A favorite past-time back in the day was driving at night from pub to pub along the 'back roads' (B-roads specifically in the UK) as fast as 'possible'. There were typically no street lights, however lights from other vehicles showed up alerting you to any possible danger. It was fun at the time, but i wouldn't do it now .. lol ..

Right, there were no street lights where I grew up because street lights cost money and the people where I lived were rich partly because they paid few taxes, so no money for street lights. I happened to move to a city when it wasn't yet concerned about the environmental impact or cost, so I went from "Of course the main road doesn't have lights, what are we made of money?" to "Of course jogging tracks in the city parks have 24/7 street lighting. what if you wanted to go jogging at midnight, you can't jog in the dark!". Today those tracks don't have lighting 'cos there's no money and the wildlife hates it but thirty years ago, sure.

However some back roads aren't even B roads, the classification keeps going through C and D but it's local numbering, the numbers are just for local maintenance crews - so a C-1234 could be duplicated a few miles away in another local government territory and that would be confusing for drivers so they won't write C-1234 on a sign, they'll just say what's in that direction or maybe a local name for the road.

That’s great just so long as your county roads doesn’t have any dog walkers or wildlife like deer.

The best case scenario then, is that you write off your car with a deer shaped hole in the front. The worst case scenario is you have a death on your conscience for the rest of your life.

I hit a pheasant on such a road once, not driving at silly speed but it was pitch black. My fog light was never seen again, nor the pheasant.

If you're walking in the middle of the street in the middle of the night, in the middle of the woods, with no reflective clothing, and I hit you, it's your fault. I know how fast I'm driving. I can live with that.

>lights from other vehicles showed up alerting you to any possible danger.

When I started driving I preferred the dark for these roads because the lights let you 'see' hazard around a corner.

Headlights were worse then - and I hadn't seen a crash into a deer.

I went to a wedding in Devon recently, friend of my wife’s whose family are all farmers and her brother was joking that it’d be fine to drive back drunk because the car would just bounce off the hedgerows…

Safety first. More hedgerows!

of course it's re-usable .. most passionate excel jockeys would agree, as long it's their VBA that gets reused

Tony Wheeler has a lot to answer for

This is not unique to SV. This is happening world over. The wealthier are buying more assets, the middle and lower classes are left paying rent to the wealthy landowners. "Gary's Economics" has tons of material on wealth inequality and its impacts.

A Gattaca moment ?

I went as a contractor (fixing a port from PDP 11/44 -> SUN 5/110) on-board a UK nuclear sub back in the 90s, and had a contractor berth in the 'bomb shop'. I slept underneath the Tigerfish MK24 torpedoes, smelly and greasy, but i don't remember it being cold !!

Some good stuff in there, but heard most of it in earlier publications. Reading Steve McConnell's "Software Estimation" covers a bunch of it, Cone of Uncertainty etc etc.

Here's where i've seen estimation become accurate:

1) The people doing the work are estimating the work, and KNOW the software base they are estimating for.

2) Technology being used is not shifting considerably for the piece being estimated.

3) Processes being used to go from requirements elicitation to acceptance are not shifting dramatically for the new piece of work.

You have to have probably 2 of these 3 to have any chance of reasonably accurate estimates. I've seen this work on a fairly large (1 MLOC C++) sonar system development. After a couple of 'late' releases, where those 3 premises were not true, estimation became better, and after 3 or 4 releases, teams were getting pretty accurate, such that customer trust went through the roof.

If you don't have 2 or 3 of those ticked off, you'd better add in a bunch of padding, or get some risk $$ from the C-suite signed off.

I have been involved in 2 medium sized-ish (~300) software support projects for western-nation's land forces project that brought in SAFe with a fanfare. Lots of ($$) training, everybody gulping down the coolade etc etc. It started off OK, but as with most of these ideological methodologies, our projects' circumstances started to clash with the SAFe 'way'. Our customer was very fond of his existing rituals (meetings, committees, progress meetings etc), but we also folded in all the SAFe rituals too. It seemed we were in meetings too much of the time, and we did a poor job of convincing the customer to move wholesale to the SAFe way. In addition, the organizational structure and governance models never operated in the SAFe way, with the customer's insistence on being in our shorts on every decision hampered most of the 'delegate decisions as deep as possible' philosophy. At the end of the day, it steel feels like RUP re-invented for 'agile' .. never again.