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...

I have recently come to realize that some of the most basic of my thinking is not as evident and obvious to people around me as they are for me. This was a real wakeup call for me and made me think long and hard on what is important to me and how I do work. And consequently try to lead others with this as guiding star. My ideas is not new nor radical. The  ideas I did meet is not bad, they just strive to achieve other goals (I think) or maybe the same goals but in a totally different manner. I have really tried my best not to portrait my  ideas as better, but rather just another way. My agile and lean friends will quickly see that this is by not measure unique or new thinking. But I’ve come to realize that for people that haven’t seen this...

It was quite sometime since I wrote a blog post with an error message in the title. However I have now got this error so many times, and keep scratching my head every time. Also I think I can explain why it happens. Here’s an example on how to make this error occur, from the co-monk library README (not anymore maybe): Running that code (either with “node –harmony koaErrorFail.js” or test it with “mocha –harmony-generators koaErrorFail.js”) fail with the error from the title of the blog post: yield users.remove({}); </div> ^^^^^ </div> SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier </div> At this point you start to think that you forgot to run the example with the “–harmony” flag</a>. But of course you do that, right? Ah, maybe you are running the wrong version of Node. Again, no. You’re doing it right. Right? However this code is not running within a generator function. And the...

I have now been in Indonesia for about 4 months. There’s so many new impressions and things that I’ve seen, learned and experienced that I’m starting to forget them. Some is bad, some is good, some are ugly so I thought that I would write them down. The first thing is some sort of alignment that is repeated almost everyday. In almost all workplaces that I’ve seen or heard about. Like a routine checkup on what is important here. I’ve actually experienced that before, in a very different setting. In this post I’m planning to tell you a couple of short stories and episodes, to then try to see what this could look like in my “normal”, more western culture. I hope it will be interesting and useful. Gothenburg Brass Band I had the great privilege to play in the top brass band in Sweden for about 2 years. The...

The first two post of this mini-series, we picked up the basic on getting Koa Js to start as well as understand what it’s build from and the concepts behind it. It’s time to do something for real. Well over time, one might add. This post is all about using Koa to build different websites and web api’s. By using Koas own examples I will show you how you can use Koa for a lot of common tasks and scenarios. Let’s dive right in. Middleware The first thing to understand is that Koa is very modular. “Ok, got it”, you think. “No”, I answer, “very modular! The bits are tiny.” So a Koa application is to a large extent made up by middleware you include, that is not included per default. The list of middleware is quite staggering and will quite some time to learn and take in. Luckily you don’t have to learn all...

This week started a bit late due to a public holiday, the Hindu new years celebrations, (the joys of working in a country that respect 4 different religions and celebrate all the main events publicly!) and then we had been spread out during the weekend. It took some time to gather the forces. Last week we were a bit confused about the lead times and throughput. Sure enough this week we did some more items, due to the ketchup-effect of doing to big items. We are continuing to track both the lead time per size (S, M and L) and the number of items (or each size) that we are completing per week. It’s still a little too little data to draw any conclusions but we are confident that with this data tracked we will soon start to understand our work. Retrospectives Today I told the team that the little...