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...

I got yet another computer. To work on. But there will be slow days on airports and hotels with this baby to… So I decided to try something new; I decided to go Linux and setup a development environment for Node Js. I did not set up a goal of this being a no-cost project, it just ended up that way (with one worthy exception, in the end).

I have never used Linux before and decided to go with Ubuntu that looked like it would suit my Windows/Mac background best. It did too. It’s been a pure joy to use so far.

This blog post described what I did and what obstacles I ran into on the way. It was … not surprisingly maybe… but at least gratifyingly simple and smooth. I’ve tried to describe it so that you can be both a total newbie and a little bit more...

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 at work, but...

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.

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 with a LOT of teams that have this situation. It’s a drag…

If you remember in...

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...