Feminist City: June 22: Chapters ?

Elegant puzzle

Sprints

Matthew: one week sprints. Monday is gone with meetings, but not much time for executing. Moving to two weeks sprints. Would like to try Shape Up process
Pat: planning meeting on Tuesday, no other structure. Happy with current system.
Richard: two weekly sprints with a sprint retro. Currently incorporating slack time with pairing on other tickets but need to figure out prioritisation for those. All work processes are the same in general, and sometimes they work, sometimes not, and mostly ignore them
Adam: look at how much work is needed for a milestone rather than actual sprints. Doesn't make sense to have a fixed amount of time to get between two points.
Elle: does not like when sprints are jam-packed without breathing space and especially when they are used for management sake rather for the developers' benefit. Would prefer a well-groomed backlog by a switched on product manager that decides on priority list and a continuous delivery cycle. Updates and reports can be done without time-boxing work.

Should ask the question: what purpose does a sprint serve in your project? Many do not reflect on that. And when they think about it, they realise that it does not serve the developers. But you still need to provide reports and demonstrate momentum. When you create structure around time, you need to

External dependencies between teams and external entities. Two weeks cadence is a chance to release for testers and so they can figure out how to test it.

A suggestion to move estimates to the end of the spring and thus all estimates are accurate.

Structure is needed but time boxing is not necessarily needed and causes stress and added problem.

Curious in exploring a system where things that never get prioritised, get archived, rather than having a never-ending backlog

Review of Elegant Puzzle as a whole:

The book prompted good discussion, found a lot of the advise hard to be able to use.
Very little that was interesting
High overview without going into a lot of details
Interesting but hard to know what to take away from it because there was little detail to support his argument
Good SRE papers that are not related to the book, but are good resources.
Good resources in the appendix
Would have been good how he designed the systems, rather than what the systems were

Feminist city

Leslie Kern

"Kernography" - studying her materials
What is the goal of this book? who is the target audience?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Criado_Perez
- takes essentialist view of womanhood and denies the existence of trans people
There is content overlap with Criado-Perez's ideas

Themes in the introduction

Contested terrain and being a "public woman"
Did not know people designed wind tunnels. There is a problem with poorly designed skyscrapers. Wind could be too forceful that can create harsh outcomes for cars and people.
- 99% invisible city talks about wind tunnels
- https://99percentinvisible.org/article/dangerous-skyscrapers-channel-wind-sun-topple-pedestrians-start-fires/
Colonial women marrying settlers to make themselves honest women
- White tears, brown scars: How women and people of colour are treated.
Reminds: many indigenous languages do not have gender pronouns. So historian documented that with a "he" pronounced. so that important women were not documented because of the lens they used
Citationality: like selecting which people to follow on twitter and which voices to amplify. Amplifying the same kind of voices, makes them seem like the important voices to listen to.

word. As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed cleverly points out, “Citationality is another form of academic relationality. White men is reproduced as a citational relational. White men cite other white men: it is what they have always done … White men as a well-trodden path; the more we tread that way the more we go that way.”

Feminist geography - the way people interact within the city

Throughout this book, we’ll meet the urban thinkers who have studied everything from how women travel through the city to the gendered symbolism of urban architecture to the role of women in gentrification. But rather than start with theory or policy or urban design, I want to begin from what poet Adrienne Rich calls “the geography closest in,” the body and everyday life.

Freedom and fear
- Outdated impressions of NY based on previous decades or books/tv from the '80 and '90, describing NY as being unsafe and dangerous
- "Rape myths" and "rape culture"
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack By Peggy McIntosh

Blackmill / book-club