The traffic in Jakarta, like many Asian cities, is notoriously chaotic. Amidst the sea of motorbikes and the apparent disregard for safety, I found profound lessons on the concept of slack.

It took me nearly a year to look beyond the apparent disregard for safety and see the underlying patterns that profoundly impacted me.

In this brief post, I aim to share those insights and perhaps spark some reflections that may resonate with you.

My dear friend Håkan Forss delivered an excellent presentation titled What Traffic in Stockholm Can Teach You About Queuing Theory, which inspired me to pen down these thoughts.

They Never Stop

One striking observation is that motorbikes never come to a halt. Understanding this fact could save your life. Asian motorbike drivers seldom stop, even in the face of imminent danger. This relentless...

I’ve just concluded one of the most challenging yet rewarding projects of my career. In my role as a coach, I witnessed remarkable transformation at a hospital on the brink of collapse, now thriving and profitable within seven months.

At the helm of this turnaround is Dr. Lillian, a responsive and dedicated leader who embraced radical change. I extend my gratitude to her and the entire hospital staff, whose collective efforts made this success possible.

As I bid farewell to the hospital last Friday, I remain vigilant, residing only 150 meters away. But before I depart, I wish to impart some advice to Dr. Lillian for the journey ahead. While rooted in healthcare, these insights hold relevance beyond the hospital walls.

Start with Why

Communicate the purpose behind every action, aligning it with your vision. Continually ask: “How does this action contribute to our vision?” This not only reinforces...

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 developed a small application called page-logger for purely selfish and lazy reasons. However, it turned out to be not only a learning experience but also a source of income. In this post, I’ll walk you through the motivations behind its creation, the development process, and how it unexpectedly generated revenue.

Why I Built Page-Logger

After years of using Blogger, I switched to Jekyll hosted on GitHub. While Jekyll served me well, I missed a lightweight Google Analytics feature embedded in Blogger. This feature allowed me to track the reception of individual posts, which I found invaluable. Determined to replicate this functionality, I decided to build my own solution.

How I Built Page-Logger and What I Learned

I opted for Node.js, leveraging the Koa framework. The application essentially comprised two components:

1. An HTTP-accessible API for posting page views.
2. A simple site for viewing the collected data.
...

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:

For some reason I’m from time to time drawn to different languages that compiles to JavaScript. And then I’m drawn away again. Especially nowadays with ES6 coming up many ideas and needs for CoffeeScript or TypeScript goes away.

So the other day I found myself thinking again:

Hey - CoffeeScript. That's not such a bad idea. Maybe I should try to write some.

CoffeeScript and I have a dormant but warm relationship because this little language was the one that helped me understand not only JavaScript but also got grips of functional programming.

I thought I’d write a simple little kata in Node to fresh up my CoffeeScript-fu. How hard could it be?

Well… there’s quite a lot of setup and idiosyncrasies that you need to be aware of. This post tries to summary what I learned as I got my environment up and running....

In Indonesia there’s an interesting development going on right now in health care. A nationwide health insurance is being rolled out. For everyone. Until now health care has been paid for privately or via private health insurances, but with the advent of BPJS (that it’s called) everyone can now afford to go to the hospital… or at least there’s fixed tariffs.

Before we continue, imagine the effort to roll this out in the world 5th biggest population… 250-270 million people. Most of which is very poor. I think this is such a great thing and I applaud the Indonesian government for doing it.

However… I work for hospitals in Indonesia. On the “other” side of things. For us this is also an opportunity since this will bring more patients to our hospitals and we get to serve those in need. But there’s another side of the story that have very...

After coding and testing a Node application, deploying it to real users becomes a priority. I’ve previously discussed how to do this quickly and easily with Heroku. However, one aspect that often causes headaches is configuration, especially for environment-specific variables like database connection strings or sensitive information.

The Configuration Object

I use a simple yet effective object to handle configurations, which I include in almost every project I deploy. Let’s dissect it:

// Configuration object var config = { local: { mode: 'local', port: 3000, mongoUrl: 'localhost:27017/myApp_Dev', user: { name: 'marcus', pass: 'koavote' } }, staging: { mode: '

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