Xanthene.com

Somehow I manage to attract strangers every now and then who wants to talk to me. That is considered odd behavior in Stockholm.

A couple of years ago a druggie with no teeth came up to me. I was sitting on some display chairs outside a store waiting for a friend when he took the next seat and just started talking into the blue. All of a sudden he asked me if I was from Australia and I could not resist saying yes. Asking if I knew Angus, Angus from AC/DC, which I unfortunately didn’t. He was just back from Bangkok and was very dissatisfied with Sweden. The social helper-ladies was awful and the mob was crap. In Bangkok he was the king and knew all the highest bosses, he dictated the rules.

Another time there was this exetremely happy fellow who never showed anyone his eyes, it was his only rule. He was very much a hippie and wished me and my girlfriend lots of love and babies. All this, just as I was getting off my bike.

Just now an older gentlemen sat down next to me on the subway. While I startded fiddling on my mobilephone he asked if it was my favourite toy. Telling him no, but it helps wasting time on the way home he instead quickly replied the demise of humans. How many hasn’t been killed over a phone he asked. I tried that many has been saved also, but that didn’t stick. 20years ago they weighed 25kg and was useless even then. As he got up and taking off at the next station he also told me that stroking the hair is a nervous sign too – we will all die anyway.

I wished him a nice day to which he hollared a reply from the doors: “Shit, I hope not!”

Strangers in public places, I love talking to you! You make my days :)

No no, I am not a mother. I do hope to prove to be a good father though. But that is a whole other story. The motherly feelings I want to bring up to discussion here is women in tech and particularly in leading positions.

At the company where I work we have quite a few women, and many of them in leading positions of different kinds. Our CTO, lots of mid level management and project managers.

There are diffrences though. Some are more straight forward in their approach than others. I recently had the opportunity to work with an excellent project manager who have the ability to curve the minds on those around her. It was very soft and subtle, before you knew it things were rolling. She managed to protect the team while moving us forward in a very difficult project this way.

What she created was an open environment and invited everyone in, alot of trust came out of this. This is exactly the type of spot I like.

I guess it is also a personal preference of what you like, but in the long run this is the kind of environment you want to cultivate. In the open, things emerge and good stuff come out. Also, having a female leader tends to soften testosterone, and create little room for “chest bumping“. Less comparison and just get things done.

If I had my own company, I would hire this project manager any day for a leading position and find more like her. Women in tech are important, for the sake of getting things done in an orderly fashion.

So, apparently I rebooted this blog/site/homepage/whatever in 2010. I promised change over a long period of time. I told you to stay tuned and that the first one probably would cover some javascript. I remember those ideas and I think that there are some unposted drafts.

This time I hope it will be different. Last time the goal was to start blogging because it felt like a good thing to do, but I didn’t really know why it would be a good idea other than sharing knowledge. Now I’m starting to get some sense to why it is a good thing which, incidently, is what THIS first post will be about :> (is smiley an accepted punctuation in blogging? Probably not, will need to work on that one.)

There are a number of things that have inspired me to get started. For one, I think it was Scott Hanselman who said that “there are a finite number of keystrokes left in your hands” and thus writing a blogpost instead of an email will reach more people AND be saved for the afterworld through indexing and archiving meaning more people will get the message.

Then there is this book I started reading, Pragmatic thinking and learning by Andy Hunt. More on the contents of the book in a later post, but it basically told me to cultivate my R-mode (more on that later aswell). R-mode pretty much translates into creativity which is essential for development to be able to dive into problems and solve appropriatly.

So this is a way to start exercising my brain, be a bit creative out of the everyday work, a test to see what happens. It is also a way to learn to verbalize creative stuff, which can be a hard thing. Besides I like writing. A problem is that I have a hard time stopping once I get going…

Xanthene.com is now up and running again. New host and moved from a hardcoded html-page to WordPress. Along with all this I migrated the three running blogs I had over at Blogger to WordPress, so all photos, recipes and tales from the crypt (vacations) all are here (sorry, but they’re in swedish). Will hopefully get my act together and start blogging about some real stuff, programming and such as well pretty soon.

I think the first one will cover a bit of Javascript…

’tis me again… Hopefully back with full force. Expect a lot of new stuff to happen around here over a longer period of time.