I’ve had the great opportunity to do some extra work in a very different environment this week; I’ve been a musician in a professional orchestra - the awesome Östgöta Blåsarsymfoniker.

It was quite a treat to work in this group and get to play my instrument on a high level. Also, as an amateur, getting paid to play my instrument is … mindboggling.

Being part of this group for a few days made me notice a few rituals and practices that I think we can learn from. I wanted to share a few thoughts on them here.

Recently, I undertook a fascinating task for a client. As the “Head of Curriculum” at the School of Applied Technology, my responsibilities include crafting the content for bootcamps. Our inaugural bootcamp, “Fullstack JavaScript Developer with React and Express,” required me to swiftly set up 33 developer computers to ensure students could start coding within hours.

Here’s a rundown of how I accomplished this feat and the insights gleaned along the way.

This gives me all the tech items that have been resolved across all of Roar organizations in the last 30 days.

Selecting Columns

Now, the default columns are great for reading this long list of items, but I want to do some stats. I just need the issue key, creation date, and resolution date.

To select columns, click the Columns link to the right of the search. Then select the columns you want to store for this filter. They will be saved automatically.

Setting Permissions

Always remember to set the right permissions for the filter before sharing it. Click the Details -> Edit permissions link next to the filter name and set the permissions to something useful. I usually select Any logged in user unless it’s sensitive.

Importing Data into Google Sheets

Exporting the list of issues is simple: click the...

At my current job, we heavily rely on Google Apps (Docs, Slides, Sheets, etc.). I’ve grown quite fond of them, especially the seamless integration between different apps. One of my favorite features is the ability to create a chart in Google Sheets and easily copy it to Google Slides for presentations.

Today, I want to share a small hack I’ve implemented to keep those slides updated automatically. This is particularly useful for dashboards or presentations displayed in a kiosk-like setup.

Copying the Chart

When copying a chart from Google Sheets to Google Slides, there are two options: as a picture or as a link. For our purpose, we want to use the link option:

1. Open the spreadsheet containing the chart you want to copy.
2. Click on the chart and then click the three dots (…) in the top-right corner.
3. Select “Copy chart.”
4. Open the document or presentation where...

I’ve been playing around with refactoring a Koa application to use modern JavaScript constructs like async, await => and do away with generators etc.

In doing so I had an epic battle with mocha, monk and supertest to use async / await etc. I finally found a good structure for this purpose that I wanted to share.

This is the fifth and last post in a series where I refactor an old (4 years) code base (an API written in Koa) to modern Javascript and tools.

Here are all the posts in the series

• Part I - get the tests to run
• Part II - where we clean up the test code a bit
• Part III - where we start to move over to async/await testing
• Part IV - where finally do something about the production code, and fix the other parts of the application
• Part V - wrapping up by refactoring the root application - this post

This is the fourth post in a series where I refactor an old (4 years) code base (an API written in Koa) to modern Javascript and tools.

Here are all the posts in the series

• Part I - get the tests to run
• Part II - where we clean up the test code a bit
• Part III - where we start to move over to async/await testing
• Part IV - where finally do something about the production code, and fix the other parts of the application - this post
• Part V - wrapping up by refactoring the root application

This is the third post in a series where I refactor an old (4 years) code base (an API written in Koa) to modern Javascript and tools.

Here are all the posts in the series

• Part I - get the tests to run
• Part II - where we clean up the test code a bit
• Part III - where we start to move over to async/await testing - this post
• Part IV - where finally do something about the production code, and fix the other parts of the application
• Part V - wrapping up by refactoring the root application

This is the second post in a series where I refactor an old (4 years) code base (an API written in Koa) to modern Javascript and tools.

Here are all the posts in the series

• Part I - get the tests to run
• Part II - where we clean up the test code a bit - this post
• Part III - where we start to move over to async/await testing
• Part IV - where finally do something about the production code, and fix the other parts of the application
• Part V - wrapping up by refactoring the root application

I have learned so much by following the Koa Js community and framework over the years. My first post on the topic was written in March 2014, when Koa was just a little tiny bird trying out its wings (look up that reference…).

From that point I’ve written many posts, done a few screencasts for fun and other for profit.

4 years (MY GOD!) is a long period but in the JavaScript world it’s eons of time. I noticed that the other day when I refactored one of my later Koa applications into something more modern. I learned so much about the topics that I ran into, while upgrading my code and the resulting code was much more elegant, functional and understandable.

So… I thought I’d do it again. This time you can tag along. This post will be long, but hopefully worth it.