I know it's perhaps a silly thing to nitpick on, but the general look of Switch 2 with its darker, Steam Deck-ish joycons don't look as fun as the first one to me.
Current Switch with the neon blue/red joycons had its own character, and IIRC that color combination was what Nintendo often marketed. This change makes it look like a MSI or ASUS product than a continuation of Nintendo's own line.
interesting you said that, because I was totally unimpressed and bored with it and thought, "Ok, so this it? So it's just the Switch, scaled up by 10%?"
It's not that I expected something groundbreaking, but if I had been the creative director I would have said that they need to focus on whatever was updated, e.g., graphics or performance since effectively nothing major has changed.
At the end of the video they announced a direct for the start of April. This video is just a teaser. I’m sure they will cover everything you mention in the direct.
Many, yes. You can pair a CLI arg parser with a logger that supports colored output, and add a TUI library if you needed that. There are "command line frameworks" as well, like picocli that can be paired with something like Jbang for distribution.
I'd certainly like to be in an environment that has the dedicated people to those roles that so often are either combined or eschewed entirely, but 16+ hours of meetings per sprint sounds incredibly draining.
It wasn't particularly draining, because the large windows allowed a more relaxed pace, ensuring that nothing was missed, and a time for joking around.
And it was not "16+ hours of meetings", but two days of taking a break from coding to do more social work, also having a 2-hour lunch together in the middle :)
Even a two hour lunch break still leaves more than six hours for a retrospective, so, honest question, what do you talk about? I'm used to retrospectives taking about 15-30 minutes, and even then we usually have to scratch around for things to talk about. How can you have six hours of things to discuss after three weeks of work?
That doesn't answer my question :-) Are you all regularly having terrible problems that need in-depth discussion? Are you all celebrating every success with its own party? Are your processes so wildly off the mark that you have to change everything every sprint? Is there something else you do in your retrospectives that I don't? For my current team (also around 10-12 devs, 2 week sprints) it's:
- what went well? we completed most/all of our tasks, cracked a tricky problem, received good feedback from somewhere - let's say 5-10 minutes of celebration
- what didn't go well? maybe a task was more difficult than expected, some new requirement added unexpected difficulties, some third party something didn't perform as expected - 10-15 minutes of commiseration and discussion, maybe more if there's something complicated, perhaps that requires further action
- what would you do differently? unless there are some procedural problems, I would expect almost nothing here; maybe someone has some new ideas about how to improve something, perhaps some aspect of the project isn't running as smoothly as it could - 5-10 minutes maybe
So about thirty minutes max across the whole team, usually less. What secret magic are we missing out on? Six hours??
Six hours is longer than I would use for a regular retrospective, but 30 min is very short. The format you’ve described is fairly shallow. Check and Derby and Larsen’s Agile Retrospectives for ideas about what you might be missing.
This feature has extremely limited usability. If there's one group medium-sized group (2-10; and 10 is being generous, I'd say 2-7 is more realistic[1]) and the conversation is chaotic, it is a great feature. However, if you're playing a game that requires coordination across multiple squads, Ventrilo or TeamSpeak are the definite winners.
We tried really really REALLY hard to make a shift to Discord[2]. We even tried writing bots that mimic some TS features. We ended up using Discord to include the more casual gamers from the guild, but most of us still use TeamSpeak, with a few people who're on both to help coordinate the less tech-savvy folk.
Discord always seemed to target a much broader "gaming" audience. It's simple, it does what it does in a mediocre way, but that's okay, because it's a casual product and nobody cares (evidently). You need to be a bit more tech-savvy to connect to set TS/Vent up, but if you're serious about multiplayer gaming, then it's worth the extra effort.
I'd (and a lot of my friends probably) use Discord fulltime if they started catering just a bit more to non-casual gamers too.
[1]: I wouldn't be surprised if Discord's aimed at small gaming groups and that the feature was designed with small/medium sized groups in mind. I'd guess the average room size on Discord probably falls within that range.
[2]: Most people had it already, so adoption wasn't the issue, it was the usability. However, the fact that most people already had it speaks volumes about Discord's conversion strategy/onboarding.
Whoa, that's great. Seems to be a new feature though, as it's only supported on Windows. Thanks for letting me know though, I'll definitely make use of it.
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