I’m a programmer. But I, for some strange reason, often find myself doing management consulting on different levels. Since my basic schooling is in programming I sometimes often find myself using principles that work well for programming in management.

One such principle was something I picked up about 10 years ago and I’m still reaching for that every day. Here’s my current desktop background, showing that principle to me every day:

This is a so-called truism that nobody says again, but I fail to reach just about all the time. I find it very useful as a guiding north star both in organizations and programming. But what does it really mean?

I have the good fortune to coach some managers in my current position and today we got to talk about that statement above with one of them. She obviously bought into that, as do...

A couple of days ago I had a great experience in why a modular framework is a great thing, that I wanted to share in this blog post. You will follow the EXACT path of my thinking. Yes, it might scare you but… it will not take very long.

Before we start, I’m sure theres a number of times when a very modular framework, like Koa Js and NancyFx for example, might be bad too - but for the most part I think my experience is the most common one.

In my current job, management consulting for the Salvation Army hospitals in Indonesia, we have seen the need to do a quick poll. Simple questions like: “What did you like your stay?”, “Are you happy at work?” or “How was your meal?”. So I built a very simple little application, using Koa Js and called it KoaVote....

A couple of days ago I learned about the 7 Levels of Delegation in the Management 3.0 book by Jürgen Appelo.

The last level of delegation (aptly named Delegate) is defined as:

You leave the decision to them and you don’t even want to know about details that would just clutter your brain.

Yes, that. Give someone a responsibility and then step away. Today I got the opportunity to talk with a manager that has a tendency to micromanage a lot, and we came up with a conversation template that I think was worth remembering.

I told her that she needed to delegate an area of responsibility to a manager of one of her departments. And I introduced her to the definition above. Because she’s really involved in almost everything that happens in the company right now. And a lot of the tasks depend on and...

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...