Hello! I am Paolo Belcastro. You are reading this because you subscribed to Morfternight, the weekly newsletter about leadership, product management, distributed teams, and anything that tickles our brains.

Morfternight #52: One Billion kilometers later

The one with large numbers, great distances, and games.

Paolo Belcastro

Sep 22

▷ Listen

SAVE

🤩 We welcome four new Morfternighters who joined us last week! We love to have you here and remember: like a smile, this newsletter can be shared with others without you losing anything.

Share Morfternight

📷 Photo of the week

Trains - More Photos

👋 Happy Anniversary, Morfternight!

One year, 52 issues of Morfternight, quite a milestone.

When thinking about a year, I tend to imagine we went all the way around the Sun, to the same place. That couldn’t be more wrong, of course. Yes, over the past 365 days, we have orbited around our star, following an elliptical orbit almost one billion kilometers long, at 107,000 km/hour.

But we are very far from being in the same place.

During the same time, our entire Solar system has been orbiting around the center of the Milky Way at close to 800,000 km/h, which puts us about seven billion kilometers away from where we were one year ago.

And that’s not mentioning that our galaxy is moving even faster, at close to two million km/h, or 17.5 Billion kilometers, during those 52 weeks.

That’s a lot of huge numbers, but my point is: one year later, we are all in a very different place than we were one year ago.

💡 Project estimation in a stochastic world

It’s almost a running joke: an Engineering Manager will double the estimations his engineers make, only to see the Product Owner double that again. It’s not that they do not trust each other. These multiplications are feeble attempts to take into account the randomness that will inevitably affect the project.

Managing project uncertainty using Monte Carlo simulation is a short and sweet article explaining how to apply a basic Monte Carlo simulation to consider randomness without throwing all sense of accuracy away.

Worth checking out if you ever have to provide estimates or are just curious.

🛰️ Let’s play the Space force game

I leave you with e short videos: one is a trailer for the second season of Space Force, the Netflix show. The second is an interview of Gen. Raymond, who leads the actual Space Force, by Ronny Chieng for the Daily Show. The last one is the new Space Force song, but guess for which Space Force?