One of the most amazing things about my current job as a teacher and “head master” at Salt is to see amazing people take my material and make something more amazing with it. Or when see people start to venture down avenues that helped me (in this case agile, lean and no estimates) so much.

I got a question from Øyvind Ege - a brilliant developer from a class last spring/summer. And with his permission I will here publish his question and my response.

I hope you find it useful.

Very early in my agile journey, I stumbled over behavior Driven Development (in that exact blog post, in fact - Thanks Dan). And like many, I first thought of it as a more user-friendly way of writing tests.

But pretty soon (through the help of Specifcation By Example - Thanks Gojko) I realized that the true power comes from the shared understanding that stakeholders and delivery team can get from writing the specifications together, before we start, as examples/tests using concrete data.

I was hooked and Cucumber was my poison. A programming language for requirements. Executable specifications, I mean - come on! This is now 15 years ago and I still am a big fan of this way of working.

Hence I was really happy to see that two of my BDD-heroes (Gaspar and Seb) have come together (again) to write about the often...

This year has been a very strange one, for most of us. I thought I’d share a little Christmas Greeting.

For me personally, I’ve gone through one of the big personal crisis of my life that led to a sudden, and deep, fatigue syndrome. I am better but it takes longer that than I wanted and I still am fighting a lot of different symptoms of the sickness.

But there is hope. For all of us there is hope - we can do this. We can get through the pandemic, drepression and fear. I’m sure that we will make it - and I’m sure that we will come out stronger, wiser and probably learned a lot.

Before dragging y’all down into a hole of dispair I better get those Christmas Greetings out of the way, right?

• All lovely collegues at Salt - what a crazy year. Thanks...

The thing that I’ve feared but never thought would happen has come to me to.

I have come down with the fatigue syndrome and a depression to follow. This is something that has been building up over many years and bursted out fully after the spring that was very though on me.

It’s now in its fifth week and I’m going to take some kind of program at a clinic that is geared only to handle this type of problems.

I’ve gone mostly of grid. First three weeks was just me crying and sleeping, so I was not much use to anyone anyway. I’ll be keeping it like that (off-grid) for the foreseeable future until I know what I manage.

Lots of confusing feelings right now where I’ve lost all my confidence and self worth while at the same time feel very tired. Right now a single telephone call is...

I’ve started a little series of some (by far not all) of the people that have shaped me during my career as a consultant. The more I think back of the things they said, did, and taught me - the more I can see how I’m using their advice just about every week.

Today the turn has come to a colleague that I had at Cap Gemini - the first senior consultant that I worked with and someone that made a huge impact on me and my ways; Lars Littorin

I’ve just started a series about a few a the people that have shaped, influenced, and affected me throughout my career. The reason I’m writing about this now is that I lately have had the opportunity to be a role model for other young developers - I notice that much of what I say and do comes from others; things I’m saying, manners I’ve picked up, approaches to code, development, and life in general.

I am, as the saying goes, standing on the shoulders of giants. For what they have done for me I’m very grateful and I wanted to show that gratitude here.

The first post was about Staffan - that showed me servant leadership and what a consultant is. Today it’s about Christian Forsberg, a rock ‘n roll developer.

I have a great job! I get to work with a lot of young people and get to train developers in the early stages of their careers. It’s absolutely amazing to see people develop in these early steps of their career.

But it also creates a weird feeling for me - since I, to them, comes out like an old sage telling stories that are long-forgotten about how the web was when the world was forged. Back in 1996 and stuff. I feel both a bit like Gandalf - both in age, length, and how I’m addressed.

It’s scary. Because, if we’re going to be a bit more serious, I realize that I become a role model for some of them. How to behave, act, say, and think about our work. This is especially real when we talk about agile practices and techniques,...

At </salt> we have a lot of labs and tests. Last time I counted we just passed 100 repositories. And it’s dawned on me that all of those need some love and attention from time to time. Stuff moves pretty fast in the JavaScript world and dependencies might start to act up etc.

At least you’d want to check out the code, do an installation of dependencies and then run the test and see that you get the expected behavior. Preferably you’d also wanna see that we don’t have deprecated dependencies or broken stuff. And probably check this, at least once before each course.

This is what scripts are made for, right? Automate the boring stuff.

The only problem is that since we are teaching a lot of different technologies and tools, not two repositories are the same; this one uses Docker and this is actually just text, and...

At School of Applied Technology, our accelerated career program is running in small teams, using Mob Programming. We have found that this gives us the most and best learning in a short amount of time. In this setup the tight group that you are in becomes both your best teachers but also, from time to time, you will be the teacher others in the group.

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.