I’ll be holding two talks:
1. A talk about continous delivery, how we at RemoteX moved set up our environment to deploy to production more or less continously.
2. A talk about our HTML5 client at RemoteX. At the date of the conference we’ve had a HTML5 offline capable client in production for a year. I hope to share some of the experiences we’ve gathered along the way.

There are still a few tickets left if you want to join us. If you live in Stockholm there is a direct flight from Skavsta airport, and the southern France is quite nice around easter.

Turns out Google tought of that. You need to navigate to their Google Iphone Calendar Selector and select which calendars you want to display in your IPad.

Suddenly my IPad’s calendar app got a lot better. Now if I could only find some way to get a better mail application as well

So once I got my vim working after some slight issues in the segmentation fault department, I started looking at it more closely.

I got a bit scared when I realised that all this configuration would go into my .vim directory with out me keeping track of things.

So instead of installing Janus I made a git repository in my .vim directory, and added it to GitHub.

It will probably never be quite as extensive as Janus, but feel free to use it if you want.

You can find it here

It turns out that I can blog using markdown, and the post it to my blog converted to html. I liked that I’d and decided to give it a go.

You can find the details here. The post is a bit outdated since the commands have been simplified, but it describes the process.

While setting it up I ran into issues with MacVim. It kept giving me segmentation faults when ever I used vimrepress.

I tried different methods to get macvim to work. turns out if I used macports it would cause segmentation faults when ever I tried to run the blogging plugin. So I had to uninstall the macports version of python25 and all of a sudden things started working.

I now use the macvim snapshot build 61 which seems to work out really well.

So this is my first blogpost from vim.

So I’ve been searching for a blogging to

ol for mac OS X lion. I’ve found Blogo which seems to support most of what I want but it didn’t work for the new version of Mac OS X.

So now I’m testing out an application called myWPEdit which is available through the Mac OS X appstore. There is a photo of it here.it was hard to figure out how to attach that photo, but it seemed all i had to do was to drop it in the text to add it.

so far I’ve found the following issues with it:

• it can’t reformat added photos once added which is annoying.
• It doesn’t support offline blogging i.e. save the drafts locally and publish later.

We’ll see how this works out.

To keep someone naturally loyal again we look at the Maslow hierarchy of needs. This time however we are going to assume that the employee is working on the self-actualization part of the hierarchy. If he or she isn’t then this might be a motivation problem and could be solved by finding out what’s wrong at the other level.

What would cause an employee to quit if even though that employee is self-actualizing within the company?

When an employee wants to quit its often due one or two things either its motivation based, things are bad at the workplace, want to work with something else etc. See my previous post. Or that employee has been offered “the dream job”. You might ask your self, why isn’t the current work place the “dream job”.

I think for a workplace to be the “dream job”. That workplace has to give something to the employee at each level of the Maslow hierarchy of needs. An employee is loyal to the company if he or she has parts of the needs for each level tied up within a company.

This is interesting because then we have to look at what does the company give to the employee? What’s in it for the employee?

An employee would be loyal if his or her Self-actualization is achieved to a large extent at the company. If the Esteem level comes from respect from colleagues and achievement at the workplace.

If the is a good social network of friends at the workplace. If the workplace feels safe. If the workplace gives security to the employees family through salary, vacation time and insurance.

If you consider how much investment or payoff an employee has at each level then you are considering how loyal that employee is. Helping an employee out in a rough spot causes loyalty, but also makes that person feel Safety at the workplace. It helps with belonging, and might help with Esteem.

My theory is then, that to keep knowledge workers loyal you have to constantly work to establish connections in the company to each level of the Maslow hierarchy and to the employees. This is hard and for most levels probably individual per employee work.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory. This post describes what I found out in a non-personal way because I think this can be highly useful for companies looking to keep their employees.

To summaries, Maslow figured out that in order to start self-actualization you would have to have some other needs met first. Once you achieve a certain level of needs to you start working on the second level striving up to Self-actualization.

To the right you’ll see an illustration of the Maslow hierarchy.

Notice that this is in fact an hierarchy. If someone whom had been working with Self-actualization suddenly lose a loved one, or finds him or her self in the middle of a war. It’s most likely that that person will jump down to work on Safety or Loving/belonging.

Being employed affects different parts of this hierarchy. The salary might give fill you Physiological needs for food, it might even help with feeling Safe since the salary helps you put a roof over your head. You might sense belonging at work due to your work friends. Your self-esteem is affected on how good you are at your work, if you get encouragement from colleagues. You can self-actualize if allowed to grow within the company, not based on rank or title but by being allowed to grow by learning, becoming better at what you love to do.

Now an employer should want one thing when hiring a someone: Does the employers self-actualization process align with the company? or in other words: Will the employee be motivated by working with this type of knowledge work? Hopefully all employee’s align in this way at the company at their respective roles.

If your hiring for a great developer, is development what this person will be fulfilled by doing? Will this person be self-actualized by developing new and interesting things and learn new things from his craft? Will that person self-actualize when working creatively to solve the customers problems?

The best performing knowledge workers work in the self-actualization of needs, and probably have done so for quite some time.

To keep such an employee in the self-actualization part of the hierarchy is good for the company, we need to realize that the other levels in the hierarchy needs to be fulfilled first.

If an employee looses a family member for some accident, then that employee will most likely start to mourn and work on the Love/belonging level of the hierarchy. So to keep an employee motivated, being informed about what’s happening to that employee and helping him or her get past that issue will get the employees motivation back on track faster.

If a employees house burns down, helping that employee find a temporary home for his or her family, will make sure the employee has his or her Physiological and Safety needs met.

If someone is bullied at work, making sure that person is respected and treated well at work will help that employee with Esteem and belonging needs.

In essence if you have a motivation problem with one of your employees, find out what’s wrong and see how you can help him or her to full fill the level of need he or she is working on right now. Once that person is back at self-actualization, most likely motivation is no longer a problem. Caring about your knowledge workers needs and cater to the to keep them at the Self-actualization level, will have them motivated and working creatively.

Or as someone said on Twitter: Tiered of coding? fix the other problem in your life and get on with it.

I thought I’d mention some tools to help debugging issues with the cache manifest.

There are two tools that help you verify that the application cache manifest is set up correctly. First theres the Manifesto Application Cache verification bookmarklet. Also the Cache Manifest Validator verifies your cache manifest via file upload, URI or direct input. For some reason however it no longer validates my cache manifest that is working.

Setting up the logging on all the cache events also helps debugging on for example IPad where all you have to rely on is the console log. This blog post shows how to set things up.

Also, something I ran in to on the IPad you might have to shut down all web applications on the IPad before refreshing your application with a Cache manifest. The symptom is that all files are downloaded (shown with progress events) but when its done the IPad just gets an error message. If this is the case, just shut down all web-applications and Safari and reset the Cache from the settings. That got it working again.

However I need a tool to replace Windows Live Writer. Apparently there arn’t many good tools for desktop blogging on the mac, the best I’ve found is Blogo. However that doesn’t work on the new version of Mac OS X. I’ve seen Ecto and MacEdit and their just not there.

Does anyone know of any good desktop blogging tool for the mac? Do I have to write one?

Any suggestions appreciated.

I would like to mention that my expectations on this book was very high, which could make them hard to live up to.

The book starts by describing testing, and the takes us through a fictive scenario where we gradually build up software guided by tests all the way. Then at the end it covers advanced topics.

I had trouble reading the scenario part of the book. Part because I do not like the use of mock-frameworks. But also due to not really buying in to the scenario. Some paragraphs were written to add realism to the scenario, such as sudden changes of UI. But these paragraphs seems taken out of thin air, and adds no value to the chapters. This annoys me. I also disliked how the book kept defending the technology choices of the example, it was quite clear that this was an example after all.

Now the advanced chapters at the end did indeed pick up the book quite a bit, some aspects of it I already knew, while others provided fruitful suggestions on how I could improve certain aspects of one of RemoteX’s test-suites.

The beginning of the book structures out testing and the terms used quite well, and I did like the last parts of the books discussing advanced topics.

I’m not sure if I would recommend this book. The approach in the book isn’t bad. It’s intended for beginners, however I’ve seen what a junior team can do to a test-suite armed with a mocking framework. I would recommend that junior developer would start by using OO-design to do their testing simply because they will learn much more and their tests will be much clearer. An intermediate level of developer could extract great value from this book however.