The travel eSIMs are a bit different. My Orange plan covers Turkey and the UK, which I specifically wanted, and probably Switzerland as well. For my wife, I needed to get a “world” plan that covered Turkey, otherwise the Europe plan would have covered the UK.

But that’s an important point. The travel plans are NOT the same as regular plans in some ways.

I would have a couple years ago. In a flash. We replaced our phones a while back specifically to have eSIMs. It truth, considering the cost of Canadian roaming plans the phones have already paid for themselves.

Both of our old phones were single SIM, so using a local SIM would mean disconnecting our Canadian numbers which would put us out of touch with people back home. Which means that this card wouldn’t have work for us either.

I was at the point of looking at buying a portable WiFi hot-spot, when I found out about eSIMs. So we went that route.

I have an Orange eSIM with a France number that I have kept alive by reactivating it at least once every 6 months. It’s good for all Europe, without roaming charges, so that’s easy to do. Having the same number all the time is convenient, but more importantly I have gone through the hassle of providing passport info to Orange, which is a government requirement if you want a number for more than a couple of weeks. I think that’s an EU thing.

The local number is good for calling hotels and for making restaurant reservations. Just having that is a game changer.

For my wife’s we don’t need a number, so I just use Nomad for her data only eSIM, and get a new one each time. The cost is about $12-15, and you get whatever carrier you get, but the service has been good so far no I keep using Nomad.

We can text each other using WhatsApp, and you can even use WhatsApp for voice calls. The sound quality is acceptable.

We bought phones that support eSIM because we do a lot of travelling. Canadian mobile companies charge usurious rates for roaming: $15/day! Times two phones. I can get 2 weeks of data only for Europe for about $11 total on an eSIM. With voice it goes up to about $25. Total.

It has changed our lives when we travel.

You mean “flavour”, right? Another small but important difference.

Thank God somebody got it.

I think it’s a bit more than that. I think that the idea is that you simplify the problem so that the rubber duck could understand it. Or at least reformulate it in order to communicate it clearly.

It’s the simplification, reformulation or reorganisation that helps to get the breakthrough.

Just thinking out loud isn’t quite the same thing.

“Intercourse!”

COBOL is not hard to learn. But it takes years to develop the muscles in your fingers to the point where you can write a subroutine in a single session.

In a way, this question itself is very “un-agile”. Agile should be always forward-looking, “What can we do next?”, “What can we get done in this short period of time?”, “What should we do next?”.

OK, so you found a possible “defect” in your system. Is it a defect, or did someone slide in a requirements change 3 months ago?

This reminds me of playing chess. Sometimes a player will make their move when their opponent is distracted. The opponent hears, “Your turn”, and they look at the board. “Which piece did you move?”. The first player just shrugs.

The point is that you shouldn’t need to know which piece just moved. Every chess position is a “state” of its own, and your best move should depend on going forward from that state, not knowing how the board changed recently.

It’s the same thing here. You have a situation. Does it really matter how, when, who or why it happened? It shouldn’t, and here’s why:

Just because it’s a defect (if it is) doesn’t automatically mean that correcting it moves to the top of your “to do” list.

It’s going to take some non-zero amount of time to change it back to blue. And when you’re doing that, you’re not doing something else. There is always an opportunity cost to doing bug fixes and you shouldn’t treat them in an ad-hoc way. Should you be spending that time, and who gets to decide if you do? It’s not your decision. It’s the PO’s decision to make.

Maybe the PO doesn’t care about the colour. Maybe they do care, but not if it means some other feature gets delayed. Maybe it’s the most important aspect of the whole system, and there’s no way you can launch with it green. So you cancel the current Sprint and start a new one dedicated to fixing this defect! Maybe they regret asking for it to be blue, and now they’re happy that it’s now green.

If it was me, I’d get a quick T-shirt size estimate on the work required to change it back to blue, then put it in the Product Backlog to be reviewed with the PO. Maybe have a quick chat with the PO, or send a memo about it. Maybe the PO will need to check with their SME to see if anyone remembers asking for it to be changed to green. Maybe not. In any event, it either makes its way into a Sprint Backlog or it doesn’t.

Also, if you’re doing Agile right, then your clients are getting constant, hands-on, experience with your system as it is being developed. To go 100 days without some kind of “release” that they can play with and give you feedback is an anti-pattern. If you are giving them the latest version every week or two and after almost three months they haven’t noticed that the footer is green, then it’s probably not important.

On to the actual question. Jira is a potential sand trap of administrative complexity. The answer is usually to keep everything smaller. Smaller features, and smaller Sprints. Smaller teams. A team of 5 or 6, working in one week Sprints, can only do so much per Sprint. If your fundamental unit of work - a story, or a feature, or a ticket - is set to take something like 1/2 day and forms the basis of your Sprint Backlog, then each programmer on the team can do at most 10 SB items (in a perfect world). Depending on the composition of your teams, you’re probably going to have only about 3-4 programmers - which means 30-40 tickets per Sprint Backlog. And that’s a blue-sky number that’s practically impossible in a world with meetings. A team of 5 or 6 is going to complete closer to 20 Sprint Backlog items in 1 week Sprint in the real world.

The point being that 14 Sprints is your 100 days and each Sprint has about 20 easy-to-understand items in it. Whatever your management tools, it’s a failure if you can’t locate those 280 features in a matter of seconds. And it should be easy to eliminate 270 of them as not possible places where the change happened just from the description.

And when those SB items are small, as they should be, it’s not an onerous task to document inside them the requirements that they are supposed to meet.

When you have 1 month Sprints with tickets that take 2 weeks to complete, then everything becomes a nightmare. It becomes a nightmare because it’s virtually impossible to impose some kind of consistent organizational structure internally on free-form stuff that big. But it’s almost trivial to do it with tiny tickets.

And the other thing that happens with big tickets is that there’s tons of stuff that programmers do without thinking about it too much. If you’ve got two weeks to finish something, then there’s a ton of latitude to over-reach and the time estimate was just a wild guess anyways. If you have 3 hours to do something, then you’re going to make sure that what you need to do is clearly laid out - and then you have to stick to it or you won’t get done in time.

Did somebody “fix” the inconsistent footer colour while doing some huge, 2 week, ticket? Good luck finding out. But that’s not going to happen with tiny, well documented tickets.

My first experience with this food was in Halifax decades ago. The Halifax Donair is a unique thing.

And it’s definitely Donair, not Doner.

Deal with the ethernet port issue by purchasing a 5 port ethernet switch. Maybe the rest of your issues go away?

As a Canadian driving around the UK I always found these signs strange. When passing one we would raise our fists in the air and shout, “End road work…end road work everywhere!!!”.

It amused us.

For me Bazzera Magica and Baratza Vario grinder some time back. Better coffee than most cafes.

I looked and Python has the library support for the GPIO and to do background threading to poll pins. My preference would be to go with a JVM language like Kotlin, but then I’m a programmer. Python, from the little that I’ve mucked about with it is really just one step in complexity from scripting. Maybe even easier, because some things in shell scripts are super difficult to do.

Maybe then you need to move one stop up from scripting into something closer to actually programming. I’d be surprised if Python doesn’t have the library support on a Pi for dealing with both serial and GPIO I/O.

the end stop in external to the serial communication

Does this mean that you have some kind of other signals or pin-outs? If so, this is starting to sound like a great project for a Raspberry Pi, because the GPIO pin array can handle that.

Keep in mind that it has been decades since I last used Kermit, but I’m pretty sure the use case it was originally designed for was…

Connect to a serial port, which had a modem attached. Talk to the modem and get it to dial a number. Presumably, the remote end answered and the port attached to its modem would issue a login prompt. Negotiate the login and then issue a bunch of commands to change directories and then launch Kermit on the remote system. After that Kermit to Kermit communications took over until you terminated the session. Finally, log off the remote system and hang up the modem.

All of this stuff could be done via scripts. I seem to remember that it would actually wait for a response, and then parse the response in the script. I don’t remember ever doing polling loops.

If you’re on a *nix box of some type, it’s totally possible to open up a serial port for manual I/O even in something like a bash script. Even if you have to reverse telnet to a terminal server.

Kermit on top of FTP can work really well. Kermit has its own communication and transfer protocol, IIRC, but updates in the 1990’s allowed it to be used with TCP/IP and FTP. So you can write a script to log into a remote system, run some commands and then initiate a file transfer. The scripting allows you to wait for responses and act on them.

I am fascinated by his thumbs.