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Author: Bartek (Page 2 of 5)

Well just Bartek, you're a wizard

🎉 Puzzle Balls Release 🎉

I have the pleasure to announce: the playable release of Puzzle Balls is out! Go ahead, play it! Prepare your arrow keys and space bar, and connect 3 or more; fullscreen recommended!

Puzzle Balls early release gameplay preview

The game is not developed only by me. I collaborate with a dear friend of mine, Michał Hołowaty.

Keep in mind it’s a very early release. There is not much depth to the gameplay, plus many assets are just a placeholder, and many features are in the early stages. Although the game is fully functional and can be highly addictive! You have been warned!

We keep having fun playing and developing the game, so save the link in your bookmarks and come back to it once in a while. You are likely to encounter new features soon!

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Communication benchmark – number of questions

If you want to be a good communicator, you should practice communication. This requires feedback and questions from your recipients make great feedback. You don’t have to ask anybody for anything extra – questions happen anyway.

You write something -> by the hardness of communication, you aren’t sure if it’s clear or not -> somebody is indeed unclear on something -> they ask for clarification -> you answer, then you improve for future

How to use questions as feedback?

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Send that link

In writing, whenever you’re referring to something that has URL, send that link.

Whenever you’re discussing Jira task, send that link.

Whenever mentioning a document, send that link.

Whenever referring to particular Slack discussion, send that link.

This will allow other people to immediately jump into details (if they need so). That in turn will reduce communication noise (typically in the form of annoying ping-pong messages).

If you think that the link won’t be helpful, because they know what you’re referring to – think twice. You’re in the loop, they might not. Also, it’s not a bad idea to lower your expectations, when communicating in IT. Have you ever been surprised by the fact that something obvious for you turned out to be not obvious at all for others?

If you think that they can check the details on their own if they want – think twice. Unless you’re pair-programming, they are working on something else. Their own tasks, tickets, context. They might need to find Jira it their bookmarks, search for the ticket name, make sure it’s yours – each operation taking 10 sec or so. If they are unlucky, this might be not the end – they might need more accesses, or more details.

You, on the other hand, have this thing in your browser. For you it’s cmd+l, cmd+c, cmd+v. For them it might be minutes turning into “ah fuck it, I don’t need to answer you now”.

If you think it will add to “spamming” in messages – think twice. This should not be the concern here. If you can save someone else’s minutes of their work, it means that the link was useful. It’s not spam at all, if somebody needs it. There might be a deeper problem with not distinguishing useful messages from real spam, but it’s another story. The bottom line is that link is never spam, when it supports foregoing discussion.

If the link turns out to not be useful – fine. I will argue that, in total, the habit of sending links will save much time, even if only a tenth of them are useful. The cost is too low and the potential benefits are too high.

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