Over the years I and many around me have periods of time when we have too much to do. That is we have more to do than can fit in the time we have to do it. Pretty common, especially in the workplace.

In these times I’ve noticed many people trying to be helpful and give the following advice:

Be more careful in how you plan your time.

It’s said with the utmost well-meant intentions but it is honestly not helpful. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Yesterday I had a really weird experience and I wanted to share it, not as something reflecting good on me, but a reminder of the value of sharing knowledge and learning from people around you.

I have bumped into people that have taken #agile and #lean to other and better places than me, and done more of it than I ever thought. Of course and it’s lovely.

The other day I stumbled on a YouTube video that looked interesting. I’ve been using Chat GPT quite a lot (a few times a day) in my daily work and was looking for a way to feed some private, data for our company into it.

The title of the video was “PrivateGPT 2.0 - FULLY LOCAL Chat With Docs”

It was both very simple to setup and also a few stumbling blocks. But in the end I could have conversations in English (and broken Swedish) about how to build data pipelines, the Scling-way, by feeding the AI our documentation files.

This is all running locally on my machine without any keys to a third party service.

This is a personal post about recovering from depression and fatigue syndrome. I’m writing it for me, but you can read it if you want.

I’m still in the process of recovering from fatigue syndrome, I realize. I’m doing better but the fact that it’s now been 2 years and I’m still thinking about that every day makes me think that I’ll never get out of it completely, but rather need to learn how to live with it.

Lately, I’ve noticed two things that pull me backward, and I wanted to write down how I get out of it so that I’ve at least written it down once.

At my current job, we are using Google Cloud Platform, which is awesome since it opens up so many services that exist in the Google ecosystem.

The other week a need arose to create reports based on data, from a template. We were wondering for a while and then decided that Google Slides could be up for the job. It was. But there were quite a lot of small hoops to jump around in, especially considering that there were so many different versions, languages, and ways to do things.

Here’s my plan:

1. Create a Google Slide Template that will serve as the report original. This will contain some placeholder strings that we will replace with data from the report
2. Create a folder for the report we are generating, and make a copy of the report original to this folder.
3. Uploading a few pictures to this folder, and ensure that...

This week I used ChatGPT professionally for the first time.

It worked … pretty well.

I can’t write regular expressions. There was a time when I even wanted to learn them, but that has long since passed, and now I hate them with the heat of 10.000 suns. You can spare me any “But if you just look at this tutorial/book/video etc.”, or “Take a look at regexp101.com that will help you, I promise”.

No, thank you. I’ve done that. I even read the best book (here as a post) on the topic, by Staffan Nöteberg. Nothing helps.

When I need a regular expression I either solve it in a substandard way or spend waay too long to write something simple.

I ran into a problem when coding. But when I saw the error message, that meant nothing to me on its surface, I soon found the problem. After fixing it I realized that the way I approached finding and fixing this came from many years of making mistakes experience.

In this post, I wanted to share this. Not to show off (it’s not that impressive) but to share some of my experience from hunting bugs. And maybe more important, the way that found and protected myself against this happening again.

I got invited to share a list of my top five books on leadership and change management. At first I didn’t think more about it but when I started to investigate the site that asked me I found a nugget of gold.

Shepherd.com is very cool!

I have worked in many different types and sizes of orgnanisations, sometimes in several ages of the organisations growth; and I’ve noticed something that I don’t really understand.

When an organization passes the number of people where everyone cannot know everything (20?) something weird happens. You have probably seen it, or maybe (like me) even said this. I have never seen this not happen.

Different parts of the company doesn’t seem to understand each other any more. Typically higher levels (“management”) and lower levels, but it can also be department to department.

Here’s my conundrum; the people saying this are intelligent people trying to do their best for a common goal. Sometimes they have decided that common goal together.

I don’t have a solution for this, but I needed to write my thoughts down to flush them out of my system. I’ve carried this for years. And you can read...

One person that has had a great influence on me over the last 10 years or so is Woody Zuill. I’ve learned, benefitted, and become a proponent of many of his ideas; mob programming, no estimates, and his general view on life.

One of the things that Woody once told me stuck with me hard enough to have it as one of my daily reminders. It’s great and will change your outlook on life.

This post is part of a series of blog posts that I’ve written on some images I have a screensaver and what they remind me of. Here are all the posts in my series:

• Kindness is better
• Complex == Bad. Simple == Good
• What would Jesus do?
• (DO(SOMETHING(SMALL(USEFUL(NOW())))))
• Turn up the good - This post