. Moreover, this is highly advantageous for stores (from my non-professional point of view). In most cases, when you pay for advertising, you spend money without any guarantee of getting it back. But here, you essentially receive free advertising and only pay a small percentage of the actual revenue generated by the user. Furthermore, as a store, you typically pay for a single purchase, but the buyer might stay and become a long-term customer. For subsequent purchases, you almost never pay anyone. Additionally, there’s the well-known factor of the first purchase—it’s much harder to convince someone to make their first purchase, but if they’re satisfied, the likelihood of a second purchase increases significantly.

As a devoted bookworm, I’ve always kept an eye on the development of online book sales. I witnessed the rise and growth of ozon.ru, and I even had a small hand in the creation of the Belarusian oz.by when it launched. From then on, I simply followed the market’s evolution.

As soon as such stores started offering affiliate programs, I signed up to test them out. This was especially advantageous when I was regularly writing the ” The Notes of Glitch the Hamster” series (the namesake of this blog), which reviewed all the latest sci-fi releases on the Russian-speaking market. Back then, I included links to books directly in my reviews, using my affiliate ID. I wouldn’t say I earned a lot, but I did manage to buy a few books (considering that getting books from Russian ozon to Belarus at the time wasn’t exactly easy).

Read more