We’re ready to sit down to eat. The kids comes running and I do the regular check-up: Nope - all hands, some of the faces covered in dirt. Me:

Wash your hands!

The run off, remarkably without complaining. 15 seconds all three of them are back. Hands, faces and much of the shirts are dripping with water. Hands and faces are still dirty.

This is my fault. I was really just focusing on the activity rather than the outcome. I see this sickness in myself, many organizations and even our community at large.

In this post I wanted to examine this thought a little closer. I have no idea where I might end up, but I’ll type on for awhile and then structure it into something worth reading… or you’ll never read this

In the last post I promised to write something about “git, pushing and deploying”. This is purely from a personal need since I have used make for those things. I wanted to see if I can move all of that to use npm and package.json instead.

I’ll also add a compile and minification step, just since that it’s a common need.

[UPDATED] This, and other posts on npm scripting, has drawn a lot of attention. I wanted you to know that I have created a PluralSight course on this topic, published in late October 2015. You can find it here.

Also, don’t miss the other posts on this blog on npm scripting:

• npm scripting: git, version and deploy
• npm scripting: configs and arguments… and some more tricks
• Pre and Post hooks for npm scripting

If you liked this post...

I’ve written two posts on npm scripting with package.json and during the course of these post I’ve picked up some tricks that I didn’t really use in the posts.

This post will hence be a bit less structured by contain some small tidbits of information for you to, hopefully, enjoy and use.

I’ll be working of the code here and add all the features I describe (as far as possible) to that repository.

[UPDATED] This, and other posts on npm scripting, has drawn a lot of attention. I wanted you to know that I have created a PluralSight course on this topic, published in late October 2015. You can find it here.

Also, don’t miss the other posts on this blog on npm scripting:

• npm scripting: git, version and deploy
• npm scripting: configs and arguments… and some more tricks
• Pre and...

npm is at the core of developing in Node. Most of us use it to get packages, set up the package.json etc.

But when you put it together with the vast possibilities in package.json you get another gear. Then npm can actually become a build tool - driving every aspect of your development. Without getting unwieldy and out of control.

In this post I wanted to examine one of the lesser known features of scripting with npm and package.json; pre- and post hooks. In doing so I will most likely brush on a lot of other subjects too. We’ll see how it goes.

[UPDATED] This, and other posts on npm scripting, has drawn a lot of attention. I wanted you to know that I have created a PluralSight course on this topic, published in late October 2015. You can find...

Here in Indonesia Internet is often very slow. No, you don’t understand. VERY slow. Downloading big files, like movies on iTunes, can be a project from 4 hours to days.

The other night we wanted to watch a movie (Bamse i Tjuvstaden, it’s actually pretty good) that our kids love. We have already bought it but iTunes still downloads part of it.

The normal thing happened; the progress indicator lied. My kids were angry and I had to explain to them:

That is an estimate, a guess. They simply don’t know when it’s done.

As I said that I was reminded about many times I’ve been required to give estimates in other settings. In this post I wanted to examine the similarities I felt was present.

I don’t like meetings. Because most meetings I’ve attended has not been great. And I’m guilty of organizing some of those meetings too.

In this presentation I talk about how to make effective meetings. There will be a lot of small advices that I’ve found useful during my consultancy. I will also briefly describe the Lean Coffee meeting format.

Here’s all the post in the series (the links will work as I post them):

• ca 10 minutes on Mission statements
• ca 10 minutes on Vision statements
• ca 15 minutes on Strategic plans
• ca 15 minutes on Impact mapping
• ca 15 minutes on kanban
• ca 10 minutes on root cause analysis
• ca 10 minutes on effective meetings (this post)

Please read the reason and ideas behind the entire series in the first post.

I’m a big fan of Keynote and use that to create all of my presentations. Although I try to keep the number of animations down to a minimum, since I think they take a lot of focus from the content, I find that a few, well placed, animations can be very effective.

In one of my recent presentations, I found the “need” to do a movie credits animation. You know like the thing that rolls in the end credits after a movie or TV-show. First, I thought that I’d seen that exact animation, but it turned out to be in iMovie.

A search on the intertubes didn’t give me much useful either. But it turned out to be pretty simple to do. In this post, I’ll show you how.

TL;DR

Basically, we will just use the “Move” Action for our block of text, move it over the...

Throughout all the things I’ve talked about in this series; mission, vision, strategic plans and kanban there’s a underlying concept. We want to improve. We want to be better in achieving our vision.

If you want to improve you will have to be great in fixing problems. Not only fixing the problems but the actual underlying reason for the problem to occurred in the first place.

Root cause analysis is a powerful tool for doing that. This is what I talk about in this presentation.

Here’s all the post in the series (the links will work as I post them):

• ca 10 minutes on Mission statements
• ca 10 minutes on Vision statements
• ca 15 minutes on Strategic plans
• ca 15 minutes on Impact mapping
• ca 15 minutes on kanban
• ca 10 minutes on root cause analysis (this post)
• ca 10 minutes on...

Sometimes people email questions to me, directly. I love that (although I sometime need to postpone the answering for awhile) because it gives me such nice insight into how other teams work and function. Basically: I learn more and as you can see from the tag line of this blog… I’m into learning stuff.

The other day I got a question that I’ve heard before in variants. It’s also very reasonable and a bit complicated to answer: “How big is a work item really?”

I also got permission to publish the whole question and my answer here.

I hear more and more about Elixir from some people that I really trust and respect. That means checking-out-new-technology-time for Marcus.

Luckily installing Elixir on Os X (Yosemite 10.10, that I’m running) is super simple with Homebrew:

brew update
brew install elixir

Or is it …

Not for me as it turns out. I hope you had a better fate. This is my story.