During the last week I took a course in Kanban (Jedi level mind you well) a Crisp in Stockholm. Giving the course was David Andersson, more or less the father of Kanban for software business as I understand.

If you don’t know anything about Kanban (as I didn’t) then this article by Henrik Kniberg is a great introduction. Also keep your eyes open on Info-Q for a complete book on the subject with some great case studies.

I think that the course was really good and gave me some deeper understanding in Lean-thinking. There are some simple but powerful tools in there; visualization (put it up on the wall!), give room for the value-adding things in your process and minimize waste, root-cause analysis etc.

Kanban itself is not really that hard to grasp (thank God!) but...

OK – this has been quite a journey and I am not completely satisfied with the solution yet – but I works. During the journey I have also deleted all my contacts and calendar items on my phone about five times… Brrr – equally scary each time.

The problem is as follows; as a consultant I am working for customers that have their own Exchange Server (or similar). When I start there I am given an account for example marcus.hammarberg@anycustomer.se. So my coworkers at AnyCustomer will start sending me emails and making appointments in my AnyCustomer-calendar.

Also I work for Avega – that of course supplies me with an email address and accompanying calendar.

Finally I have a private Gmail account for private stuff.

So I have three synchronization problems; mail, contacts and calendar items. Here is how I am synching them right now. I hope that...

Last Thursday the day had finally arrived. From a not very well planned post after an article it has been quite a journey to finally get a visit from one of the IT-gigants – Ivar Jacobsson.

I have made a short recap of what he said here (in Swedish), but the main thing for me was just to see and hear a man with that amount of experience, with all the enthusiasm still intact.

Also I like the ideas on the computer industry being a fashion industry that chases trend after trend. Ivar has started to look away from the different processes and instead focus on the practices that is used and can be combined into great support for the organization.

I really laughed hard at one of his statements: “We really has gone crazy with the documentation” (my translation). This said from the...

I found a cool tool that allows you to create, edit and show slide show presentations online. The tool is called 280slides.com and is completely free.

It also allows you to upload presentations in Power Point format, to save presentations “in the cloud” and also download the presentation in several well-know formats (ppt(x) and pdf for example).

I like it!

BTW, this is my 600th post… It’s been a joy and I have no intention to stop. But I never knew from the start

Although there is a some time since the vaccation I realized that I haven’t posted photos from it. Here are a short summary of what we did and went during those lovely summer months. Not too far away…

Albert enjoying himself on the seashore - he stayed here most days…

Here we are on our way into the water. Again.

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I have noticed that I’ve been reading some reference literature in the IT-department lately. I don’t know why but it’s a great way to get to know some of the giants that frequently is mentioned in current hot developer topics.

So after Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and Clean Code the time had come to Test-driven development: by example (my good –Google Books is almost scary).

This is was by far the funniest IT-book I ever read. I burst out laughing from time to other and found myself giggling through the whole thing. For example read this paragraph about the time when Kent Beck was young.

The book itself is centered around two example that take you through a variety of disciplines in TDD. And then mr Beck talks about patterns in TDD; design...

As I wrote earlier I attended my first ever Alt.Net un-conference this weekend. It was very rewarding and great to meet fellow developers under such informal circumstances. The open spaces was the most rewarding part I think.

One of the open spaces I took part in were about Pair Programming. It soon evolved to a session about how to convince developers / management and other that it’s a good idea.

Here is a short recap of some of the good thoughts that emerged from that session.

Good ideas

• Switch the keyboard often. I.e. one developer writes the test and one the implementation or use some kind of a pomodoro clock for ten mintues.
• Switch partners often – once a day for example

Argument for the benefits of Pair Programming

• It’s fun! No more agrument should...

Two big things will (or are in the progress of) happen this weekend.

The first is that I have gone over to the dark side. Yes, I know, I couldn’t resists anymore. The temptation was to great.

I have bought a Mac Book Pro. And have just installed it – that process was so smooth. I want to do it again!

OK – the next thing is that I will speak at a conference for the first time ever. Actually it’s a Un-conference, for alt.net Sweden. And it’s a lightning talk but that only makes it harder I think. 10 minutes – it’s not much.

The subject is “Let Fluent NHibernate test your mappings”. And it relates to some of my Read More

I ran across this post by Ayende and it pretty much sums up where I want to reach with my persistence ignorance efforts:

“After that, you are done. Just create an entity in the proper place, hit the /database/create and have a lot of fun.”

I of course like the fun-part of the quote the most. :) But seriously – that what I want to reach – to configure my conventions. And then simply code the model as I want it and let the framework (NHibernate in this case) figure out how to store it.

Well, as it seems, the Fluent NHibernate framework has been updated since the Ayende post. So I’ve read, and read, and read and discovered some shortcuts. By the way – here is an article on how to Read More

Here is a great tool for sharing code without having to send mail or chat-messages – pastie.org

Just go to the site, paste your code, optionally chose a language and you’ll get a URL to the code.