This week I used ChatGPT professionally for the first time.

It worked … pretty well.

I can’t write regular expressions. There was a time when I even wanted to learn them, but that has long since passed, and now I hate them with the heat of 10.000 suns. You can spare me any “But if you just look at this tutorial/book/video etc.”, or “Take a look at regexp101.com that will help you, I promise”.

No, thank you. I’ve done that. I even read the best book (here as a post) on the topic, by Staffan Nöteberg. Nothing helps.

When I need a regular expression I either solve it in a substandard way or spend waay too long to write something simple.

I ran into a problem when coding. But when I saw the error message, that meant nothing to me on its surface, I soon found the problem. After fixing it I realized that the way I approached finding and fixing this came from many years of making mistakes experience.

In this post, I wanted to share this. Not to show off (it’s not that impressive) but to share some of my experience from hunting bugs. And maybe more important, the way that found and protected myself against this happening again.

I got invited to share a list of my top five books on leadership and change management. At first I didn’t think more about it but when I started to investigate the site that asked me I found a nugget of gold.

Shepherd.com is very cool!

I have worked in many different types and sizes of organizations, sometimes in several ages of the organizations growth; and I’ve noticed something that I don’t really understand.

When an organization passes the number of people where everyone cannot know everything (20?) something weird happens. You have probably seen it, or maybe (like me) even said this. I have never seen this not happen.

Different parts of the company doesn’t seem to understand each other any more. Typically higher levels (“management”) and lower levels, but it can also be department to department.

Here’s my conundrum; the people saying this are intelligent people trying to do their best for a common goal. Sometimes they have decided that common goal together.

I don’t have a solution for this, but I needed to write my thoughts down to flush them out of my system. I’ve carried this for years. And you can read...

One person that has had a great influence on me over the last 10 years or so is Woody Zuill. I’ve learned, benefitted, and become a proponent of many of his ideas; mob programming, no estimates, and his general view on life.

One of the things that Woody once told me stuck with me hard enough to have it as one of my daily reminders. It’s great and will change your outlook on life.

This post is part of a series of blog posts that I’ve written on some images I have a screensaver and what they remind me of. Here are all the posts in my series:

• Kindness is better
• Complex == Bad. Simple == Good
• What would Jesus do?
• (DO(SOMETHING(SMALL(USEFUL(NOW())))))
• Turn up the good - This post

This the fourth installation of my series with tips that I feed myself everyday, through my screensavers. In this post I’m going waay back in time and we get to meet an unsung hero in the IT world, to tap into his wisdom.

Here are all the posts in my series:

• Kindness is better
• Complex == Bad. Simple == Good
• What would Jesus do?
• (DO(SOMETHING(SMALL(USEFUL(NOW()))))) - This post
• Turn up the good

Yes, yes … I know that a lot of Swedish people gets nervous reading that heading alone. Don’t worry - there’s very little religion in this blog posts. It will merely serve as a good example.

You ok, most-secular-country-in-the-world-citizen? Ok - let’s go. The rest of you - welcome.

I’ve started a little series about the screensavers that I have running on my computer. They consists of some sayings, phrases or ideas that I’ve found useful over the years. And I wanted to share these ideas with you.

Here are the screensavers that I’m flicking through each day.

• Kindness is better
• Complex == Bad. Simple == Good
• What would Jesus do? - This post
• (DO(SOMETHING(SMALL(USEFUL(NOW())))))
• Turn up the good

I’ve started this little series of posts about things that I remind myself frequently enough to make into my screensaver.

For each of these items, there’s a story and some thoughts that pop into my head when I see them, and I wanted to share them with you.

Here are the screensavers that I’m flicking through each day.

• Kindness is better
• Complex == Bad. Simple == Good - This post
• What would Jesus do?
• (DO(SOMETHING(SMALL(USEFUL(NOW())))))
• Turn up the good

I’ve been in a slump in my life, which just about knocked me out totally, experiencing a few years with fatigue syndrome and depression. Getting out of that is an ongoing process and I find myself leaning back on old lessons, but trying to make them more real in my life.

One thing that I did was that I added a few sayings that I’ve picked up and that builds me up, as screensavers.

Screensavers, kids, was an old thing that we had running on our computers when we didn’t work at them. Otherwise, the old monitors would etch the text shown into the screen permanently… but they were totally safe sitting in front all day. I’m quite … BZZZT … normal.

I wanted to share them with you and also what I’m thinking about when seeing these sayings or phrases.

Here are the screensavers that I’m flicking through each...

I’ve just started a lot of new things in my life; programming Scala (and Python), data engineering and a new client.

Luckily the things we have built until now is algorithmically pretty simple and … what was that? Calculate the what-now temperature?! The wet-bulb temperature? Wash your mouth with soap, young man! What on earth is that?!

And you want me to write this in Scala?! This is horrible.

In this blog post I’ll walk you through my thinking and application of experience to write one of the most complicated calculations I’ve ever put into a program, in a programming language that I’ve never seen 2 months ago.

It actually took me all of 1 hour to get this to work - and still be confident that it works.