About people, development and ideas

GIT - Create/Delete a Remote Branch

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 04:09:00 +0000

It's really easy to create a remote branch on a distributed repository

   git push origin <newfeature>

Where origin is your remote name and newfeature is the name of the branch you want to push up.

Deleting is also quite simple:

   git push origin :<newfeature>

That will delete the newfeature branch on the origin remote, but you’ll still need to delete the branch locally with

   git branch -d newfeature.

The surprising truth about motivation

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 04:01:00 +0000

One of my favourite TED talks is Dan Pink "On the surprising science of motivation". I also read Dan Pink's book Drive - The surprising truth about motivation. Why I found the book and his talk interesting is because it helped me understand something I many times found contradictory - incentive and motivation. How incentive can be a demotivating, specially when you are talking incentives in form of reward or punishment. How we attract the wrong people that is lured by the money, but does not believe in your idea. Why people can put a lot of hours of their spare time working for free on e.g. Open Source projects, but is not motivated at work where they actually get paid for developing software. Money can be a demotivator if you do not pay enough, but is not a motivator for complex tasks. There are a lot of ways to motivate people like autonomy and mastery.

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

RSA Animate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

maven-antrun-plugin and Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:59:00 +0000

Had a "funny" problem today, created a multi-pom project in Netbeans (on Linux) and it worked fine until my colleague tried to build the project on his Windows machine (same Maven 2 version).

Maven produced the following code in the head pom file:

<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId><artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
....
</plugin>

which worked fine in Linux, but not in Windows. It took some time before we understood that windows version of Maven seem to require the version tag :)

<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.7</version>

Annoying, but happy that it works again :)

How do your team communicate?

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:58:00 +0000

Communication is a critical factor in any team, it's the difference between a high performance team and ordinary or even bad team. But communication is something that is really hard for most of us, we are filled with emotions that can get in the way of the communications between members; We do not listen to what others have to say, afraid of sharing our insights, or start to be aggressive because we feel threatened. Most of us are not trained in communication skills beyond social context, and we learn quickly to not stand out or say something offensive in a group, but at work we must share our thoughts and ideas and we need to have an opinion which is built upon our experience and knowledge.

A team should share ideas, build on each others ideas, help each other when someone is in trouble and be inspired by each other. There seems to be a special energy when a team communicates well, a lot of new thought processes starts simultaneously, creates new insights and ideas. The group's collective knowledge starting to grow larger than the collected individual knowledge. They learn to depend on each other and help each other.

A team can journey from low to high performance if they learn how to communicate with each other, learn how to listen observe and reflect. With a help of a good coach the team can see the potential in themselves. A good coach can get the team to share ideas and thoughts with each other freely. A coach can help building up the trust between team members and get them to depend on each other.

A good coach helps people to communicate and gives the team new perspective when needed.

Fun and educational with books

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:06:00 +0000

Everybody is talking about that book, the book you also want to read but have not found the time or the drive. Or maybe you read a lot of books but you want to explore it further, but has no one to talk to?

A fun and interesting way to learn, explore and maybe push yourself to read an interesting book, is to start a book club with your colleagues. It does not even have to be colleagues (or friends), you could use your twitter connection or blog readers to form a book club.

So why do I want to join or start a book club? If you read a book you will only have one point of view, your own, and you will be biased to the content due to your past experience and values, but adding more point of views allows you to draw new conclusions and maybe better understand the content. You will learn more about yourself and your pears while discussing the content, and letting new ideas, knowledge and experiences into you life.

How do I start?
1. Figure out what types of books you want to read, e.g. books about change, then choose a few books and let people vote. Also decide if everyone should buy the book themselves or make a big order for everyone.
2. Decide how many times and how often you want to meet. E.g four times and three weeks between meetings.
3. Decide where you want to meet; at the office, a coffee place, or at someone's apartment.
4. Food and beverages is also important. Do you have the meeting early, lunch break or after work? Will people be hungry? Should everyone bring their own food or do we order in? Is there coffee, the, water?
5. Decide how you want to conduct the meeting, using a talking stick (e.g. if it is a large group), post-it's where you vote on topics, free discussion, post-up sessions, and so on.

Remember to always have the door open for new members, some people will leave due to not enough time or have read the next book, or any other reason. Don't be afraid letting new people in on an ongoing book. New people means new thoughts and ideas, larger pool of knowledge to drink from.

FOG Factor in brainstorming meetings

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:25:00 +0000

When you sit down in a brainstorming meeting it can be quite hard to distinguish between facts, opinions and guesses, and it can be hard to track them even if you are using a visual aid like Post-it Notes.

I like to use different colours or use the first letters for Facts, Opinions, and Guesses.
Facts is what we can easily measure or prove, like how many users we have on our site or how long the response time is, and so on.
Opinions are things that people think is a fact, it can be true or be false, it can also be facts that cant be proven. Opinions can easily translate as facts if it comes from someone respectable, so opinions should be treated with caution. It is important to identify opinions and explore them.
Guesses are uncertain ideas, we do not know much about them, but could be valuable to explore. Many guesses are often proven to be wrong, and you may wonder why you should even bother if guesses are wrong, but those few that turns out to be right is often groundbreaking.

Opinion and guesses are often the reason for lengthy meetings and frustration, because we cant distinguish them from facts, but now when we have the FOG factor you can easily identify them and move forward. You could then try to make opinions and guesses into facts in-between meetings by researching them using surveys, fact search and market tests.

Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

OpenJPA and OSGi class loading trick

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:18:00 +0000

When using OpenJPA with a OSGi container like Felix you will get into some class loading troubles because OpenJPA will not be able to create an Entity Manager. It need to bypass the OSGi container's class loader and this is how you do it.

Store the old class loader (OSGi container)
Set the new class loader (e.g. the standard class loader)
Create an Entity Manager Factory
Restore the class loader to the original (OSGi Container)

You can put your code into the start() method of your BundleActivator:

EntityManagerFactory emf = null;
ClassLoader oldCL = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader(); Thread.currentThread().setContextClassLoader(this.getClass().getClassLoader());

Map<String, String> props = new HashMap<String, String>();
// Create a Properties object with connectio parameters for database
props.put("javax.persistence.provider", "org.apache.openjpa.persistence.PersistenceProviderImpl");
props.put("openjpa.ConnectionURL", database_url);
props.put("openjpa.ConnectionDriverName", database_driver);
props.put("openjpa.ConnectionUserName", database_user);
props.put("openjpa.ConnectionPassword", database_password);
props.put("openjpa.jdbc.SynchronizeMappings", "buildSchema");

emf = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("PERS_UNIT", props)

// Change it back to the old classloader when everything is initialized.
Thread.currentThread().setContextClassLoader(oldCL);

When you have created the entity manager and restored the classloader you can now use the EntityManagerFactory to create an EntityManager and start to use it.
It is important that you do this after you have restored the classloader or you will get conflicts between classes e.g if you have used an interface and created the class in one module and sent it to another module, the system will complain about that the class was created with another class loader.

Why do I love GIT?

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:51:00 +0000

I get this question a lot, and it is a valid question. Those who know me, know that I am not into tools, don't get me wrong, tools are great, but there is too much fokus on tools and not the craftmanship. It's human to look for quick fixes; We hope that the new camera will make us a better photographer or new golf clubs improve our swing.
But there are days when a new tool comes along and actually improves your life.

I think GIT is such a tool.

GIT allows me to quickly create a project locally, start develop and share my code with others. It is decentralized and there is no need to have a centralized server (although you can if you want). But the things I am most excited about is the ability to quickly create a branch, explore a hunch, and quickly dismiss or merge it back to my head (master) branch and share the code with others. It is easy to create a new local branch and explore a new idea, or do refactoring, or... And the merge between different branches is without fear and stress, because it really works, it is fast and you almost never gets conflicts.

A really neat trick is the git-stash command, which I use when I started something and it develops to something I couldn't forsee and I do not want it to be part of the current branch, e.g. you started to what you thought was a simple refactoring of a class and it turned out to be much more complicated and you do not know if this is something you are able to deliver in time, you want an option to continue without risk. I just stash the changes, and create a new branch and then pop the changes into the new branch and continue to explore the refactoring. To do this with other VCM you need to always create branches in advance, but for me this is not always an option, I would like to explore ideas without a lot of administration. git-stash is also great if you are interrupted and do not want to commit "unclean code" (not tested and may contain errors) before you switch branch and fix a bug or whatever the reason you was interrupted by.

There are many other scenarios this tool will help you with, but I leave that for you to explore by yourself. Gone is the feeling to be restricted by a version control system, instead it helps me to be more effective.

How to break up with employees

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:42:00 +0000

I read an interesting article on Inc Magazine about handling people that leaves our company. I think the writer has a good point, it is better to have a good break up and leave a positive feeling on both sides, you may end up doing business together in the future.

http://www.inc.com/articles/201111/how-to-break-up-with-employees-.html

Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Why best practices does not work

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:34:00 +0000

If you go to Amazon's book store and search for the words "Best practices" you will get 117,336 hits. It seems that we are keen on finding best practices to every problem in life, specially in the world of software development.

As you probably have experienced when reading these books is that they never seem to fit into our problem domain, and this is because they often exhibit little respect for the individuality of the problem, they try to sell a one-size-fits-all solution. In software development best practices comes in many forms like frameworks, patterns, anti patterns, business models and so on. Best practices is not evil, just that they are often unchallenged, a lazy way to solve problems, and do seldom fit completely with the problem area.

If I told you that I could fix your relationship problems because I have compiled a book called "Relationship best practices", would you be skeptical or be running to the bookstore? You probably would be skeptical since we know that we need to work hard in a relationship, there will be hardships and good times, but we also know that the problems is much more complicated than that. "My" relationship book may give some pointers or insights on how others have solved similar problems, but it is not a complete solution.

Image: kongsky / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Build a tower, build a team

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:17:00 +0000

Tom Wujec's TED talk about team building is one of my absolut favorits! It goes hand in hand with my 20 years of working experience, on things that works very well and things that could backfire, even if the intention is good. It is also the basis of Agile, how to build a team that performs well.

http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower.html

Visual aids

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:37:00 +0000

Many meetings is conducted by people sitting around a table and just talking, and it seems that we often just talk around the issue or having problem to unite around what we are trying to solve. I have learned that I often have problem with doing several things at the time like listening, formulate an answer to a question, sorting out thoughts and going back and forth between different ideas and pulling facts from memory. We are also often driven with a feeling of what we think is correct or not, but without having all the "facts on the table" and since most of us just can hold between 3-8 things in our head at the same time, where very few of us can hold more than 5 things at the same time, we will have a hard time to come to a conclusion because we will not have the same "picture".
I know from experience that when using visual aids, like post-it notes and drawing on a whiteboard, often clarifies things and it is easier to talk around the issue, we have a much easier time to see a pattern if we can see the things in front of us, but often there is a resistance to use these tools together in a group. But we know from TV, specially from crime shows that we need to get all the facts on the table using pictures and text, take a step back and a pattern will emerge and we catch the killer. The same thing works when talking about issues, new requirements and plans.

Today I was listening in on a meeting about a small project, it seemed that no one could agree on anything (the issue, the challenges or how to proceed with the meeting) and it seemed that we got nowhere, after 45 minutes it started to feel hopeless and people started to get restless, so I prompted on using post-it's to explore some of the ideas.
We wrote down the things that was needed to be done and posted it on a whiteboard.
We saw quickly that the original ide was not that huge of a workload or complicated as many felt.
We all felt comfortably that we choose the right solution and everyone knows what to do.
We also agreed on a plan on how to do it.

All in less than 40 minutes.

I was not always a believer; I thought that I could hold everything in my head and never learned to write things down, I am not good at drawing or have a nice handwriting, and I did not like to stand in front of people, not even colleagues, and I did not think that I was "visual". All but about drawing or having a nice handwriting has changed.

Image: jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Then it is official...

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 07:14:00 +0000

Sony Ericsson purchased Ericsson's shares for 1,05 billion euro. I have heard the rumours for some time now, but it did not seem possible due to some license owner issues. But for a long time now it has seemed that Sony have had more interest in Sony Ericsson than Ericsson; from hardware to services and applications.

Rädslan för att göra fel stoppar innovation och utveckling

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 08:13:00 +0000

Min kollega Magnus Wikholm på Avega Group kommer att hålla en diskussion om rädslan att göra fel den 18/11 kl 11:00 på vårt kontor i Stockholm.

Rädslan för att göra fel lägger en våt filt över innovation och utveckling. Många organisationers ledning och medarbetare är så fyllda av rädsla för att göra fel att beslutsprocesser och utveckling stannar upp eller kompliceras. Potentialen för effektivisering är därmed enorm. Att utforska nya världar och pröva nya grepp är grunden för framgångsrika företag och organisationer men då krävs en kultur som tillåter och till och med bejakar nytänkande och att man ser fel som en naturlig del. Delaktighet i innovation och nytänkande skapar glädje och trivsel på arbetsplatsen och ger förutsättningar för att bygga mer lättrörliga företag

Se kraften i att göra fel som en möjlighet. Vill du vara med och diskutera med andra i branschen, lett av Magnus, så är du välkommen att kontakta Magnus via epost Magnus.Wikholm (at) avegagroup.se

Productive meetings

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:04:00 +0000

Every year we have a conference at my company, Avega Group. The definitive highlight of the conference is the use of Lightnings talks and Open Space Technology, where 300+ persons come together every year and share their knowledge and thoughts. I am looking forward for the conference every year, I always come back with my head spinning - full with new ideas and insights.

Lightning talks are 10 minutes presentations where anyone can talk about anything, it is usually about processes, conflict handling, developing methods, testing, and so on. You dont have to talk the whole 10 minutes, but you are not allowed to talk longer, this means that you really need to get down to business and just spread the core message. Lightning talks can be used at breakfast- or lunch meetings to large conferences. It can be used to spread ideas in companies or as a inspiration to an Open Space Technology meeting.

Open Space Technology is a really strange phenomena, it is self organisation when it works as best. It is always impressive to see how all the planning is coming together on-site with several hundreds of persons, no agenda and no plan, using just one law and four principles.

The law of two feet - which states simply, if at any time you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing – use you two feet and move to some place more to you liking. Such a place might be another group, or even outside into the sunshine.

Principle 1 - Whoever comes is the right people, which reminds people in the small groups that getting something done is not a matter of having 100,000 people and the chairman of the board. The fundamental requirement is people who care to do something. And by showing up, that essential care is demonstrated.

Principle 2 - Whatever happens is the only thing that could have, keeps people focused on the here and now, and eliminates all of the could-have-beens, should-have-beens or might-have-beens. What is is the only thing there is at the moment.

Principle 3 - Whenever it starts is the right time alerts people to the fact that inspired performance and genuine creativity rarely, if ever, pay attention to the clock. They happen (or not) when they happen.

Principle 4 - When it’s over it’s over. In a word, don’t waste time. Do what you have to do, and when its done, move on to something more useful.

Lightning talks: http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/07/30/lightningtalk.html

OST: http://www.openspaceworld.org/

Conversation - Staying in dialogue

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:03:00 +0000

I have noticed that some of the obstacles you face when discussing any subject is to stay in dialogue, specially when discussing on internet. One of the feelings you constantly battle are the feeling of being threatened.

When you start being threatened you start to protect yourself either by going to silence or violence. Silence is when you stop adding to the dialogue since you dont want to be regarded as stupid or you feel that the person you talk to is not worth your opinion. Violence is when you stop listening and start acting out your feelings.

We are complex beings, we can have complex thoughts and even conflicting thoughts when we speak or listen, many of these thoughts are feelings that is constantly in the way of listening. So in a conversation you are interpreting what the person is saying by adding your own feelings to the mix, this means that the outcome could be that an innocent question from one person makes you feel threatened and you cut him off or that you respond totally different with another person.

When we are having a conversation face to face, our bodies is also adding to the conversation; Angry, sad, afraid, stressed, calm, happy, and so on. This is of course missed in the written language and is a huge source of misunderstanding and why so many internet forums always seems to derail. There is also a culture of using Command and Conquer methods, which makes it hard for even the most balanced person to not loose his temper and go to silence or violence

On being wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Patrik Falk) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 20:50:00 +0000

A few days ago I finished Kathryn Schulz book - On being wrong, and it is really "an idea worth spreading" (She also have a TED talk which you can find here: http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html).

I found the book very inspiring. I think it puts some of our communication problems in a new focus. We all know that the hardest thing when you communicate is to stay in dialogue, we need to listen and fight the feelings we are having, to stay focused on the meaning of the conversation. A misunderstanding can create a feeling which can lead to that you will move from a dialogue to discussion or worse.

Most of us are also afraid of talking in public, we are afraid of making mistakes, being misunderstood, or being wrong (specially when talking to colleagues).

So where does Kathryn Schulz book fit in? We are afraid of being wrong, not to be wrong, but the feeling of being wrong. This feeling is suppressing people to add their insights to the pool of knowledge in dialogues, meetings or at work. We think of conversation like if they were a game where you can win, that someone is keeping score whenever we are being wrong. We have for a very long time learned, in schools and at work, that it is better to find small error in some fact or the language used by someone than actually form our own opinion, since we do not have to risk anything ourself and we feel good when we find a small error within the argument coming from the other person. We have learned that it is good to look at the detail of a discussion and not the meaning of the discussion.

How many conversations/meetings have you walked away from, unfulfilled, with a feeling that we are just talking around the issue instead of the issue? Talking only about the details of the arguments instead of the meaning of the conversation?