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From the title, it almost sounds like this post is about some kind of virtual reality. I assure you it's not. It's an (potentially forced) attempt at a…

I am a big fan of doing software development work as-code. It’s a no-brainer when talking about writing software, because that has been done using some sort…

I have realized that even though I have been writing lately quite a lot about platforms and platform teams, I didn’t write anything to describe my view on…

Teams, the smallest work unit in a company, come and go. And in companies where there is a lot of growth, they see the necessity of creating more and more…

Obviously, the answer to this question is very much dependent on the context of each company. Also, I was never part of the journey of a platform from the…

Among the common patterns around platforms is that it is very hard for a platform to exist in a sustainable way without a community. If a community is…

Platforms usually appear organically. It goes somewhat like this:

I confess: I don’t think that titles like “DevOps Engineer” make any sense. It’s like saying “wet water”. Do we want to have any other kind?

This is one of those things that most people agree with in theory, but it somehow escapes the implementation.

DISCLAIMER: This is not another "DevOps is dead" post

At the beginning of this year, I got a new hybrid bike (combo between speed and city bike). Without making any customizations other than adjusting my seat,…

There is one major thing bothering me about CI/CD pipelines: it is hard to test them. I don’t know one good example of pipelines that are properly tested.…

I am not a big fan of the so-called “performance review” or “personal development” or whatever-name-they-have meetings. I think the idea is good in…

My daughter is a big fan of Pettson & Findus. I have been reading to her some of their unusual adventures before sleep many times and some of them I have…

In large product companies that have platform teams it is quite easy for the people in the platform teams to not know much about the products they are…

There is one known trap that most internal software platforms are bound to fall into.

As companies grow, engineering teams start gathering more and more common layers in the company's product parts they own. So instead of each of them…

This is merely a collection of quotes from a very interesting book on learning and education: Leveraged Learning by Danny Iny. Still, I found it useful to…

For some years now, I have stopped installing much development tooling directly on my computer. Everything runs in containers or VMs running on my computer.…

We are in a period of immense abundance of information, and yet, I think we are not taught how to learn in a proper way. The…

Small rant about not numbing yourself at work and choosing a job for the long term

Using writing to think better and deeper

What is hope and how can we have more of it?

Common bad patterns in a platform team

Learning has "to be customized around the unique strengths and opportunities available to the learner in question."

Why isn't it malpractice for someone to call a Zoom meeting and talk at other in real time? What an astonishing waste. It's like watching someone type a…

Babies and routines.

Depending on your child's age, they might need 1, 2 or 3 naps during the day. When I write this, my daughter is about 11 months old and she has been on 2…

It all begins with the birth of your child and I was fortunate enough to be living in a country where I was able to take part of it, even during the…

Are we behaving like a professional, an amateur or a hack in our work?

I previously talked about the theory of a way to capture, configure and control how we spend our time, as defined by Cal Newport in his writings and…

In the previous post, I described how I started re-introducing some of the healthy habits that kept me going before the COVID-19 madness. That already…

The transition to working from home here in Sweden was sudden like everywhere else, little earlier than in other places and the measures towards COVID-19…

Not long ago, I posted a small article called "Why is (there) Kubernetes?". Its content inspired me to create a short presentation trying to answer the…

When people hear that I work with Kubernetes, a very common question is "What is Kubernetes?". I found more useful to answer "Why is (there) Kubernetes?",…

There are a lot of very interesting podcasts out there that I like to listen to, as much as time allows me to do so. But I noticed that I don't recall much…

A book I've been reading lately revealed to me how tricky helping relationships can be, even though we put ourselves in such relationships several times…

Some months ago I was writing about a routine I setup to manage and refresh highlights from books and articles. In the meantime, I have adjusted it a little…

In the last years, I've been reading a fair amount of books. Besides that, I've been wanting to read more interesting articles and blogs, which is why I…

For some time now (months) I have been meditating and journaling every day. I find this combo very useful for keeping myself on track with what I want to…

There are a couple of concepts I learned about recently, while reading “Designing your life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. These are not part of the main…

Every year, I manage to read one or two books that get my mind going and give me ideas that I could either apply right away or that set me on a larger path…

After meeting Woody in a number of workshops and presentations about MOB programming, it was an unique and interesting opportunity to watch him talk about a…

The third day of LAScot was a little bit shorter for me, because I chose to come back to Stockholm on the same day. That gave me just enough time to see the…

I have the impression that the general feeling towards the notion of newsletters is somewhere close to idea of spam. Lots of ads, poor content and usually…

One of the tricky parts of LAScot was getting hold of the tokens for tracks 3 to 5, which were not filmed and required a token to get access. Or you could…

This year was the first time I attended LAScot and I had high expectations from it. I wasn’t disappointed even just one bit!

Author link: https://davenicolette.wordpress.com/ Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Software-Development-Metrics-Dave-Nicolette/dp/1617291358 My rating: ★★★★★

Author link: https://www.radicalcandor.com Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Kim-Scott/dp/B01KTIEFEE My rating: ★★★★★

The main duty of a developer is to build and improve features of a service or a product, either through big-bang releases or through continuous delivery.…

As a developer, my first impulse when the service I’m developing is malfunctioning is to jump right on it and try to fix it. But while I do that, I can’t…

To easily remember the main ideas of my previous post, Teams are made of people, I thought of a representative word and a short alternative description for…

I think this is quite an obvious thing to say. At the same time, it is quite common to forget what this fact means. What does it mean that this team that…

Author link: http://www.shinzen.org Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Science-Enlightenment-How-Meditation-Works-ebook/dp/B01KUGQYJO My rating: ★★★★☆

This has been probably said millions of times until now, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to say it once more: agile is also about people.

In most of the companies I worked so far, we usually get a lot of interruptions. Everything is deemed important and our attention is stretched super thin…

One of the many wonderful game techniques I found out about in Yu-Kai Chou’s Actionable Gamification is about Mentorship (Game Technique #61).

After reading in the The Power of Habit about how militaries or football coaches use habits to train their soldiers or players to react fast in the field, I…

Full disclosure: I haven’t read Daniel Pink’s Drive yet, but that doesn’t mean I can’t talk about autonomy, one of the 3 elements of true motivation he…

Take into consideration the following scenarios:

I don’t know about you, but in my experience until now, there were situations where I felt micro-managed. And I hated it. Badly. It frustrated me. I didn’t…

Author link: http://www.boxofcrayons.biz/the-coaching-habit-book/ Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BUIBBZI/ My rating: ★★★★☆

Author link: https://arbinger.com/ Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GUPYRUS/ My rating: ★★★★☆

Link: /posts/drunkenpmradio-having-empathy-for-your-project-w-patrice-colancecco-embry-podcast/

Dust has settled on my blog lately. Writing stuff for the Internet is not my priority, no matter how much I enjoy it. I did decide to try something though:…

I’m always on the lookout for new things, so I’m constantly reading and learning stuff. I noticed that I cannot read always non-fiction, because it is…

Author link: http://yukaichou.com/ Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Actionable-Gamification-Beyond-Points-Leaderboards/dp/1511744049 My rating: ★★★★☆

Author link: https://www.scruminc.com/ Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X My rating: ★★★☆☆(3/5)

Link: http://ryanripley.com/afh-043-the-agile-mindset-with-gil-broza-podcast/

Inspired by Nikoletta's post and Jurgen Appelo's Management3.0 concept of Personal Maps, I decided to do one for myself. So if you want to know a bit more…

Author link: http://www.coachingagileteams.com/ Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Coaching-Agile-Teams-ScrumMasters-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321637704 My…

On 6th of July, a refreshed version of the Scrum Guide was released in a live webinar by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland.

Link: http://ryanripley.com/afh-042-the-grows-method-for-adopting-agile-software-development-podcast/

Before it arrives, everything is pretty calm. There's the occasional walker and the soothing sound of the fountain, but not much else. Everything else is…

Recently, I added a few new sources of agile info (and not only) into my RSS reader and I would like to share them with you:

Not much to say about this. Felt like implementing something in 1-2 hours and this seemed like a good candidate. So here it goes, I now have RSS feed, I…

John Ferguson Smart and Jan Molak in an article I stumbled upon today:

Listened recently to this episode from Devops Cafe Podcast which is loaded with useful information and references. Besides the ones found in the page of the…

Attention is a precious thing these days. Emails, Facebook notifications, playlist notifications, colleague asking for help, loud neighbours, annoying ad…

Inspired by Dan Abramov's tweet and with a desire to get better at ReactJS, this weekend I became a little bit more active on StackOverflow.

Story maps is a concept made popular by Jeff Patton and he started using them professionally before he even started to call them story maps. They were born…

Madiha Bhatti about basically racism:

Kimber Lockhart on a sense of purpose:

Sadly this was the last day of Jfokus and it was pretty cool!

I decided to try something different and so go to the IoT Keynote: IoT - an evolution from Internet of Screens to Internet of Things, done by Pawel…

Microservices is one of the biggest buzz words of the moment. Being a very beginner in this topic, I decided to focus mostly on it through the Jfokus…

Freshly moved to Stockholm, I am glad to go to Jfokus next week. There are quite a few talks, so it's good to be prepared. Here are the talks or workshops…

When I started working almost daily with ReactJS a few months ago, I was pretty challenged (still am) with all the different modules to use and the concepts…

Seth Godin explains the difference between a client and a customer

... you get this strange feeling, you sort of feel disoriented.

I am always wondering how would it be if people wouldn't take holidays anymore.

So here we are, changing the type of the statistic we are. After 4 years and a few months since my wife and I were counted as moving in to The Netherlands…

Fancy a delicious evening snack, but you don't want to feel too guilty about the extra calories?

One of the things I noticed since I've been living in The Netherlands is that when the weather is hot, most drivers are going crazy. Aggressive over takes,…

Feeling stuck is not pleasant.

Think of one of your employees. Imagine he asks you the following: how would you sell my job position to me, if I would be a candidate to be hired for it?

After sharing The Four Horsemen video (predictions about Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) on LinkedIn, I was asked by one of my connections if I would be…

I was reading the other day in some blinks (summaries of non-fiction books) from The Shallows, the following:

I had a Pebble Steel watch for over a year now, but never took the time to put together an app or a watchface for it. Recently, I started testing RescueTime…

There are were and are a lot of discussions about Spotify not paying fair the artists for the number of streams that their creations get in the music…

Here I am, at the end of the YourTurnChallenge! Uuuhuu, what a ride!

In a conversation with a friend (same friend, same conversation as a few days ago), he mentioned that everything that happens in the world is related…

I have an idea about a revolutionary recipe website. Yeah, you read it right, a recipe website. Being a software engineer, you would think that it should be…

Have you ever felt like you've been shoved into a corner and there's no way out? Well, there's always a way out, but maybe none that you would prefer…

I have thought many times why is it so difficult to admit that we were wrong. What makes it that hard to say "I'm sorry, I was wrong". Is it that important…

Or… should it be the other way around?

By accident, like most of the books I read, I stumbled upon Stephen Covey's book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It's one of those books, it's not…

Maybe you heard, maybe you didn't, but there's a new challenge in town!

I was having a discussion with one of my friends the other day…

Just a few things I read this a couple of days ago about reactive/proactive:

Some of these things are so simple that are easy to ignore, other are a little bit too abstract to act on them right away. It depends on each of us to act…

This is probably the gazillionth unboxing of a Myo that surfaced the Internet, so I won't bother you with too many comments. Let the images speak for…

If you own one of these beauties, then get ready for some switches trouble. Don't get me wrong, I <3 this mouse, I have two (one for work, one for home),…

Like I probably said before, I read quite a lot of books, especially business and self-help books. I found out a few weeks ago about Daniel Goleman's new…

I have to say, I usually don't read a lot of fiction or fantasy books, as in, I rarely go and search for a specific fiction book in a store. It's not that I…

Not so long ago, I released my first Dropzone 3 action and of course, I wrote about it on my blog!

Dropzone is a Mac OS X app which sits in the menu bar and that allows you to configure a series of actions. You can add these actions in a grid that is…

It was a dark rainy night. You could hear some stray dogs howling, probably annoyed as well by the heavy rain. Everyone was at home. Well, except us, me and…

Maybe you've heard about Joel Spolsky, or maybe his blog domain joelonsoftware.com sounds familliar. No? Nevermind!

It seems that people are selfish by nature. All our instincts teach us to take care of ourselves and then of our species. If we would be reduced to our set…

Yesterday I spent the entire day at the Joy of Coding conference, in Rotterdam. From my point of view, it was an example of how a coding conference should…

I started a little while ago to write a book. Yeah, I know, who would have thought, right? But that's besides the point.

Some time ago I started using an improvised standing desk at home. I'm sure some of you at least heard about the article about the 22$ standing desk made…

Cover picture from ebeijing.gov.cn

After the last special, here comes another one. My mother used to cook a version of the following recipe when I was little. Ladies and gents, I give you…

Sometimes when you're prototyping a new website or a new page, you would like to add a image placeholder, just to see how things fall into place.

Not that there's anyone there believing that developers cannot cook, but there's no harm in stating the obvious from once in a while[1]. So, here you go,…

A few weeks ago scriptogr.am decided to suddenly change how their Markdown processor worked, making any HTML embedded in the Markdown posts worthless, among…

Being surprised by the incredible weather this weekend, we decided to walk around Amsterdam a bit, like any tourist would do.

A view from the countryside near the Zaanse Schans, a park known for its functional wind mills and traditional Dutch landscapes.

Cover picture from growingleaders.com

A pair of playful squirrels somewhere on the Petřín hill, Prague, Czech Republic

The cross on the "Caraiman" peak, Romania

Playing with time in Java can be a tricky thing. Here's what happens when you use the Calendar class to make a trip back in time and back again:

I have been reading an interesting book about the history of biking in the Netherlands written by an American. I have encountered some interesting facts.

One of the most picturesque villages I have visited until now in the Netherlands, only for the ones who don't feel threatened by boats and water.

A colleague of mine asked for my help, after spending hours on trying to figure out why he is getting the wrong results with his code. I went to his desk…

I have visited recently the Maeslantkering surge barrier in the Hoek van Holland area, near Rotterdam. It is an impressive construction with an important…

I have been recently reading about performance and what makes you better. The term of 'deliberate practice' popped up more than once.

I had the dark thought of watching the news while visiting my relatives and friends in Romania and it happened to be a Sunday (yesterday). Here are a few of…

With all the books out there that tell you to follow your passion, whichever that is, this book feels like a fresh breeze in a hot summer

I've read some really great books in the last couple of years. Here's a list of those books.

Random thoughts about self-inflicted lies.

I have discovered Alan Watts a few days ago and since then I have been going through the Youtube videos with his lectures. I like his way of putting things…

If you've worked with Java for a while, I'm sure you've heard about one of the things that Java does at compile time: type erasure. But you don't have to…

One of the main ideas of the famous TV show, House M.D., was that in order to generate good ideas, you have to challenge yourself or have people to…

Java 7 puts on the table some new tools for concurrency and its family of Executors. Here's my attempt of exemplifying their usage with a small bank robbers…

I started using my parents old russian vinyl player when I was a bit older than 3 years old (or so I was told). We had a few tens of vinyls, most of them…

It's always good to revisit topics that you already touched before, the chance is that you will find out new things or remember forgotten ones.

Today, I switched to a static blog using Scriptogr.am and Dropbox. I thought it might be useful to share what I use to write articles on my new blog!

Having a small blog where you can ramble about whatever you want should be a simple thing, right? I mean you don't pay much to the host, they have…

Let's face it: a typical geek is not known for his social skills, best manners or his exquisite taste in clothes. Of course, most of the geeks are not…

We are creatures of habit. I’m sure you heard this expression before.

Shortly after finishing The Shadow Of The Wind, I received the second novel from the series.

We all have difficult conversations everyday, be it with someone who steps in front of you in line or with your boss asking for a raise. Sometimes they…

One of the best books I read in the last couple of months, it has all the right elements to be a successful novel.