> but almost everybody agrees it is flawed as a language. If that's the future, we are screwed as an industry.
What language is not flawed? And why are we "screwed"? I don't get this FUD...there are more important things than language-choice such as dependency management system + community + ecosystem. JS lets you get on with the job and get things done quickly. You need performance - use C/C++ bindings. Its been clear for a long time that JS is the safest long-term choice and is slowly creeping into every other language's castle.
I have found that revisiting the same documents during regular meetings works best. First starting at a high-level overview of the projects/milestones/deadlines/customers and then drilling down in the detail.
> Know what each other are working on? (progress/blockers)
a. Gantt chart = Asana + Instagantt
- Instagantt is great. It allows you to create a Gantt chart from multiple Asana projects. I have an Asana project for each customer project with the deadlines/milestones. I also have a project for Ops/Refactoring "projects" (changing ORM, dockerizing, etc.), a project for Releases, and a project for Meetings.
- I use to think Github could do everything but business-folk seem to struggle with it, and Asana is more flexible. Assigning tasks to people in Asana is great.
b. Kanban board = Github + Zube
To actually get things built we work in loose two week sprints. We create Github Issues for tasks we are working on usually keeping them quite broad as usually a lot of details emerge once we start working on them.
We estimate time based on Planning Poker with the goal being to become better at estimating time and scoping tasks.
> Know what is currently deployed to production and staging? (heroku)
I've started keeping details of releases in Asana. Could also use Github Milestones. We feature freeze releases to a branch called `release/0.5.x`, when we ship we use a tag called `release-tag/0.5.0`, and then tag our deploys with `deploy/staging`, `deploy/prod`, or `deploy/<on-premise-customer-name>`.
> Keep track of larger goals (milestones)
We use a Gantt chart is visualise this, and usually some high-level strategy docs in Quip.
Each side could vote for articles they think are biased or not biased.
Then you are shown the ones where there is the strongest disagreement between each side.
Another idea is to allow each sentence or paragraph to be evaluated on how biased it is. So someone could read through hovering over sentences and maybe pressing a keyboard shortcut to indicate whether they think this sentence is biased.
The goal is not to evaluate bias, but to find areas of contention and allow the debate/comments to hone in on a particular phrase/paragraph or something.
The key is to apply DRY principles to argumentation.
If someone makes a claim, you should be able to hyperlink to it where the argument has already been explained.
Then each participant can "agree" or "disagree" with each claim in an argument chain. And every time they disagree they need to dive deeper to refine their argument.
Eventually all arguments reach a point of "because I say so" and ultimately it becomes a popularity contest. E.g. We should maximise happiness for all, etc.
But...the good news is argument reasoning can be objectively validated to some extent. Soundness and validity.
And definitions are arbitrary. People have to agree on definitions or there is no point in debating something. I would say that most arguments are about the parties not agreeing on definitions, and wasting time stringing together argument chains where both sides have different conceptions of the words being used.
I believe lawyers/politicians should be programmers and instead of arguing and making laws in English prose, they should use a structured programming language.
I think the key to solving this is to "branch" off the arguments that depend on a contentious topic such as "denying moon landings".
So instead of having to prove moon landings don't exist, there would be one branch that denies moon landings, and the other that accepts moon landings.
This modularises/encapsulates different reasoning chains allowing each to be debating on their own. So whether moon landings occurred could be argued on its own.
The problem today is the "common set of facts and shared reality" that the two sides of politics share are very separated.
What language is not flawed? And why are we "screwed"? I don't get this FUD...there are more important things than language-choice such as dependency management system + community + ecosystem. JS lets you get on with the job and get things done quickly. You need performance - use C/C++ bindings. Its been clear for a long time that JS is the safest long-term choice and is slowly creeping into every other language's castle.