One of the things that really surprised my wife and me when we were about to move to Indonesia was the schedule for our office. Every Friday, there’s a scheduled 2.5-hour exercise session from 8 AM. Special exercise clothing is provided by the office. Except once a month when we spend that time cleaning or repairing the office. These activities are required, and nothing else happens in the office during this time (no meetings, for example).

Every office (that I have seen and passed by on the streets) participates in this. The bank down the road is exercising or playing soccer in their parking lot. The police office is doing aerobics in their courtyard, and even the churches and their staff are outside, exercising.

It felt a bit strange initially, but I have come to appreciate these activities a lot, and maybe not for the reasons you might first think.

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 a 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...

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, organization, tools, or what have you, to try to improve. If we do the change in bigger steps there will be bigger impacts on 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...

I recently had a wake-up call when I realized that some of my fundamental thoughts aren’t as clear to others as they are to me. This realization prompted deep reflection on what matters to me and how I approach my work, striving to guide others with these principles.

My ideas aren’t groundbreaking; they simply prioritize producing value for someone, often referred to as “the customer.” This customer could be anyone benefiting from our work, including ourselves. Value isn’t solely monetary; it encompasses any positive impact, even personal well-being.

Why Are We Here?

For me, the question of purpose underpins everything we do. Though we may have various reasons for being in a workplace, the primary goal is to produce value. This aligns with the Salvation Army’s ethos: “Others!” We’re here to serve someone, whether external customers or colleagues.

Understanding value is crucial. It’s not just about profit but encompasses...

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({}); ^^^^^ SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier 

At this point you start to think that you forgot to run the example with the --harmony flag. But of course you do that, right? Ah, maybe you are running the wrong version of Node. Again, no....

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 Koa’s own examples I will show you how you can use Koa for a lot of common tasks and scenarios. Let’s dive right in.

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...

Koa Js removes the need for callbacks but still 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 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 through my head when I first learned about Koa and the concepts it’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 and say...

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 attention is something different altogether. This has to stop. I’m by no means a seasoned Javascript developer but I’m already starting to dislike the code callbacks forces me to write. Yeah, I know, there are ways around it with promises and everything, but still have a hard time grasping that. Sorry. I hope there’s another way ^^

I mean; “getUserFromDatabase()… what would you expect that to return? An user? Or a promise maybe? I...