As the companies' database is starting to look good I am looking at the first product based database, which is the Hosting database.  This is something I have wanted to do for a very long time and I did a first attempt back in 2009 that failed because I did not have the tools to make it a reality. Now I have the tools and I just need to figure out how to best make this as good as possible.
The main focus of the Hosting Database will be the pricing table. The idea is to allow for three packages for each hosting offer. This way most hosting companies can fit their different plans into a nice comparison view. I will need to add some nice CSS accordions to the form to make it easy to work with, and it will need a ton of custom fields.
This morning I created the new icons for the hosting part and set up the base category structure. I had an icon from back in 2009 in mind and when I searched for my old website I stumbled upon an interview I did with Tommy that sadly passed away in 2019. It made me a bit sad, but I know Tommy would love to see this new section as he loved services like this.
So, I will continue building this and will make sure it will be a service worthy of an article or two. It is fun to read the ambitions I had back in 2009 are almost the same that I have today!
Onwards!

The first step towards setting up the new databases has been taken, and I now have a pretty good start I think. The basic template is there and the first countries has been added. The template for People work great and the other tabs are showing up as they should. I feel that this is a good start!
Even though there are some CSS magic to be done still for mobile and tablet, I think things are looking pretty good already. There will be a lot of work setting up the countries, but other than that I think that the design is pretty much done. I decided to use a 7 continent setup and then have countries as subcategories. This should be sufficient, especially since I have set up the Industries field as a filter.

For the company listings I designed it light, and I also added a color to the pinned and featured listings. That will come in handy to highlight special companies, but it can also be used down the road if I want to add a form of paid listing feature.

The detailed view comes with a little backdrop in the header if you like that and some basic company related fields. I also bring in data from the People database and the Hosting database right now. I will add the Atlassian Apps database later as well and there is support to add as many tabs as I want down the road.

For the People tab I am still playing around with it, but I can directly call the template I made for My Projects. This makes it very easy to just add the CSS to the page and then everything works perfectly. I will build up the People database with more data though and expand that information even more. For example, I am considering a "looking for work" feature like on LinkedIn.

So far so good, next up is the hosting database and then the People database....

2021 is almost here and despite a world in flames filled with madness I still have hope. It is easy to focus on the negative in these times, but I refuse to get trapped in that negative spiral. I already have clawed through that earlier this fall and I plan to focus on positivity in 2021. Even more than usual.
Rather than making resolutions or make promises that fail for 2021 I will simply focus on one single thing next year: Keep moving forward. No big plans, no fixed goals, just continuous momentum no matter how slow. Nothing perfect, just small increments of improvements. All the time.
I will stop feeding the trolls in 2021 as well. There are a lot of angry, confused and stupid people out there and most of them swarm towards social media to unleash their madness. While it pains me to not point out the lack of logic in their feeble attempts to rationalize their inability to form coherent logic I have realized that it is a futile effort. I have already more or less left Facebook and will do the same with Twitter.
I will consider what to do with Instagram, but it is a limited platform, so I will most likely dial that back as well in 2021. LinkedIn is one of the few platforms I will remain active on, mostly because it is a good platform to form useful connections rather than a platform for madness. I will still try out different new platforms that popup, but less active than before.
Instead, I will focus on my website. It is what give me most satisfaction and now that I see some traffic coming in I feel the passion to write and build again. This is where my heart sings with joy, and it is here that I can make meaningful contributions to help others realize their own dreams. Even though I plan to write some controversial things here under my Debate category, I will make sure that critique is partnered with suggested solutions to make it constructive.
So, for me, I still have hope for 2021, and I look forward to a new year filled with new teachings and explorations.

I think we can all agree that 2020 was not the greatest of years in general. Even though COVID-19 changed the world in 2020, and we lost a lot of people not all things was pitch black. For me the year got better with time because I started the year really bad even before COVID-19, but the end of 2020 was actually not that bad all things considered.
Professionally
I started out 2020 being almost burned out from after effects from a bad internal situation at Zington and a high stress situation in 2019. This situation escalated with new management at Zington that did not fit my view of good management and I choose to resign rather than stay in a work situation I was not happy with. I was not alone in taking this decision and after checking my options in the midst of the Corona outbreak I followed some colleagues to build up something new at Cartina.
The first quarter of 2020 was really bad, but there was one thing that made everything awesome despite that and that was the assignment with ChessIT. Working with ChessIT was great, and it was exactly what I needed at the time. Great people, great attitude from all involved and the soothing work of making design again. This not only sparked my creative side during the project, it revived that passion I have for this website as well.
The second quarter was a bit rough as I resigned from Zington and did not really have a plan going forward. I just knew I could not stay with Zington the way I felt at that moment. With COVID-19 raging across the world most companies stopped hiring and after some consideration I decided to follow some colleagues to Cartina. As I had worked with Cartina before on several occasions and with the opportunity to help build something new, this looked like a good fit for me. Even with a new employer it was still hard to find assignments, which was the same for most consultants at the time. I helped out with the new Cartina website and looked for assignments, but overall things was pretty slow.
After the summer we managed to lure over our former boss Aki and also Margit. This is where things really started to turn around for me emotionally and searching for assignments got a big boost knowing I can always count on Aki and Margit to be there to support me when if I needed it. Never any pressure, just support and positive energy. We also added a nice CV tool that made applying to assignments so much easier, especially for me with so many roles I can take. Slowly the market started to change as well and where the market was reluctant to hire, I now got bombarded with offers. Most of them was for employment of course, but it did not take long before I had three projects landing in my lap. I have now concluded 2 of them and working on the third. For next year it looks like I have assignments at least until the summer.
 
Personally
After a rough patch in 2019 things was much better in 2020. My wife started working again after her studies and got a job she really likes and that seem to fit her perfectly.  My son started to find his place in school as well. After a nice vacation in Dalarna with Jenny's mother and a little balancing with Benjamin's medicine for ADHD he seems to have settled in and is doing well in school again. He also grew quite a bit and lost weight in the process, just like I did in his age. He also started working out at the gym and for the first time ever he actually enjoys gym at school, which is amazing.
We had some big expenses at the end of the year for car issues and a cat that needed surgery, but overall this year has been pretty good for the family. I am gaining some pounds and need to get out more, but I am having fewer issues with my SHR since I stay home. I also don't really have any good place to work, which in combination with not enough exercise have given me some back issues. Nothing more than usual though, so overall things have been pretty ok.
 
The website
This website has been my savior this past year. There has been so much to learn, and I feel that 2020 was the year when the website really started to come together. I have several new sections that I have wanted to build for so many years that I finally could see come to life this year. The fact that I have several more coming next year just make my heart sing with joy.
While I have been posting blog articles and slowly rebuilt the site after loosing all graphics back in 2019, things was a bit slow for the first half of the year or so. It was when I finally rebuilt the templates and moved from the SuperGrid app that I first used while learning how to build my own themes. With that knowledge I now feel that I can build pretty much anything in Pages.
The big highlights however came at the end of the year when I built the database for My Book - working for real and then the redesign of the Movies app. I have been feeling bad about my book since it has been locked away in a software that I find hard to commit to opening. By moving things to a public database this becomes so much easier to access and work on. The fact that it is public also make it a bit more rewarding to write as I can get feedback on it.
The Movies app was just a spur of the moment purchase as I love movies and TV Shows and spend quite a bit of time watching those. I also worked in a video store for several years, so the idea of building a database of movies and TV Shows have been a long dream of mine.
 
Life in general
If this year has taught us anything, then it is that change is painful and that even the smallest of problems can cause big disruptions. A small virus has pretty much crippled the entire world, and we will live with the effects of this for decades. Thousands of people have lost their lives and the situation have illuminated big problems in pretty much every country.
In Sweden, it is our elder care, or rather lack thereof, that has become painfully obvious. It is nothing new, but we have ignored it for decades. Even if we focus on COVID-19 right now you can be sure that thousands of our elders have died needlessly from other viruses such as the flu due to the same lack of education and routines that is now killing our elders by the thousands.
Hopefully we can make sure all who work with elder care at least get basic healthcare training, proper time to care for the elders that survive and of course that we have solid routines to prevent virus and bacterial spreading. As bad as things have been this year I do have hopes that those that survive will see better elder care in the future.
For introverts this year has been the year when remote work finally became acceptable. We could see a huge spike in investments in the remote work sector and once the initial trial period was over most could see that remote work actually works very well for many in the IT sector. I have a feeling this will increase in 2021 as well and hopefully this will lead to a hybrid situation in the future that work for both Introverts and extroverts.
I also think this year have shown the contrast between those that will sacrifice themselves to help others and those that care only about themselves. Never have I felt more despair than this year watching people willing to cause physical harm to others for selfish reasons. Never have greed and selfishness been more apparent to me than this year as more people are forced to deal with their inner demons in isolation or as desperation sets in due to loss of income. It is clear that as fear takes hold of our hearts we will lash out and show the worst part of ourselves.
This year my respect for those that are willing to sacrifice to help others have grown to new heights. It is something amazing to see a person go through a literal hell to help others. To see people work beyond exhaustion or give freely of what little they have to ease the pain of others. These are the people that give hope in a world that seem to continuously drown in selfishness, envy and greed.
2020 was a difficult year, but we will survive and move forward. I only hope that we have learned something from the suffering the world have endured. I doubt the greed will subside magically, but I have hope for a more tolerant world in the future...
 

Today I look into Company profiles over at TechCrunch and try to figure out how ipsCarousel works while mind mapping the new categories for the site. There are still some days left on this year, so let's make the most of it!
As I continue the planning for the site I look into CrunchBase from TechCrunch as inspiration for the Company database. Basically it is the tabbed design and some of the data fields I look at. I will start small and then build based on that I think. I have this idea that a user can add themselves to the company with the click of a button, but not sure how to actually do that. Yet. I will probably will start with something easier like directing the user to the people's database where they can connect their profile to a company.
ipsCarousel is the feature that make those nice sliders in most apps. It is a great feature, but also very much undocumented. This goes for a quite a bit over at IPS, so I am considering making some sort of database for that. At least for the templates it should be easy to make a list of attributes that can be used to help people get started. For ipsCarousel however I will look at making a block or two into sliders as I found a forum thread with some basic info and some example code:
<div class='ipsBox ipsSpacer_bottom'> <h2 class='ipsType_sectionTitle ipsType_reset'>{lang="featured_downloads"}</h2> <section id='elDownloadsFeatured'> <div class='ipsCarousel ipsClearfix' data-ipsCarousel data-ipsCarousel-fullSizeItems data-ipsCarousel-slideshow data-ipsCarousel-shadows='false'> <ul class='cDownloadsCarousel ipsClearfix' data-role="carouselItems"> {{foreach $featured as $file}} {template="featuredFile" group="browse" app="downloads" params="$file"} {{endforeach}} </ul> <span class='ipsCarousel_shadow ipsCarousel_shadowLeft'></span> <span class='ipsCarousel_shadow ipsCarousel_shadowRight'></span> <a href='#' class='ipsCarousel_nav ipsHide' data-action='prev'><i class='fa fa-chevron-left'></i></a> <a href='#' class='ipsCarousel_nav ipsHide' data-action='next'><i class='fa fa-chevron-right'></i></a> </div> </section> </div> This weekend I also went over the categories on the site and made a little mind map over the databases and sections using XMind. This is because I see that the IPS content will grow, and it is a niche that have potential for the future. I also see that I need to add a new section for Databases where I will place People, Companies and Roles. I have also mapped out Section specific databases like a hosting database, Atlassian App database, Management Frameworks database and so on.
2021 will be an exciting year for sure 🙂

As this year slowly comes to an end I find myself filled with inspiration. Looking past the situation in the world these days things are not that bad to be honest, and I have a fire in my heart to build. I have struggled a bit with that this year, but now I really feel that my heart long to build and to write again.
Sure finances could be better as there have been some big costs lately and a long time without proper income. Still, I am more fortunate than most and as financial things rarely matter to me, as long as I can still pay my bills and have a little something left over.  Health wise I am mostly tired, and I don't get out much. It will get better as light returns now and hopefully the vaccination can make it safe to hit the gym again soon.
When it comes to building I feel that I am in a good place right now. I am looking into the next step and strangely enough I stumbled upon a topic on the IPS forums about a job board. It seems a lot of people want something like that and as I started to think about it, I realized that the solution for a job board actually fit what I have in mind for this site, but for a few different things.
I already have a database for people (two actually if you could Awesome People) and I was planning on adding a database for companies. This was first meant for Hosting companies, so I was thinking that I should add a database for services to that as well. Now if I think about a job board it is three types of data:
The Job Offer The company that offer the job People that want the job So if I make a database for Companies, then I can pretty easy add different offers and then connect them to different offers or services. That would work well with my thoughts to have databases for people, companies and services/products. People will be located under Community while Companies and Services / Products will be located under Resources.
There are now quite a bit of links under Resources however, and I might move things into a new section called "Databases".  This makes sense to keep things organized, but it makes the footer a bit complex, so I may need a new design for that area. Overall I need to sit down and focus a bit on the structure of the website going forward.
Things are good now 🙂

With the movies and TV shows in place I am starting to look at the IT Roles database. I notice that in many organizations there is a lack of understanding of IT roles. I also see that mixed roles like Scrum Master start to popup, which will lead to new generations of people being burned out due to poor understanding of the role definitions. So I plan to redesign the database a bit to make it more useful.
Currently, the database is named Job Titles and I will start by renaming that. Then I need to make a new design for the templates and I will probably take some from the standard design and some from the movies and TV shows design. Since the Roles will have quite a lot of information I will use tabs for sure as well as some form of representation of the role in the form of an image.
There will e many custom fields for this database and there will be a few special things going on in the form for it as well. For the fields I will prepare for more functionality than I plan to have in version 1. There are some fields that I have an idea of how I want them to work, but I don't quite know how to make it so. Yet.
The fields I plan to have so far are:
Role Description Responsibilities Mandates Report to Staff reporting Organization Placement Work Direction Related activities Related Frameworks Role Certifications People in this role I might tie in Books into this as well later, but I need to expand on that section first for it to be useful. As you can see I also have People in this role, which I will set up using the same type of link that I have in My Projects. Right now this is just a placeholder database, but I will build a proper one next year hopefully. This would be similar to Awesome People, but a bit toned down.
With this database I will be able to connect it to My Book and other areas, so I can create cross-linking between different areas. Some areas such as certifications can be extended later on and tied with eductors, so I can direct some people to them. If I build a tools database I might also tie that in here as well. For now though I start with this and see where it ends up.
It will be awhile before I get to this though because I will first do my best to get into Vue.js to build a new site with @Marko Salonen. That will be a bit of a challenge, but one I look forward to!

This week I have tinkered with a new section here on the site. I purchased a plugin for movies and TV Shows when I also bought the Books plugin. For some reason I just sat down and played around a bit with it, and it turned out great. I am very happy so far, even if I can do a lot more with it. There are a few things that I need to sort out first though...
The plugins are from the same developer and the price was right, so I bought both. As I am a long time movie lover and a frequent TV show watcher I figured I could use it somehow. As I sat down and played around with it, I was amazed how easy it was to work with, and I ended up with a design that I liked. This is something I have wanted to build for almost 12 years now.
Once I got some help figuring out how to use the custom fields I could really start  building. I have a few things that are manual that can be automated later, but it is not a big issue really. The design is pretty basic, but I think I can use that for other things as well. I might even recreate it for a blog post layout...
One thing I though was cool would be to add a movie player to the background image. Rather than build one from scratch I just used the data-ipsDialog function that are built into Invision Community. It tuned out pretty great, but I might change it a bit later to make it a bit better.
With this however I take the first step to split up the section About Me. It is a section that has not received much love yet, and I need to figure out what to do about that section. It will be a bit interesting to see what I will do about that section though as it has some potential, and yet I might not want to focus too much on it.
As it looks 2021 will be a very interesting year indeed.

In just a few days I have managed to build a new book section here on the site and update the support section that I use Jira Service Management for. It has been a burst of creative energy and I feel it was exactly what I needed. I am now tired, but filled with energy if that makes any sense.
For a while my book writing has been pretty much dead. I just did not enjoy the format and I felt I was stretching myself a bit thin with the very extensive content. In short, I have pretty much abandoned the writing and focused on writing articles here on the site instead. The idea was there that maybe I could create a database for it instead, but I was a bit hesitant due to the work involved to build a new layout.
On Friday however I just gave it a go, just to see how much work it would include. As it turned out it was not much that was needed and with some very small adjustments and a few icons designed I am pretty happy with the outcome. I feel I have a pretty solid base to work from, so now I just need to define the scope and start writing.
I have tossed up a basic skeleton, but I will break this down properly as soon as I have decided on the scope. I already have a basic process designed up and I will extend that a bit with more details. It is something that I have done multiple times in different organizations, so I have a basic idea on how deep I need to go in each area. The tricky part will be to not go to deep into detail, so I lose myself in them. I think that if I have a visual roadmap that will be a bit easier though.
I will probably add a few tidbits here and there that may be a bit out of scope though. Things like tips and tricks on how to manage teams or structure workshops for example. The advantage of working publicly like this is that I can get feedback directly, but also that I can write as much as I like and then decide what I want to put into an actual book when it is time to publish.
Last night, as I could not sleep, I also did some cleaning up in my Jira Instance. I created a new support section and created a new workflow for different requests. Then I disabled the support function here on the site and turned off the contact form that was active for some reason. The reason to do that is that I want to direct all incoming requests to Jira since I find the internal support function in Invision Community lacking a bit.
I now have a new setup, so I can receive and manage the different requests I have gotten lately. Strangely enough I get quite a few requests regarding sponsored articles and guest blogging, but also some work requests. This way I can manage them better using Jira Service Management as the engine.
Overall I feel that this is a great way to end 2020 and I might have one or two more things I want to build before the end of the year. I have already talked a bit about the database for Atlassian App reviews, but I think that the database might be possible to also use for other types of databases, like a database over JavaScript libraries or tools for the different sections. That would expand the site quite a bit, which is not a bad thing in my mind.
So, today I am filled with creative energy and I look forward to seeing what new, exciting things might happen in the future.

Another week has passed and this week I have made my final delivery for one project. This makes my head a bit less conflicting and I can focus a bit better without the need to split my attention on multiple projects. I have also played a bit Destiny 2 this week and looked into some interesting topics surrounding Agile and Story Points. Now I plan for the weekend to catch up on some things.
On Tuesday this week I made my final delivery for the Martin & Servera project. I held a two-hour-long presentation to the steering group to summarize the result of the pre-study. The delivery was well received and I will probably have a new project next year based on that outcome. It always feels good when the client is happy with the delivery and I got a lot of good feedback on the presentation to boost my ego a bit.
In my other project we are doing a lot of work defining processes right now. Next week I will hold my training course for Incident, Change, Problem and Service Request again, and we will have a retro on the first part of the POC. It is likely that I will set up a simulated workflow for the training course using Advanced Roadmaps and next year we also need to dig into Insight a bit more.
As part of this project I am working on a graphic workflow of sorts that I will use as a basis for future articles on how to work properly with IT development. It will be a continuous work where I expand the design with new workflows and try to tie it together in one big overview. Then the idea is to break out certain areas and define them in more detail. This ties well into the work I have been doing to write my book for the last few years.
Last week I wrote about estimations and this week I have followed up some discussions about Story Points and the Iron Triangle, which I will write about this weekend I think. It is a bit interesting to see prominent members of the Agile community quite clearly promoting avoiding responsibility because the work process is flawed rather than fixing the problems themselves. I think I will write quite a bit about that topic in a near future.
Updating on the site is on my agenda this weekend. I have made some changes to the form for this blog and the articles form, so now I need to build new forms for My Projects and the Awesome People section. I will probably start looking at the Atlassian App Reviews database and My Book database as well. My Book will be a bit different so it will need a custom design, but for the Atlassian App Reviews I can use the standard design.
Overall this has been a pretty good week and I look forward to next already 🙂

So this week was a bit hectic to say the least. I had a big training session for Stockholm Exergi where we started up the developers for the new work processes using Jira and Confluence. I also finished up some things here on the site and it seems that I am getting noticed because I have received multiple requests for sponsored articles this week.
The work I do for Stockholm Exergi is fun and I got great feedback from the education I held on Friday. That was the first education and it was aimed towards the development team. Next week I will do another education session regarding ITIL and ITSM for the management teams. It will be based on Jira service Management and Confluence with the focus on Incident and Change management. I look forward to that.
Otherwise, on the work side I am getting a ton of questions for employment right now and you can really tell that the market is shifting a bit. There is an increasing need for help with work processes and especially for Atlassian's products it seems. No doubt this is driven by the change in work conditions that for many are strange and unfamiliar. It means I get more work and that is not a bad thing right now.
It seems I am not the only one being popular lately. This website also start to get some attention. This week I have received a handful requests from people who want to post a sponsored article. This of course is always welcome and I think I need to work on the guest blogging page soon as more and more people are starting to ask about it. I might need to work on the Author database a bit sooner plan planned I think.
The past months I have been asked quite a few times to talk with friends about their current situation in life. Some ask for advice on work processes, others ask for help with jobs and so on. I am happy to help of course, and I am happy to have helped some friends and colleagues to find new employment. This is something I enjoy a lot and I will look at expanding that a bit more in the future here on the website as well.
I have started to evaluate a books feature here on the site. Not sure if I like it yet, but I feel that having a books feature is a definitive must. I will continue testing it out as time permit and if I don't like it then I will build a custom database for it.
Finally, I have been playing a bit of Destiny 2 now with the new expansion and I started to get a bit stressed over it. Not so much that the game itself was stressful, but the fact that I am not leveling up as fast as other players. I know it's just a psychological effect that my mind feel that I am loosing out on things, so I just had to adjust my mindset a bit. Overall I think there are a bit to many bugs right now, but overall it's a pretty fun experience.
Today is Raid day when the best raiders in the world give the new raid a go in order to try to become worlds first. I will probably watch it a bit if I can as it's often pretty funny to watch.
It has been a weird week.
How was yours?