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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

I’ve just ended one of the hardest but also most rewarding gigs I’ve been part of. As often I was merely a coach, but this time I marveled at the result. We took a company (hospital) on the verge of dying to being self-sustaining and profitable in 7 months.

The leader of the hospital is called Dr Lillian, a young doctor that been very responsive to my tips and radical changes. I’m very grateful for her cooperative spirit and hard work. The same goes for many many people in the hospital. As I said; they are the people who made this possible. I just gave some hopefully helpful (although hands-on) pointers.

Last Friday (the 13th…) was my last official day at the hospital. Now, it’s ca 150 m from my house so I will keep it under close surveillance during my time here.

But I wanted to leave Dr...

When I first arrived in Indonesia I didn’t think nor knew much about the difference in our cultures. This quite understandable, although in hindsight I should have read up on it a little bit more. Now, as I know more and more, I also get more and more interested and confused about some very basic things in the society.

To not come out as very prejudiced there’s some of disclaimers to be made and I’ll do that throughout the post, but here are few to get started:

1. These are merely my observations after 15 months in the country. I’ve been working with quite a lot of people (met maybe ≈500) and in a few different companies.
2. It’s very easy to jump to a conclusion that some behavior (mine, your or theirs) is stupid or wrong. I don’t want to do that, so in everything I write here I will...

I wrote a little application called page-logger for purely selfish and lazy reasons. It was fast, quite fun, I learned a lot and apparently I could make MONEY by using it. Which I didn’t thought of when I wrote it.

In this post I’ll take you through some code, point to some things that I learned and finally some thoughts about learning from your data. I hope you like it.

Why I built page-logger

I’ve been using Blogger for a very long time. From when I started to blog (2006… oh my) until early last year… OMG - I’ve been doing this for 9 years.

Oh, sorry… got lost in sentimentality there. Ok - last year I switched to Jekyll hosted on GitHub. That’s worked out very well.

However - there’s a nice feature of Blogger that I was missing. There’s a lightweight...

The blog post I wrote yesterday was from my experience at the time. I even ended the post with a call out for better ways.

And sure enough, twitter to the rescue:

@marcusoftnet Marcus.. I just use the Coffee command that you installed earlier? No need to compile at all..

— Erwin van der Koogh (@evanderkoogh) March 4, 2015

As a side, this why I hang out on twitter. There are brilliant people there that will push you towards ever better. Thanks Erwin for this.

So… what does that mean for my post yesterday… Let’s find out:

First of all - nothing I wrote will cause you problems but it’s a bit cumbersome and maybe not the CoffeeScript-way… I think.

What worked

All the things I wrote under the “Initialize project and more” and “Run tests” headings...