I’m reading Reinventing Organizations right now and it’s an inspiring read to say the least. Finally someone puts words and structure to what I’ve tried to do, achieve and explain to others. And the stories about the self-organization, trust-embracing, hierarchy-demolishing, performance-through-the-roof, best-place-to-work-organizations are truly truly amazing. I’ve several times wiped tears from my face reading these stories. Not because it’s so great but because it comes down to trusting the people in the organization. As one founder of such organization puts it when he describes his organization FAVI: The organization that believes that mankind is good I don’t care what they are doing - I want to work there. I know I can belong! Luckily I work for a company, Aptitud, that strives towards this. But what is common for these organizations? Mind you I’ve only read 1/3 of the book… this might be answered later and then I’ll will...

My favorite thing with blogging is the feedback I get. In fact; that’s the reason I blog. There. I’ve said it. I love to see many read my stuff and get back to me with questions and suggestion. I’m not even ashamed to say so. Sometimes people even ask me to blog about something. I really love that, even though I’ve have to find time to do so. I got a very nice comment from James Gardner asking me to blog a little more about supertest. He specifically asked me to show how to “split test into separate files for big APIs”, so I’ll do that in this post. But that sprung a few ideas about things that I’ve started to use a lot and I thought I’ll do a little mini-series here. Here are some posts I have in mind: Splitting API over several files - this post Splitting...

Yes, it’s another post on change management. As a consultant … well that’s basically your job. And most of my engagements are of consultancy type. But change management is very trick to do right, frustrating and … simply wonderfully rewarding if you get it to work. Sadly this post is describing my frustrations rather than a “one size fit all situation” solution. Of course, since those solutions don’t really exists in reality. Where I work. I wanted to share a thought that went through my head one day when I was particular frustrated. And then tell you why it was stupid and how I now changed my thinking about this problem / situation. Yes - it will be great fun. Mmmmmm frustration… Just kidding but I will try to write this so I can use it as a nice reminder post for when I fall into this reasoning again. Maybe...

I’m starting to realize that the biggest advantage I, personally, will get from my three years in Indonesia is a lot of experience in change management, under some extreme conditions. As I’ve blogged about, twice, I am now in a culture where questioning is not done. It’s not encourage, not praised, not sought for etc. You simply don’t do it. Again please don’t read that as I think that they are stupid or ignorant - it’s just their culture. There’s a lot of strange things going on in our culture too. Just step outside your own box and you’ll see it. In fact; that’s what this post is about; stepping out of my box. A simple question that I’ve found very valuable for me to understand “them”. Getting to the point First let’s get back to my intro a bit. I think that everything I’ve seen here in Indonesia that...

One of the things that I’ve been told that upset me the most during the last couple of years was this sentence: Please don't question the process Instead of going angry and rant about the stupidity of that I’d thought about the opposite. Or what I’d want to do. If I ever get to hire people to a company I will tell them, on their first day: Please question the process. This is only as good as we've got so far. In fact - one of the big reasons you are here is to make us better. You cannot do that without questioning and challenging the current state. If you ever feel that something could be done better or in another way - please say so. Please question the process means that we are humble about that we are not the best we will ever be. It also sends a...

I’ve been writing quite a lot of Koa applications, but most of them have been small. Now I’m doing a little bit bigger website. It consists of three parts: A public site that is just static html, served with static-now. The site will do API calls back to the server for the content. An administration site for administration of the text content of the site. This will be based on my example koa example blog An API serving the content from use form the static site. Absolutely nothing humongous but still big enough that you need to think about application structure a little bit. That’s when I came to think about koa-mount. In this post I wanted to show you what I’ve learned about this powerful little middeleware, at the heart of Koa thinking. The tag-line on the koa-mount page says it all really: Mount other Koa applications or middleware...

Last autumn I met one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto in real life. At the Agile Singapore conference. I didn’t think much about that until he (James Grenning) mentioned it in the beginning of one of his talk. He told some anectodes about that meet-up. In honestly so would I if I was at that weekend in Snowbird. There I was. Also a speaker at this conference half-around the world. Working with management for the Salvation Army in Indonesia, being invited to the conference since I’ve written a book on Kanban. The last 10 years of my career has been involving agile in one way or the other on a daily basis. And evolving me for the better, mostly daily. You know where this is going: I just had to thank him. In fact I vowed there and then that I would make it a goal to meet...

I wrote a post about Indonesian culture. In it I wrote about my experiences in Indonesia and how I’ve interpreted what I’ve experienced as many people here lives in a world without WHY. Read more in that post. In this post I wanted to continue my thoughts about this and specifically around what actually motivates Indonesian people. Or how I could motivate someone that lives in a world without WHY. How do you get someone to start thinking in long-term goals in a culture that do not? This is has been my task for the last 1,5 year and I’m still struggling. Sometimes I have, accidentally mostly, succeed too and in this post I wanted to describe HOW I did and why I think that it worked. As before remember: these are my experiences by being here for close to 1,5 years, meeting the people I happened to meet during...

I’m poking around quite a lot with io.js recently for reasons that soon will be revealed. When doing so I used my favorite Node version manager - Node Version Manager to manage different versions of Node and io.js. Switching back and forth is simple and sometimes I end up running some code on a version of Node/io.js that the code does not support. For example running EcmaScript 6 let-statements in Node. I was hoping that I’d get a warning or preferable even an error when doing that. But no. Or… In this post I’ll show you how to use the package.json file to make sure that you get warnings and errors when using the wrong version of the framework engines In the package.json there’s an optional node that you can set called engines. From the documentation we can read about what this is for: You can specify the version of...

Like most cities in Asia the traffic in Jakarta is horrible. Especially the motorbikes that are plentiful is an interesting phenomena to observe. Once you mange (took me a year to do) to look past the total disrespect for human life on display, the drivers own lives as well as other people, I saw patterns that have bigger influence on at least me. In this short post I wanted to share those with you and maybe you can also get some thoughts that can help you. My good friend Håkan Forss wrote an excellent presentation called What can traffic in stockholm teach you about queuing theory. That inspired me to write this post, at least a little. They never stop The first thing that we need to observe is that the motor bikes never stop. This knowledge will save your life. Don’t ever expect an Asian motorbike driver to stop....