English is not my first language, as I’m sure any reader of this blog knows. But I chose to view this as a superpower since I then can see things with fresh eyes. For example, the true meaning of words and phrases.

I still remember when I understood the difference between effectiveness and efficiency. Those are the same word in Swedish, but when I understood the difference a lot of things made sense when it comes to agile and lean stuff. Read more here

Last week I had another revelation like that - when I realized the difference between value and valuable. According to Dave Farley it’s a common mistake he sees for teams to adopt user stories effectively. I think he is right.

Hold on? What are we testing here? Now I’m only testing the framework code

I’ve had this conversation many times, mostly with myself, and a few days ago with Johan. It might feel and seem like a failure but it is often the beginning of improvements and deeper understanding.

A long time ago I stumbled over the motto of Bob Bemer and it is both cool, nerdy, and useful

((((DO SOMETHING!) SMALL) USEFUL) NOW!)

In this post I wanted to unpack, what I think, it means and show you how it can be useful to tackle beasts that you haven’t dared or have the strength to do something about.

I even have a screensaver picture that you can download here

One little nugget of gold I picked up when working for Spotify was:

Always assume positive intent

However, I’ve now realized that it’s a bit one-sided and it opens up an unexpected opportunity for building a bad culture. Also, it touches on one of the reasons I never wanted to be a manager.

Let me explain.

Always assume positive intent

Always assume positive intent as a general rule I think is good advice. I’ve seen many conversations that could have benefited from some “hey - maybe they don’t want to hurt me?” at the outset. Just taking a little effort to think that the question comes from someone with good intent, before jumping to conclusions about them wanting to do something bad to me - that’s how I understand “Always assume positive intent”

Interestingly enough, every time I talk to people that have had this saying floating...

A common problem I see on #kanban boards is that we are moving tasks, not stories. This misses one of the core ideas of #lean, is hard to report status for, focuses on resource utilization, and invites compartmentalization (anti-teamwork). But other than that – it might be a good idea 😊 Let me explain.

Over the years I and many around me have periods of time when we have too much to do. That is we have more to do than can fit in the time we have to do it. Pretty common, especially in the workplace.

In these times I’ve noticed many people trying to be helpful and give the following advice:

Be more careful in how you plan your time.

It’s said with the utmost well-meant intentions but it is honestly not helpful. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Yesterday I had a really weird experience and I wanted to share it, not as something reflecting good on me, but a reminder of the value of sharing knowledge and learning from people around you.

I have bumped into people that have taken #agile and #lean to other and better places than me, and done more of it than I ever thought. Of course and it’s lovely.

The other day I stumbled on a YouTube video that looked interesting. I’ve been using Chat GPT quite a lot (a few times a day) in my daily work and was looking for a way to feed some private, data for our company into it.

The title of the video was “PrivateGPT 2.0 - FULLY LOCAL Chat With Docs”

It was both very simple to setup and also a few stumbling blocks. But in the end I could have conversations in English (and broken Swedish) about how to build data pipelines, the Scling-way, by feeding the AI our documentation files.

This is all running locally on my machine without any keys to a third party service.

This is a personal post about recovering from depression and fatigue syndrome. I’m writing it for me, but you can read it if you want.

I’m still in the process of recovering from fatigue syndrome, I realize. I’m doing better but the fact that it’s now been 2 years and I’m still thinking about that every day makes me think that I’ll never get out of it completely, but rather need to learn how to live with it.

Lately, I’ve noticed two things that pull me backward, and I wanted to write down how I get out of it so that I’ve at least written it down once.

At my current job, we are using Google Cloud Platform, which is awesome since it opens up so many services that exist in the Google ecosystem.

The other week a need arose to create reports based on data, from a template. We were wondering for a while and then decided that Google Slides could be up for the job. It was. But there were quite a lot of small hoops to jump around in, especially considering that there were so many different versions, languages, and ways to do things.

Here’s my plan:

1. Create a Google Slide Template that will serve as the report original. This will contain some placeholder strings that we will replace with data from the report
2. Create a folder for the report we are generating, and make a copy of the report original to this folder.
3. Uploading a few pictures to this folder, and ensure that...