The topic for the December 16th, 2025 chat is self-hosting. More and more developers are exploring it, but what are the benefits? Does it really improve security? And is the effort justified for a personal project or a small team?
Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.
I came across this article. I'll jump to the end and quote his conclusion:
Estimates – as defined in the English language – isn’t really the problem here. The problem is when estimates are treated as predictions, deadlines, and used to put pressure on developers who are just trying to do their jobs. Estimates – the way they are used in our industry today – hurts people and reduces the psychological safety in our organisations. I believe we would be better off if we could work in a way that allows developers to be transparent and continuously communicate updated estimates as development progresses.
What do you think? How can estimates be realistic? How are estimates done where you work? Agile, e.g. Story Points, planning poker? Or more formal software costing, e.g. COCOMO, Function Points?
Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.
This is a big topic! We can discuss change at the corporate/organizational level, or we can zoom in on controlling change in software development. I’ll leave it open for the group to steer the conversation. Controversial opinions welcome.
Anyone have horror stories? Boss drops a 500-page manual on your desk Friday afternoon and says “figure this new tool out by Monday”? You show up one morning and the entire phone system/email client/ERP has been replaced overnight with zero warning?
What about managing requirements? You work for weeks on a feature and it's suddenly dropped? Or a new requirement causes a major rewrite? Or maybe the real issue about managing expectations.
Regarding version-control, we can also dig into trunk-based vs feature-branch workflows vs Git Flow, and when each actually makes sense.
Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.
