There’s no secret that I like the writings (and presentations) of Captain David Marquet. If you haven’t seen this video do that instead of reading this. It changes a whole lot about how I look at leadership.

One of the best tips in the book is the small imperative sentence:

Move the authority to the information!

However, often when I explain this to people and clients I often end up adding the opposite to this sentence. From that, I got some interesting conversations going. Let’s see if I can explain what I mean here.

With the added continuation (that, to my recollection, is not in the book) would make the quote like this:

Move the authority to the information instead of the opposite; move the information to the authority.

What caught my attention was how much time, money,...

When I was a kid (and teenager… oh, well still today too) I messed up a lot. I forgot things or did them in a stupid order and all of a sudden I was in an emergency. For example, I forgot that I should be in a rehearsal 1 hour away and here I was in my home, 2 hours from the rehearsal room.

Quite often in those situation someone, my parents predominantly, of course enlighten me about how stupid this was and gave helpful advice on what I should have done instead in order to not ended up here.

This made me very mad a little upset, since those advice didn’t improve my situation one bit. I often “told” them (talk about re-writing history) about the futility of these tips at this point.

Years after, in my twenties I found support from one of the...

Walking my oldest son, Albert, to and from school is one of the highlights of the day here in Indonesia. At least when he’s in a good mood. Today was not one of those days. He was angry because something didn’t turn out as he planned. He very often does that: makes up his mind about what we should do (often involving TV or games) and then gets very upset when it doesn’t happen the way he wanted.

I tried to talk with him about that and in doing so I had a little epiphany about me, the IT industry, estimates, and uncertainty. Oh, I should probably add that I re-watched this great presentation by Dan North two days before. It probably affected me, to maybe be wiser than I otherwise would.

Here’s what I said to Albert:

Albert, you know what...

I recently ran into a concrete example on waiting that showed me, again, why it’s bad. And how easy the alternative is.

At one of our facilities the cleaning has long been neglected. It was super-dirty in places and you could see that no one had clean here for months, maybe even years. A rescue operation was put into place and in just 5 days the facility was cleaned. About 15 people was engaged in the effort.

That’s really awesome because not only is the cleaning done, but the next time we clean it will not take as much time.

In this post I wanted to share some thoughts on how this is general and what we can do to avoid this situation.

To explain what just happened to the people in the room I drew this diagram on the whiteboard:

We talked for awhile...

Tomorrow I will end a 30 day social media fast.

I got a bit overwhelmed and depressed by some comments and discussions that I was drawn into and aired it with my buddies at Aptitud. 2 minutes later 3 of us decided to go on a fast.

I uninstalled all my social media apps and removed the shortcuts to the sites. The first thing was to make it harder to use it. I was in real deep, and even felt a bit stressed that if I didn’t read my stream the first thing in the morning.  The first couple of days it was pretty close that I got back in a couple of times. I realized that if I was waiting for a slow page (ALL pages when in Indonesia) I often switched over to Twitter to catch up…. And got stuck.

Full disclosure: I have been tweeting...

I made another little screencast about Koa Js. This time I talk about and show the concept that Koa is built upon: generators. We’re also visiting the “yield” keyword in order to understand what’s going on.

• Yo
• I
• Expect
• Little
• Delay

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 you’re quite new to a subject, the errors that you are 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 click-y-click sounds away, even if it also made my...

I got a comment from a reader. That’s both encouraging and educating. Mr Robert Larson 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 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 are a few of the things that I picked up:

• Rehearse it! Did the complete app 4 times before...

Quite often when you create a visualized version of your workflow you end up with a waiting column. This is where items go while you 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 feedback on the report before you can continue. Sadly, that person (Daphne, let’s call her that) who can give you feedback is sick, so you’ll have to wait until Daphne is back again. You are blocked on this item and cannot complete it. (Coders, exchange the word “report” for “module” and you’ll be able to tag along :smile:). You move the sticky to the waiting column and pull the next one…

This is a bad idea. Waiting-columns are a place where work items go to...

REPOST FROM CODEBETTER

I noticed that CodeBetter is slowing down. Maybe dying. I’m preserving my post from there here.

Original 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...