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 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...

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...

Koa Js removes need for callbacks but still have uses non-blocking code. How is that possible?

If you read the code of the last blog post you might have reported a bug or two since I was using a strange asterisk at in the getGreeting-function. Is that really valid Javascript?

And when you looked very closely you might be wondering about the “yield” right there in the middle… What kind of witchcraft is this thing anyway?

These questions and more flew threw my head when I first learned about Koa and the concepts its’s built upon. In this post I will try to explain that a bit and point you to other places where they explain this much better, if you don’t like my tries. This is just how I, a newbie to these concepts, have tried to wrap my head around it. Hey, let’s be completely transparent...

Ok, let’s talk about KoaJs. Why? Well, it’s new and shiny. But that’s not it. And it’s tiny and stays out of your way. But that’s not it. It’s created by the awesome crew behind ExpressJs (and others). But that’s not it. It teaches me about new things. And really strange things. Like generators for example. But that’s not it.

No. The Reason I really wanted to get your really important fact that we would like to hold on to in the rest of the text attention is something different altogether. ...

One thing that is really interesting and very enjoyable is to have long time contacts over social media (in my case Twitter mostly). Many of these people I have never met in reality and I still consider them friends. We know quite a lot about each other and have learned a lot from each other.

Kristof Claes was the guy that introduced me to NancyFx and SimpleData in 2011. From an excellent blog series about a photo blog (couldn’t find a link…) he thought me a lot. He has now got an opportunity to use Kanban at work and asked me a question about that.

I asked him if I could blog the question and my answer and he agreed. Here you go:

First Kristof’s question:

I have a very very limited knowledge of kanban and I *think* kanban can help us with a situation...

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The last week the blog post turned long. Sorry. This meant to just be short updates. Here’s another one.

The first thing I did this week was to create a diagram over our throughput; the number of items we’re getting done per week. And it looked pretty bleak. And was about to get worse… Here’s how it looked at the beginning of the week.

| | |:——————————————————————————————————-:| | | | Throughput trend at the start of the week |

That’s not looking good, right. I think I can explain it… and I think that I shouldn’t care too much about data with these few data points.

A lot of the things that we are doing require third part input. Someone else needs to approve, read or work with the item before we can finish it. I’ve been working...

DISCLAIMER for frequent readers of this blog: I now work for the Salvation Army in Indonesia and they asked me to write an article from time to time in the Indonesian War Cry (the Salvation Army magazine). I of course used my normal style of writing and wrote about the thing I’ve written about here. Oh, not Javascript or Nancy maybe but Limit WIP, Lean and Kanban. But with a Christian twist and message.

So if you don’t want to read this, please stop now. I’ll soon come back to my normal things. But if you want to please continue. Maybe there’s something that you can use in here. Or not. As normal on this blog, I use it to store my ideas and thoughts. END DISCLAIMER

Here is the second of two short articles that I’ve written for the Indonesian War Cry. You can read the...

DISCLAIMER for frequent readers of this blog: I now work for the Salvation Army in Indonesia and they asked me to write an article from time to time in the Indonesian War Cry (the Salvation Army magazine). I of course used my normal style of writing and wrote about the thing I’ve written about here. Oh, not Javascript or Nancy maybe but Limit WIP, Lean and Kanban. But with a Christian twist and message.

So if you don’t want to read this, please stop now. I’ll soon come back to my normal things. But if you want to please continue. Maybe there’s something that you can use in here. Or not. As normal on this blog, I use it to store my ideas and thoughts. END DISCLAIMER

Here is the first of two short articles that I’ve written for the Indonesian...