Team Yayasan week 3 - Understanding the problem and sloppy limits

Every week (or in case of this week) we hold a short retrospective. It’s very informal is basically just us asking ourselves what worked and what did not. And then we change something. I think that is very important. We change something. In order to improve. Those changes doesn’t have to, and up to now most haven’t, been suggested and implemented at the retrospective meeting. But we try to improve in small steps. Often. Hmmm someone should write about that.

Going into this week we decided two things to improve:

  • Deep dive into why we don’t get reports in time
  • Lower our work in process limit from 14 to 12.

One of those were very successful and one was not…

Sloppy board management

Team Yayasan week 2 - Transparency, culture and lower WIP

This week was really, really interesting. The things that happened on the board and within the team was good but what happened with our interactions with others was both unexpected, a bit though and also important. I’ll try to describe both things without revealing to much details about people and events.

Speaking of that, I got a comment about being this transparent with our work and there’s probably other thinking about it as well. Yes, I can see you. I can read your mind. You will give me $10000 Just kidding. But I have asked the team. I have checked the cards. There should not be anything too controversial on there. And finally, and most important, we are striving to introduce a greater degree of transparency and openness in our organization. I think it’s very important that we are transparent with our work. For us and for others that will follow...

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Javascript callbacks - cannot live with them cannot live without them... or can you?

This is a confession post. Yes, I’m a phony too. I pick up some things very late. Like JavaScript. And Node and … well a lot of things.

But I’m sure that a lot of people have run into this and maybe, just maybe, there will be some others that haven’t run into it yet. So this might help someone. Or me, for that matter, when I come back to this problem later.

It has to do with callbacks. The things that Node is made up of. And how they confused me a lot. And how I grew to love them, then hate them, and finally get them. And right about that point realize that there’s another way.

Let’s see if I can explain this. Just as an experiment.

Everything in node is event-driven (as from their mission statement on the homepage) and non-blocking. Which means...

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Marcus Node Bits - Ok then, Moogose is pretty sweet

I often blog too early. I get excited and want to tell everyone as soon as possible. I whip together a demo and then write a blog post about my experience. Sometimes that is a bit too early. Sometimes you need another look to really appreciate a tool, or to realize that it doesn’t do the job.

In my blog post about Monk (which I still think is great… Monk, that is, not the blog post) I wrote that I didn’t like Mongoose that much. That was too early to say. I have now used it for real and I think I like it.

Let’s me redeem my bad Mongoose-conscience and write a short post on what I’ve picked up when trying it… for real.

The thing that ticked me off and actually made me turn away from Mongoose on the idea-stadium was the...

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A little lesson about document database modelling

This is just a short thing that I experienced when doing the data layer for AptiTalk. AptiTalk is an attempt to create a corporate chat, we want something like Hangout but better. Yeah, we’re not only best - we are the most humble as well!

Ok, in this simple setting I learned a thing about using document databases (Mongo in this case). The data model is really simple. It’s just a Posts, Replies and Hashtags. So we created the Posts like this (using Mongoose):

Let’s leave the Replies out of this discussion for now. I think I have more to say about that, but I haven’t tried it yet. The Hashtags in turn is just the Tag and a reference to all the posts that contains that hashtag. Like this:

Notice the reference to the Post-collection in the pots-array. Both me and...

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Team Yayasan - getting started

I have a wonderful opportunity on my hands. I have been given a team of 4 people that never have done agile or lean before (albeit one of the is Elin, my wife, so she should know something). I have also authorization to decide about how and what we work on, within some limits (that I don’t really know the bounds of yet). And I have three years to work with them.

For the better part of my career I have been a consultant giving advice to people with power of various reach. I have often done gigs that have been ca 6 months in length. Sometime they have been prolonged but then it has always been to go somewhere else in the organization. This time I have plenty of time and direct application of my ideas, no need to try to convince the person in charge.

I’ve decided to...

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Impact Mapping - now helping Indonesian Hospitals

I have a new job. In a new country. In a new domain. But it’s still me, luckily. And I bring the knowledge and tools that I know and have used from other domains. I have often thought that the IT industry was special. that projects in our environment was much more complicated than in any other environment. That we had special communication problems that only occurred here. I’m now starting to change my mind. Of course I cannot talk TDD and Specification by example with these people, but there are many universal things that will help you: focus on lead times and doing fewer things at the same time, get people together in the same room, visualize your problem to get a better and common understanding of it. Things like that.

In this post I’ll describe how...

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Marcus Node Bits - supertest is a nice way to test an api'

I’m writing down some of the things I’ve picked up when I started to learn about NodeExpress and Mongo. Here are all the post in the series:

This post is about a testing framework...

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Marcus Node Bits - Express is best without generators

I’m writing down some of the things I’ve picked up when I started to learn about NodeExpress and Mongo. Here are all the post in the series:

This post is about the most commonly...

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Marcus Node Bits - monk is an easy way to access MongoDb

I’m writing down some of the things I’ve picked up when I started to learn about NodeExpress and Mongo. Here are all the post in the series:

This post is about monk,...

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