About

Normal short intro

Agile coach, Christian, .NET/NodeJs/Scala Developer, Euphonium player. Married to Elin and father to Albert, Gustav and Arvid. Lived in Indonesia for a couple of years. Author (with Joakim Sunden) of Kanban In Action and Salvation: The Bungsu Story. Created a bootcamp for developers and now works as a data engineering.

Longer introduction

During the years I have been moving around quite a bit. I started my career as a developer but soon got to be leader for the teams I was in. This got me to look into finding ways to become more effective as a team.

I’m very quick to get excited over new things and this reflects in my posts that ranges over a lot of different subjects, tools and technologies.

The underlying theme of it all is agile lean and it’s practical usage in the situations I find myself in.

Why this blog?

This blog started with me loosing three notebook (paper versions) in two weeks. I grew tired of trying to remember everthing I learned in my head and started to write it down instead.

During the years I learned so much by sharing and soon I picked up the theme for the blog: “sharing is learning”. Just the other day I got some evidence that I might be on the right track too:

We Learn . . .10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we see and hear, 70% of what we discuss, 80% of what we experience, 95% of what we teach others William Glassner

So … it might be for my selfish learning purposes I write this. Anyway I’m very happpy to share this with you… to learn more … to share more … to learn more … to

My family

I have one wife, Elin, and three boys; Albert (born 2008) and Arvid and Gustav (2010). We have lived in Indonesia for a few years, but home is Stockholm, Sweden.

Salvation Army and Indonesia

Yes, I lived in Indonesia for two years (2014-2015) working for the Salvation Army there. Me and Elin are worked with the 6 hospitals (and 17 clinics) that the Salvation Army have, trying to help them to become more effective in their medical and spiritual ministry. I wrote a book about that experience

Aptitud

Back home in Sweden I work for Aptitud - the best consultancy in Sweden! I am an agile coach working right between the business and IT if I get to choose. My motto is: Getting agile to work, which makes me focus on pragmatic solutions rather than theory.

Although I’ve become a process guy I’m still interested in code and the craft around software development, in all the stages of the development cycle.

Read more about my professional life on LinkedIn

Stuff I’ve done

Kanban In Action

By far the biggest thing I ever did was to write Kanban In Action. I did that together with my good friend Joakim

Writing the book took about 2,5 years. Sometimes with a lot of frustration and work above our capacity. The pride and relief we felt when it was released was worth almost all of that work.

The

If you haven’t got the book yet - get your’s today! We have done our very best to be both entertaining and informative.

Salvation: The Bungsu Story

The thing that I’m most proud of recently for work is my book about our adventures in Indonesia. It’s a roller coaster of a novel about the work and tribulations of the Rumah Sakit Bungsu and how we used the principles of kanban, lean and agile to help them out of a looming disaster. Twice!

You can get the book here. Please do - I’m really, really proud of it.

Or watch one of the many recorded talks of the story here:

Speaking

I like to do public speaking. During the years I have spoken at lot of conferences like OreDev, JFokus, Agile Sweden, Agile Singapore and Yow West

Most of my talks have been at or for clients of mine. You can catch some of them here:

I also did a long series of short presentations for the Salvation Army in Indonesia:

Most slides for my talks can be found on my Slide Share page

Open source and programming

I have been into Open source on the .NET platform for quite some time. The main projects I’ve been into are:

  • NancyFx Nancy is the super-duper-happy-path library to small and awesome web applications using .NET. I absolutely love this framework and have committed small things to this. Very proud to be on the list of committers.
  • SpecFlow SpecFlow is a great way to write specifications in english (using Cucumber) that then is translated to testing code of your choice. I’ve written a lot of blogposts about SpecFlow over the years and contributed the first version of the SpecFlow intellisense.
  • Simple.Data I have commit code and written some documentation around this awesome data access framework.
  • Pickles lets you generate a nice documentation from your SpecFlow specifications

I’m most proud of my own little helper utility SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamics that let’s you write less code in your step definitions when using SpecFlow. You can download it from NuGet.

All of my code is found on GitHub under marcusoftnet

Screen casts

In 2014 I got interested in Javascript and Node development. This led me to do a couple of courses for PluralSight on Node development, of all things:

I’ve also recorded a couple of screen casts around Koa on YouTube: