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Well sure that’s fundamentally true, but really doesn’t give any sort of accurate picture of how estimates are done any more than “humans are just collections of cells” does, and anybody who does estimates without using some sort of data as the basis and is purely guessing is doing it wrong as fuck.

It’s not like we have no idea how long certain tasks have taken in the past, or what affects how long something will take.

XML has a bad rap because people went a bit (ok a lot) overboard with it in the early years, pretty much like what happens with a lot of other technologies, but as far as structured and human-readable data formats with good schema and tooling support go, it’s pretty much unbeatable. Now that JSON is the New Good Tech and XML is the Old Bad Tech, too many developers use JSON where XML would absolutely make more sense, and then we end up with unholy abominations like Portable Text, which is JSON pretending to be XML, and is so incredibly verbose and monumentally stupid that it feels like some sort of joke esolang data format rather than something being used in a production system. But no, here we are, god is dead and JSON is XML.

XML is terrific for building eg. structured markup languages with more complex markup than what something like Markdown can provide, and have the resulting files be comparatively readable, at least in comparison to the JSON-based alternatives – compare HTML to Portable Text, for example. XML has such a bad reputation – partially deservedly – that people just automatically assume it’s not a valid tool for anything modern, even when the modern “NoSQL”, “structured and typed data is for nerds, suck it” JSON solution is a giant pile of shit compared to the XML alternative

To expand on this, the problem with huge releases is that bugs tend to pile up along with the new features, simply because more stuff has been changed. You’re much more likely to experience a painful release if you pile in months of changes, and this is doubly true for a distributed system with no rigorous testing of the system itself instead of just units

You’ll likely get pushback from people who are convinced that free and open software means you have to allow literally everything. Possibly a large overlap with the sort of people who at least claim they’re free speech maximalists

Having seen a couple of data driven disasters, I’ve gotten extremely suspicious of data driven business. I’ve ranted about this in some earlier comments, but it seems to very often be the case that the business “intelligence” people producing the data not only apply statistics wrong (things like taking averages of averages when the sets have very different sizes, or not taking into account how skewed the distribution of some variable is etc etc), but also tend to define “KPIs” so that they don’t necessarily measure what they believe they’re measuring in the first place. On top of all that, there’s also the fact that using “engagement” (however the hell they measure or mismeasure it in each particular case) as a key metric that you try to optimize most likely won’t lead you to build a better product as much as it’ll be a product that takes up more of the users’ time.

Have the KPIs of my own life failed to grow quarter-over-quarter?

You mean to say that if I leave my door unlocked, somebody might come in? This is shocking news!