This "research" has no controls, no blinding, no quantitative data. The historic work mentioned all come from a time when there was no reliable way to confirm that someone was actually asleep. The recent research is full of weasel words like suggests, seems like, appears to, with no actual hard facts to measure and review.
So called Sleep Learning systems have been around for over 100 years but to date there is no rigorous suggesting that any of them work for acquisition of new information and/or skills.
I'll never understand HN's fascination with obvious pseudo science.
The fundamental idea behind Kanban was WIP Constraint Management.
Unfortunately, so many people have been doing cargo-cult agile for so long that now the word "kanban" means 'task board with columns' to most people.
It should not be possible to put 200 items into a column on a Kanban board unless the team is actually shown to have the capacity to work on them without causing a bottleneck.
The fundamental idea behind Kanban is backpressure signaling for logistics.
If I understand it correctly it moves the signaling in-band so it can be handled at a locally distributed level, that is, each local parts consuming system is responsible for directly signaling it's upstream supplier to provide more parts and this is done by putting the signals on the parts bins or making the parts bins themself the signals.
I guess there is also that weird software logistics thing that appropriated the kanban term but because software logistics is very different from manufacturing logistics has little to do with actual kanban. shrugs. It's probably still a backpressure signaling thing however.
"WIP" does not work - it only seems that you are in control of the process. It may work for the same type of tasks (hammering a nail), but in my practice, where all tasks are different, it did not work anywhere.
It has worked fine for me on a variety of software projects for more than 20 years. Here's a project I documented back in 2004, where we used physical cards: https://williampietri.com/writing/2004/teamroom/
These days I'm on an all-remote team, and we use GitHub's kanban interface with WIP limits. That also works fine, and them main difference form how I worked back then is that we no longer do estimates.
I'm not sure what went wrong for you, but my strong suggestion is not to think of it as a task board. Think of it as a board that lists units of value. E.g., features delivered, research completed, messes cleaned up. We do sometimes make task breakdowns for cards, but that happens as we start work on the card, and it's just a checklist somewhere (for us currently, in the GitHub issue via Markdown checklists).
An important mindset shift for a lot of teams to use kanban boards well is to get away from siloing and toward collaboration. For my teams, cards were generally not individual achievements, but things we collaborated on.
I think it's also important for software teams to have a BLOCKED column between TODO and WORKING. The only cards that should count against your WIP limit are the ones that people are truly working on that day. If there's something you can't work on for some external reason, move it to BLOCKED. Then before a card is taken from TODO, try getting any BLOCKED item going first. It's also worth talking in your retrospectives about common reasons things end up blocked, and I like to set a pretty low limit for blocked cards to force discussion.
Happy to discuss further, but kanban approaches definitely work well for software.
I understand what you mean, but I think this is a self-deception of control. After thinking about it, I implemented WIP on the process (board), but only in the form of an "excess indicator".
Such a bold statement when you must know that countless people have a very different experience. Kanban the team methodology is about process efficiency and avoiding bottlenecks.
WIP limits are triggers to redirect resources to the bottleneck is that causes the pileup. Example: If there is pileup of PRs needing review, that is the trigger for devs on the team to stop making new PRs and switch to doing reviews.
Kanban is certainly not the best methodology for all team tasks but where it fits it works very well.
Sadly, for a lot of teams "we are doing kanban" means nothing more than "we are using a task board with columns" or worse "we have no constraints or flow controls and do everything ad hoc."
Yes, many people disagree with me. Take this as an assumption that I'm checking in my service. Of course, it is necessary to limit the amount of work, but in my opinion, WIP per column does not work. Therefore, I have implemented limits only for the entire kanban board (process).
I'm curious exactly what you found not to work. How was your manager using the WIP constraints and triggers, that you didn't like?
I ask because in my experience the main 2 reasons are either a manager who doesn't understand the kanban methodology and uses it incorrectly or that it simply doesn't benefit the workload of the team trying to use it.
In recent years, I've been working in 2-4 teams at the same time. Each team has its own manager, and every year one or two teams changed managers for different reasons. This gave me the opportunity to work with different people, but not a single case of successful introduction of WIP limits. It's not because someone didn't understand how to work with WIP. It just didn't have a permanent effect.
For a change, it's worth trying different tools, I think it's useful for a good atmosphere in the team.
> I think it's because the complexity of the tasks varies, and it's also difficult to predict this complexity.
I don't know what that means in relation to the Kanban methodology.
What I'm looking for is something like, "my manager attempted to improve our cycle time by introducing limits on the number of tasks that can be in each state on our board. When a limit is exceeded, we are expected to take a predefined action to help clear the bottleneck that caused the pile up. It doesn't work and we still have bottlenecks and have not improved cycle time or efficiency."
If all your manager is doing is putting arbitrarily limits on WIP columns, that's unlikely to accomplish much and thats not Kanban. This kind of limit is only beneficial for the person who starts too many tasks without finishing them. The Kanban methodology is about team efficiency, not individual task limits.
The limit can be specified per board (process). This is my vision of an electronic kanban board. Perhaps in the future I will add an indication to the columns, but now I want to check my guesses.
> Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
This is such an odd take to me.
I sold and supported computers in the 1990s. Outside of a few industries, such as desktop publishing, Zip was not popular. The vast majority of computer owners never owned a Zip drive, unlike a floppy or soon to be CDROM.
In fact, I sold far more QIC-80 tape drives for backups than Zip drives.
Zip also didn't vanish overnight, it simple never caught on with most people. However, in the industries that used them, they hung on for a while.
For awhile, the Ontario Health Insurance Program allowed physicians to submit their billing in person via zip drive. I remember depositing the disks for my parents (funny the things one remembers)
This was the time between paper billing and digital submissions.
Banner says "custom tees, delivered at cost" but then the preview page shows a price that is double what I get going to their drop shipper directly (printful). No detailed product info on shirt type or quality. No company info. Hard pass.
The pricing includes printing, shipping, and handling. There's no markup on top of Printful's base cost. If you're comparing against going to Printful directly yourself, the price should be the same. If you're seeing a difference, mind sharing what product/shipping you were comparing? Could be a regional shipping rate thing.
I know a few people who work in food service and make close to 6 figures with tipping. Without tipping they'd be at or close to minimum wage. Of course they are in favor of tipping.
One friend shared with me in detail how she plans and practices every customer interaction to maximize tipping. The more I learn about this the more the restaurant industry feels like a scam to me.
For example, if someone orders a mixed vodka drink, she will ask "do you want that with Absolut or Stoli?" two of the higher priced vodkas they offer. She won't even mention that you can also choose the well vodka for much less.
She also told me of another trick she often uses, especially with large parties on busy nights. When she first goes to the table she will ask "has anyone been by yet? No? Oh this isn't my section but I'll be happy to take care of you since you've been waiting..." Only it really is her section. According to her this always results in higher tips because it gives the impression that she is going out of her way.
My reaction to this and the escalating tip expectation has been to pretty much stop going out to restaurants. Instead, I've learned to cook and host dinner parties. I enjoy it so much more (and I refuse any attempt to tip me ;)
0. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3014680/your-usb-c-cables-ar...
1. https://www.fnirsi.com/products/fnb58
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