In these very strange times, we see a lot of change; some are really sad, devastating, and depressing. While others are encouraging and celebrate humankind’s will and capacity to survive and overcome.

Others still, are just interesting to observe and learn from. These last weeks I’ve noticed two new realizations about two of my favorite topics; feedback and transparency. They too, it turns out, are affected by the changes in our ways of life due to the corona pandemic we are living under now.

This post reflects a few thoughts and ramblings that I’ve had in my head for some time. I’m not hoping to solve world problems here, but just get some reasoning down.

I’ve just experienced something fantastic and a real testament to what amazing people can do when given the room to be amazing (and have an apparent and real reason to do so)

A week back, our accelerated career program; School of Applied Technology - the world’s toughest coding bootcamp were running five mob programming teams (that we call mobs) in two locations. This is how we teach and it has given us amazing results so far.

But it’s not cool being the “let’s sit as close together as possible for 8 h per day”-teacher in times of Covid-19 infection spreading across the world.

So in the middle of last week we started to make plans. Last Friday we had a “just in case”-lecture on tooling for our 5 Amsterdam mobs. Then during the weekend, things escalated in Sweden and we decided to move over the 5 Stockholm mobs...

My current role is awesome - I get do do some agile coaching, quite a lot of teaching, reading up on new tech and from time to time some programming.

Yesterday evening someone just blurted out: what if all of us died at once?! All the code and documentation would be hidden in a cloud somewhere and we will not be able to get it.

That cloud is GitHub and I’m sure it would be safe and that the risk that we all die at the same time is relatively low. Then again - I have booked a raw chicken tasting for our next offsite …

Just kidding - but when that was said my programmer-self sprung to life and I device, in my head, a simple script to make an offline copy.

This post describes that script. Oh - I only had 30 minutes spare time to do it...

I got a question, on twitter, the other week about how to handle a long list of backlog items on a kanban board. Here’s the original tweet:

Hej @marcusoftnet. Vi sitter med en backlog med 300+ o-organiserade och o-prioriterade stories som ska passera vår #Kanban board närmaste 10 månaderna.
Hur kan vi "gruppera" stories för att förenkla refinement och beroenden mellan stories?
- under epics?
- funktionella områden?

— Tvivlarn (@MeChristensson) February 9, 2020

And my adequate translation. The tweet by “The Doubter”

Hey @marcusoftnet. We got a backlog of 300+ un-organized and un-prioritized stories that will pass through our #kanban board the coming 10 months. How can we “group” stories to simplify refinement and dependencies between stories?

– by epics? – functional areas?

I got his permission to respond here on the blog. It’s a response and...

The other day we started a new course here at </salt> And the first day we are used to seeing some confusion from the developers and the odd strange, wrongly configured computer (by us). But the error in the title of this blog post:

 getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory

had me scratching my head for quite some time. Until I realized that the error message states what was wrong.

In the </salt> accelerated learning program we emphasizes learning in groups throughout the entire boot camp. We do this through the use of mob programming that is not only a great way to solve problems together but also puts learning front and center. I’ve yet to sit down with any mob and not learn a new thing (I’ve tried 40+ so far.)

But there’s a thing that needs to be in place in order for the learning to be allowed to flow freely; psychological safety. We try to create a psychological safe space through two tools:

• Trust
• Vulnerability

Let me, very briefly, expand on how we use this in our training.

I work for a developer accelerated career program. I have (together with Jakob Leczinsky) created a training material that takes people with no professional development experience into professional developers in 3 months. We have now run 4 courses and found jobs for about 100 people. All of them have got rave reviews from our clients, top-line software companies in Stockholm.

But how?! This is quite provocative, even for me. I spent 4 years in university (Go DSV!) - surely you can’t learn as much in 3 months.

How can this work? Because it quite obviously does. I have 100 devs telling me so.

I was pondering this as I picked up the book Antifragile by Nicholas Nassim Taleb for a reread. And things clicked. Our method is antifragility applied to training. And we create antifragile developers.

How do you get so much done? Where do you find the time?

This is a question that I often get asked and it always catch me off guard. I don’t have a recipe (or do I?) and I don’t think I get more done than others.

But last time when I was asked this question I stopped for awhile and thought to myself - what do I do, and is that something others don’t?

In this particular case I referred to a blog post I’ve written and the question back was:

How do you find the time to write blog posts?

In this blog post I share a couple of my … tricks.

Yes, yes … I know. I do way too much Google Sheets for my good. But that tool is SO amazing. It’s becoming my first go-to-tool when it comes to small simple tasks at the office. And it allows us to be more data-driven and visual.

And it’s very easy to build aggregation tools for people around the office. For example; the other day we were wondering what kind of technologies that was hot in different cities in Sweden.

From that question, until I’ve created a simple but powerful tool to scrape data from Indeed.com, presented it with a simple filtering function and got it in the hands of the sales team was 45 minutes.

In the process, I learned about two new friends; IMPORTXML and the slicer-feature of Google Sheet.

Let me show you what we did.

Where’s the information?

I headed out to the Indeed...

In my current job, as Head of Quality and Curriculum at </salt>, my thirst for being data-driven is frequently useful. In particular when it comes to test results for the developers in our courses. We test the developers every weekend (for 10/13 weeks) and we have now run 4 courses using the same tests… A gold mine of knowledge if you can mine it.

To help each developer and us, understand how they are doing we produce a diagram that compares their results to the result of their class (ca 30 people) but also compared to all classes (to date 4 x 30 people).

In the end we want to produce charts that looks like these:

But getting there has been quite tricky but oh so rewarding. At the end of this blog post,...