Me and my kidneys
Instead of posting this longish description in the social medias I thought I’d write it up here. That way it’s easier to refer people here instead. Ordinary and casual readers of my blog, sorry. I’ll be right back with normal content in a few weeks. Thinking about doing a new series about writing a NuGet package in DNX-land, using my Mac… TL;DR; I’m in hospital. Again. From the same kidney infection since the last 3 weeks. I’m better this time but it’s a little bit serious and I need antibiotics twice a day for seven days. How did this happen? Most likely I have passed a small kidney stone or crystal. Doing so damaged my urine bladder and … piping (Yeah, I know these terms well. NOT!). At that same point I have got some bacteria that traveled to my kidneys. How do you feel now? I’m not too bad....
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Making dynamic chart in Excel
It was quite some time since I wrote a How-to-post. Here’s an Excel-thing that I managed to solve today that’s been bothering me for a long time. Here’s the scenario: We have plenty of data point, one per day, counting something (really the number of patients per day but it can be anything). This is displayed in a diagram like the one above. After 2 months this starts to get out of hand looking at and really we’re only interested in the last 30 days Sometimes though it could be fun to see more data in one view Basically we want the diagram to dynamically show the last 30 days (or any other number of days we fancy). Like a 30-day window backwards. This post describes how to do that. DISCLAIMER I have, for some stupid reason, a Swedish Excel installed. I have translated the formulas but some other names...
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New PluralSight course: npm as a build tool
I’ve just (October 21 2015) got news that my latest course for PluralSight is published. Find it here. This time I took the opportunity to put together a course on using npm (Node Package Manager) as a build tool. I think it makes for a very lightweight and flexible option for any JavaScript (or front-end heavy btw) project. As you might know I’ve written a couple of posts on the topic: npm scripting: git, version and deploy npm scripting: configs and arguments… and some more tricks Pre and Post hooks for npm scripting In the course I dive much deeper and the topics discussed are: Initializing package.json with npm Running and writing scripts with npm and package.json Writing custom scripts Short cuts for common scripts Pre and post hooks for scripts, see this Hooks for custom scripts Scripts useful for development, supporting tasks as: Compile Coffee-Script Compile TypeScript Refactoring Less...
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Review: #NoEstimates - the book
The #NoEstimates movement have lived a turbulent life on twitter. I guess that happens when you present ideas that challenges how we, as a collective, view the world today. What’s funny is that after awhile, when the dust settles, it seems so natural and you ask yourself; “well, what was the fuzz about”. This is when the idea has got traction and maybe some of the early rough edges has been rubbed off. My friend Tobbe puts it nicely; I beleive #NoEstimates is a transient conversation, when dust settles it will be simply how we now view estimation, in a slightly new light.— Tobbe Gyllebring (@drunkcod) October 6, 2015 One of those moments I think is when someone decides to write something (substantial) down to present compelling, practical, solutions to some of the discussions that’s been had so far. The NoEstimates book is just this; a set of tools pointing...
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The metric / visualization pirate 'rules'
At my current client, the hospital RS Bungsu in Bandung, we are working a lot with metrics and visualizations. This has proven to have a profound effect in interest, focus and understanding for the entire staff. During the last years a couple of “rules” (I’ll come back to the quote marks soon) has established itself. Based on our experience and feedback we have come up with a few guidelines that helps us to do better metrics and visualizations of them. In this post I wanted to share our current set of “rules”. Hopefully this will be helpful to you and maybe even you can share your guidelines with me. “This works for us” (™), “Your millage might vary” (™) and “Please see past the practice and look for principle that you might find useful in your setting” (™). All of those applies to this post. These are more like guidelines...
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How trust, kanban and a little structure changed a life today
I’ve seen many people change into something better over my years as a consultant. It’s beautiful thing - but I’ve never experienced something like that I witnessed today. I was a small, small part of that change and I wanted to share the story with you. It’s a powerful testament to what capabilities lives in each human being that can be released if given the right circumstance and rooms. Ibu Elsye This is Ibu Elsye (lady dress in black in the picture) or Mrs. Elsye for you westerners. She’s General Manager of a hospital, Rumah Sakit Bungsu, that I’m helping, here in Indonesia. General Manager; what is that, in a hospital - is a very natural question to ask. Basically she’s in charge of everything that is not health care. Food, laundry, maintenance, security staff, drivers … you name it. If you need something fixed - go to Ibu Elsye....
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Changes - reasons or the opposite
This is just a short post on a (in the western world) well-known topic. I think I read it first in Switch People doesn't oppose change. People opposed being changed Or maybe with more details, if you make a change without a compelling reason for doing so the change management will be uphill from day one. I’ve mostly been the changer in this, but recently I was the person being changed (the changee?) and I wanted to share my experience and thoughts. So that I, at least, never ever does this again. This can be around any change, but for the sake of argument let’s say that I send an email to my staff like this: Starting tomorrow; everyone has to be in the office 15 minutes earlier. We, the management, thinks that this will improve work around here. Please note that the reasoning below has nothing to do with...
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EADDRINUSE when watching tests with mocha and supertest
You are happy to meet me among the living. The error I’m describing nearly killed me with frustration, and if that didn’t happen I was about to help it by finish myself off. No worries though - I found the solution. Hence I’m alive and can tell the story. This is the error, that haunted me into the wee hours of the night, in all it’s glory: 1) Uncaught error outside test suite: Uncaught Error: listen EADDRINUSE :::3000 at Object.exports._errnoException (util.js:837:11) at exports._exceptionWithHostPort (util.js:860:20) at Server._listen2 (net.js:1231:14) at listen (net.js:1267:10) at Server.listen (net.js:1363:5) at Application.app.listen (node_modules/koa/lib/application.js:70:24) at Object.<anonymous> (index.js:10:5) at Object.<anonymous> (test/site.spec.js:1:73) at Array.forEach (native) at StatWatcher._handle.onchange (fs.js:1285:10) I got that error from mocha when watching my tests with the --watch flag. But only when I ran that watching command as a npm script from package.json. Yeah, it was pretty complex to sort it. TL;DR - Just tell me how...
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Requiring the os - runtime-js
This is my second attempt to write this post. It’s not that the post itself is hard to write but the concept makes my head … go ouchie. That tend to happen to my head when I see potential quantum leaps. Instead of the fancy intro I had planned, I’m just going to give a short introduction, point you to an awesome article, tell you how to get this to run. So what is it then? Basically runtimejs is a tiny, unikernel OS that you can bundle together with your application, as a dependency to your application. Which is basically what a OS is, right? Our application needs some libraries like koa, a runtime-platform (like Node) and an OS (like Linux) that the platform can run. What if that last part just was a dependency like normal to our application? Like this: "dependencies": { "a_small_little_os_just_for_me": "latests" } That would be...
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The forced swing in my garden... and coaching
The other week we put up a thick rope to use as a liana, al á Trazan, for our kids. Extremely simple; just a rope, and I made a big tangled knot at the end. You can see my kids use it on the picture to the left. They loved it. Then one day one of our neighbors, that often help us and stops by - nice people, came by. He looked that the rope, saw my kids struggling to climb it and said: you know... it should really have a plank or something at the end so it's easier for them to stand on. I said: Nah… this is good enough for them. They are enjoying themselves plenty. Two days later … This is a post on coaching, asking before helping and not improving things that works fine. Ok - two days later, the man came back with two...
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