I made another little screencast about Koa Js. This time I talk about and shows the concept that Koa is built upon; generators. We’re also visting the “yield” keyword in order to understand what’s going on. **Y**o, **I** **E**xpect **L**ittle **D**elay is my new way of explaining what happens when you say **yield** in your code. I hope you enjoy this.

When I first started to use Koa Js I was, like many I presumed, slowed down by the fact that Koa is using features in Javascript not yet released in the current Node. Like generators for example. When your quite new to a subject the errors that you is greeted with can be quite confusing. And the solutions are often not obvious. So I did a short screencast showing off the failures that I ran into when I tried to get started with Koa. It’s a tutorial through failures, quite simple. I hope you enjoy it. There are also some tips that have helped me in there. If you prefer reading about how to install this it's basically the same content as this blog post. I used my iPhone mic this time and that took some of the clickety-click sounds away, even if it also made my voice a bit murky...

I got a comment from a reader. That’s both encouraging and educating. Mr Robert Larsson asked me if I could show him and others how to write an API using Koa Js. Yes, sir. I can do that. I thought that I would try something different (for me) and did a screencast out of this. I had great fun doing this and it was a bit nervous to record this (would the internet act up, would any dogs or cats outside my house be audible), but the end result was pretty good I think (Elin opened our VERY squeaky door twice but other than that it came across fine. Please let me know what you think about the content: As always I learned a lot in the process, here's a few of the things that I picked up; - Rehearse it! Did the complete app 4 times before recording. And...

Quite often when you create a visualized version of your workflow you end up with a waiting column. This is where items goes while your are waiting for someone else, or something else to happen before you can continue to work on it. It might look something like this on your board: For example, you are writing a report and need it feedback on the report before you can continue. Sadly that person (Daphne, let’s call her that) that can give you feedback is sick, so you’ll have to wait until Daphne is back again. You are blocked for this item and cannot complete it. (Coders, exchange the word “report” for “module” and you’ll be able to tag along ). You move the sticky to the waiting column and pull the next one… This is a bad idea. Waiting-columns is a place where work items goes to die. Slowly. I...

REPOST FROM CODEBETTER I noticed that CodeBetter is slowing down. Maybe dying. I’m preserving my post from there here. Orginal post For the better part of my life I have been a C# programmer. But lately I have ventured into JavaScript land. And I like it. I have come over the “what kind of junk is this”-phase and come to see the power and beauty that is “hidden under a huge steaming pile of good intentions and blunders is an elegant, expressive programming language”. You should read that book, by the way, that’s the one that made me like JavaScript. Being a backend-guy (I will NEVER understand CSS… There – I’ve said it!) I soon came to look into Nodetoo. And pretty soon after that I met Express. Express was very nice since it reminded me of Nancy. Felt right at home, back on the super-duper-happy-path! So after going through...

Ok, this was about to drive me crazy, and it seems like a lot of people have run into the same problem but sometimes my Mongo installation dies on me with an error like this: 10309 Unable to create/open lock file: /data/db/mongod.lock errno:13 Permission denied Is a mongod instance already running?, terminating Yeah, I didn’t get that either. The actual error is not hard to understand, there’s some kind of permission needed on the /data/db-directory. But why? And how to fix it? Why… well in my case it was when I had to shut down a running VirtualBox image by just closing the image window, the equivalent of pulling the cord of a running computer. So probably Mongo didn’t have time to clean up after itself… Fix it… yeah, there’s a big number of posts on StackOverflow, take your pick. This tip worked for me: Check the rights to the /data/db...

As you might know I have fallen in love with Koa Js. I have, from experience, also come to realize that if you want to really understand a framework or tool you need to build something real with it. In that spirit I created a little voting site that we will in my current job. The whole application is simple; basically you can create a simple question (poll maybe is a better word) that you want someone to answer. “How did you enjoy your stay?” for example. There are then only 4 valid answers (, , and ). The whole idea is that answering this is just pushing a button on your way out. Like a physical Facebook like-button. From this we can gather some simple, but interesting data about what people thinks about the question asked. However, soon I came to realize that I wanted to be able to...

One of the things that really surprised me and my wife when we were about to move to Indonesia was the schedule for our office. Every Friday there’s a scheduled 2,5 hour exercise pass from 8. Special exercise clothing is provided by the office. Except once a month when we’re spending that time cleaning or repairing the office. These activities are required and nothing else happens in the office at the time (no meeting for example). And everyone office (that I have seen and passed by on the streets) are doing this. The bank down the road is exercising or playing soccer in their parking lot. The police office is doing some aerobics in their court yard and even the churches and the people working in them are outside, exercising. It felt a bit strange, but I can tell you that I have come to appreciate these activities a lot,...

I’ve been doing something for real! A very simple little polling site, that actually turned out pretty ok (saved the UI but I have a friend brushing that up for me) and might be useful. It’s built with KoaJs, of course, and using MongoDb as database. Basically you can create a “question”, tag it with some meta data and then send a link to a page where you can start receiving answers. And there’s some very basic “export to excel”-reporting. Simple stuff. I spent maybe 3-5 hours altogether on it, in the hospital bed with my son in the bed next to me. He was pretty ok, so the concentration was not on top on either tasks for me. Bad! This Sunday I wanted to deploy the first version of it. To Heroku. It went pretty smooth but I wanted to share my story and some problems I ran into....

Apparently my last post was not completely gibberish and contained some thoughts that you could make use of. Thanks for the feedback. Let me continue my train of thoughts here. It’s not a very long train, but it’s still a train. Here’s where we ended: there’s a customer, we are here to delight them (thank you Stephen Deming for that phrase). Everything we do right now is just best so far in our strive to more effectively give value to the customer. We can and should, change our current state, process, organisation, tools or what have you, to try to improve. If we do the change in bigger steps there will be bigger impacts in our productivity, in smaller steps smaller impact. See? Nothing really new or amazing here. In this post I wanted to talk a little bit about where this can take us. Because I see this as a guiding...