I’m surrounded by brilliant minds at work. Both at my company (Aptitud), at my clients and in my community. They make me think a lot and quite clearly thinks a lot themselves too. But sometimes I think we think too much (cannot wait for the reaction to that contradictive sentence :)) - and we should do things instead. It’s in doing we learn and see how stuff work out and how well our hypothesis stands up to the reality that we throw them into. Let me give you a few … well examples and ideas that have formed my thinking around this. Getting to know new people | | |:————————————————————————————:| | | | From http://redstarresume.wordpress.com | I have never been in a situation to hire someone - although I have done A LOT (50+) prospect interviews. This is a ridiculous situation; 1 hour with someone that I never have met and then asked if I...

In my last post I related two stories that I’ve been a part of and that got me thinking about what we (or me at least) code for: change or stability. The post got attention (amazing attention for a small time blogger like me, actually almost afraid of writing now :S) and quite a lot of questions was posed. These of course got me thinking even more and I realized that I needed to follow up on the post. So here it is: some thoughts (and some answers) to questions and arguments I’ve had during the last week. Mindset vs practice What I bluntly failed to convey in the first post was the mindset aspect of it all. For me the difference in approaches was one of mindset in what we develop; do we write the code thinking that it will change or that this is the last time we ever...

Let me tell you a story: when I was in university I took an “advanced” object oriented programming course. This was my first exposure to the topic and I was lost big time. The course was taught in SmallTalk had a very different format; the first day we got an assignment from the professor that ran throughout the 4 week course. We were very excited since we were going to write a game. An old-school text-input adventure game a la Zork. We teamed up three people in groups and went to the professor smalled crammed room. Here we got the instructions on a single sheet of paper. We almost ran out of there. Just as we reached the door of the room he called us back (I’m sure he had time that call to perfection): “Oh yeah, almost forgot. Two weeks from now I will come by and change something fundamental of...

SpecFlow is a wonderful tool. With a lot of hidden gems inside of it. I have been using and coding on it now for about 4 years and still I often forget about features and extension points that Gaspar and the community has put in there. For example: did you know that there’s an inversion of control framework built right into SpecFlow? Now you do and in this post I wanted to show you one way that you could use that feature to make your step definitions more maintainable. I found this feature (again, i had heard about it before) when Gaspar mentioned it too me after my presentation at CukeUp 2013 and the usage is part of “Pushing the HOW down” which I wrote at length on before. The Context injection feature (as it’s called in SpecFlow) is one of those “just works”-feature and you don’t have to think to...

I’ve just attended my first ever CukeUp conference, that is given by Skillsmatter each year. It’s organized by Aslak Hellesoy that created Cucumber five years ago. It attracts a nice audience and community that share a lot of interest with me. For me it was extra fun to meet some of my heros and friends that I’ve followed and interacted with for quite some time (Matt Wynne and Gaspar Nagy to mention a few). As always at conferences the learning is plentiful, even though my focus and nervousness was at my talk for a few hours. I especially like Matt Wynnes talk on Cucumber Pro Tips. There’s two excellent books (The Cucumber Book and Cucumber recipes) that Matt and friends has written that contains loads of tips and pragmatic hands-on descriptions for any Cucumber user. His talk was an extract from the books. The biggest thing that stuck in my mind was: push...

I’m having the opportunity to coach in an organization that isn’t used to agile practices. This is very refreshing and they are constantly challenging me and the ways that I think for granted. Quite often I find myself stumbling to explain practices that I for so long just have assumed that everyone was doing. A couple of days ago I stumbled upon one of those. Here’s the dialogue that played out (as I remember it at least): Me: You are doing a lot of things at once here… Appointed Product Owner: Yes. But there’s a lot of things that we have promised them to finish by [date] Me: But why don’t you limit your work in process then? That will get stuff done faster and .. PO: Whatever do you mean? We cannot just limit the work. This [pointing to board] is what we are supposed to have done. We better do it now. As...

I’m working for Tradera right now and as I’ve blogged about before we have been splitting a big (40 people) team into smaller ones. Getting this to continue to work and the teams to be effective has been my challenging and very interesting task since then. I can tell you that without great people that care - this would have been a lot harder. With people that cares you can even allow yourselves to try something, fail and change. That’s great news for someone like me - I fail a lot. And take great pride in doing so, as long as I learn from it. In this post I thought I’ll describe a particular part of that process that I have had problems getting to work many times; the daily team sync, Scrum of Scrum or Syncro whatever you call it. We call it Daily Sync. The problem It’s really quite simple...

I have been playing around a bit with MongoDB for the first time of my life. It’s really a very nice experience and have a lot of the “just works”-feeling that I have started to get used to from frameworks like NancyFx and Simple.Data. But when i pushed it to AppHarbor I ran into problems. That all had with me not reading stuff properly… AppHarbor has a nice feature that replaces stuff in your .config files on deploy. That could be used for setting Production-environment values to your environment configuration. For example changing the connection string for a database. The add-on for Mongo DB at AppHarbor has a nice article describing this in detail. But I read it quickly and put the connection string in the -node of the web.config. It should be added as an . As the documentation clearly points out. So you want this: key=”MONGOHQ_URL” value=”mongodb://localhost/DotVoter”/>  That...

I’ve built a small application. Just something I threw together with a friend during a hack-session at the client. (It’s a dot voting application and you can try it here, if it’s up :)) As we wanted something out there fast we built it with NancyFx and MongoDB (a first for me) and we host it on AppHarbor with continuous delivery via GitHub. Since all of these (saved Mongo) has served me well in the past I was very surprised when we ran into problem. When a commit is pushed to AppHarbor the application is compiled and the test (if any) are run. That worked fine for us but then a stage is run that’s called “Site precompilation”. That failed with the following error: > ``` > error ASPCONFIG: Could not load file or assembly 'Nancy.ViewEngines.Razor.BuildProviders' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. > ``` This had...

At my current client we have split our teams into five smaller (8 people) team. I wrote about that process before, if you want read about that. One of the big concerns that people have had after the split is how we make sure that we don’t miss stuff that “fall between the chairs” for this teams. I think that’s an overstated problem but we sat down together and as always with great people that care - a good solution came out. This post shows our findings and I’ll try to unfold my thinking on why I thought that the problem is overstated as well. Since we’re now brushing on business critical strategies I need to keep this post fairly general, I’ll try my best to make it understandable. The problem My client now has five different teams that have separate backlogs and works towards realizing strategical important initiatives for the company....