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....

This post is brought to you in cooperation with… just kidding.

The other day, I took my kids to McDonald’s here in Bandung. For some reason, it’s still a cause for celebration for them. “Yay! Soft burgers with hard-pressed meat!” And me? Well, I’m happy when they’re happy.

As I stood in line, I noticed a problem: the queue of customers kept piling up, but no one was getting served. Being the analytical type, I tried to dissect the situation and realized that a McDonald’s restaurant is actually a great way to explain flow.

In this post, I’ll attempt to elucidate what I mean.

One peculiar thing I noticed was that there were people at every cash register, feverishly taking orders and fetching drinks. But still, no one was getting served.

Instead, we all stood around the counter waiting, inadvertently blocking access for other customers. The cashiers kept taking orders,...

Currently working with the Salvation Army in Indonesia, I oversee operations across six hospitals in this vast country. Given our limited travel budget, I’ve endeavored to leave behind valuable teachings. To achieve this, I’ve developed a series of presentations on critical topics. The first three cover mission, vision, and strategic plans, each lasting 10-15 minutes.

As I don’t speak Bahasa Indonesia fluently, the primary language here, I initially present in English. However, to make the content accessible, I utilize YouTube’s excellent subtitle tool to translate the presentations into Indonesian. This process has proven effective and surprisingly straightforward.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the steps I took so you can expand the reach of your presentations/videos too.

The Creation

The initial section outlines how I created the video for uploading to YouTube. If you’re solely interested in subtitles, feel free to skip ahead.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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’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...