Where I currently work there’s been a problem with budgets for traveling. And another with authority. Which basically mean that the people that I’m here to try to help will not get my help; there’s no money to travel there and I have no authority, which is basically a deal-breaker in Indonesia. What to do? Well, since I grow bored very fast without anything to do I tried to find a way. I started a series of presentations about the topic I wanted to talk with “my clients” about, recorded them and uploaded to YouTube. I even made extra effort to do great subtitles, in two languages, just to increase the chance that they will understand me. Before anyone tells me; yes - I know that this is maybe the worst possible way of making sure that you get an important message across to someone that needs it. But it’s...

This post brought to you in cooperation with … no. Just kidding. The other day I went with my kids to McDonalds here in Bandung. For some reason this is still the incarnation of celebration for them. “Yah! Soft burgers with hard pressed meat!” And me; I’m happy when they are happy. As I stood in line I noticed a problem. The queue kept of customers kept piling up, but no one got served. Being the one I am I tried to analyze the situation and in doing so I realized that a McDonalds restaurant is a very good way to explain flow. In this post I’ll try to tell you what I meant. One thing that was a little bit strange, in our case, was that there was people at every cash register. They were taking orders like crazy. And getting drinks too. But no one got served. What...

I work for the Salvation Army in Indonesia right now with 6 hospitals spread throughout this vast country. Due to an extremely tight budget for travelling in our office I have tried to leave some kind of teaching behind. For that reason I have created a little series of presentations on important topics. The first three are about mission, vision and strategic plans and are about 10-15 minutes each. Being in Indonesia I had to translate the entire presentation into Bahasa Indonesia which is spoken here. Sadly I don’t speak that good enough. I did the presentations in English and then used the excellent tooling of YouTube to add a subtitles and then translate them into Indonesian. It worked really well and was surprisingly easy. In this post I’ll show you what I did so that you can increase the reach of your presentations / videos too. The creation The...

I have a story to tell you. It’s mostly about me and my ignorance, I’m sad to say. But thinking about this have thought me a lot and I hope that you will learn a little as well. During the YOW conference at Perth I probably told this story 5-8 times (to different people mind you). Every time there was fruitful discussions. This is NOT a post about THEM and (or versus) ME. It’s a post about me, and my reasoning. The story is just context as you soon will realize. Don’t worry there’s plenty of room for personal reflection throughout the post - should you grow tired of me. The story When we first got to work with the hospitals here in Indonesia we found something that made us very surprised and scared. At one of our hospitals the nurses was not washing their hands between patients visits. This...

My friends on twitter keeps telling my that CasperJs is great (“da bomb”) for end-to-end-testing. Since I’ve been doing a lot of that, in .NET I took a look and it looks great. I thought to myself: “Let’s install it and play around. How hard can it be?” Well as it turns out… for me at least, the installing part was a pain. I’m on OS X Yosemite and I had nothing but problems. Yesterday I got it to work. This is my story. I started out from the CasperJs installation instructions, but soon ran into problems. Not with Casper but rather with: The Phantom menace CasperJs is, to my knowledge, just a wrapper around PhantomJS, a WebKit headless browser. So first we need to install that. When you go to their website there’s actually no installation instructions (?) but rather instructions to download. This gives us a big old...

Right now my head is spinning from the awesomeness that is Meteor. I am somewhere in between “This is too much magic to really believe…” and “Wow - why have I ever built anything with anything else before!”. Just a short little post about an error that have caused me problems. Here’s the error, that most likely pops up in your browser console: Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token Y TL;DR - Reload your browser This is a Javascript parsing error, when trying to parse a very helpful error message from Meteor. Just reload the page and you’ll see the message. Longer … but still short and sweet The background Meteor is super helpful in many ways. Creating an app is just three small steps: meteor create myPrecious cd myPrecious meteor That last one is very special. That starts the application and live reloads the page for every change you make. So...

For the last couple of months I have used io.js to run all my Node applications. I’m not going back. The transition has been very smooth, with a few minor things that you need to think about. And as always; I improved my existing skills by just moving outside the comfort zone a little bit. I thought that my journey could be an interesting PluralSight course. So did they. I’m happy to release this as my second course on PluralSight, Koa Js being the first. Here’s the link to the course A very interesting challenge presented itself at the end of the production as well. Tell you soon. The course is in three parts (and a summary): What is io.js - in this module I introduce what io.js is (and what’s it’s really called) and how to install it using nvm. Now that’s even simpler with nvm-latest Running Node apps...

This is a very hands-on post, since I thought the last couple of ones (including the one I just threw away) was a bit high flying. Here we go - I have grown into a bit of a statistics maniac, especially when it comes to my blog. I’m not getting better and I like it. :) I now found myself in a situation where I simply wanted to count the number of files in my posts directory. In the terminal of my Mac. Count’em First I found a nice little combination of commands that did exactly that: ls -1 | wc -l Yeah, exactly. That doesn’t look to hard. And yes - I would never remember that either. My memory is excellent but very short. Remember it Luckily there’s a very simple little tool that can make commands like that easier to remember. You can create an alias with a...

They’ve done it again. Gojko Adzic, David Evans and, in this book, Tom Roden has written another 50 quick ideas book. And this one is equally good as the previous book on user stories. If not even better. From the looks of it there’s a whole concept around these quick ideas and, fingers crossed, we can expect much more goodness like this. This is my review after reading the book in the worst possible manner. I’ll tell you why. But even doing so I got so much out of this book and my tool belt expanded significantly. I really like the approach of these short, focus, one-topic books, starting with Gojoks book on impact mapping. They don’t promise to be deep dives and total coverage but rather to give you ideas (well… that’s in the title even), be challenged and investigate further. In this book, on testing, they have divided...

I’m at the airport waiting to go back to Indonesia after great Yow West 2015 conference. As always the mind is filled with impressions and memories. And as always when you think back is mostly the great people you met that sticks in your head. I just realize that there’s like an “agile culture” that I’ve now seen all over the world. I met a lot of people that I’ve never seen or interacted with but still, since we have read, thought about and worked around the same things the connection was immediate and I felt right at home directly. The agile community in Australia is really vibrant and filled with awesome people championing conferences like YOW and Agile Australia. Standing a big risk of forgetting someone I had such a great time meeting Dave Thomas, Craig Smith and Nigel Dalton that was running the conference in Perth. One thing...