På grunn av sykdom ble intervjuet med mellom meg og Robert Steen 1. juni flyttet. Du kan istedet se oss live førstkommende fredag 22. juni. Jeg ble først oppmerksom på finansbyråd Robert Steen når vi ba ham om å holde åpningsinnlegg på Dataforeningens Software 2018. Som han selv sa på scenen: Å invitere en kommunepolitiker til å åpne en IT-konferanse kan virke litt rart. Men Robert Steen er en politiker som setter digital transformasjon på dagsorden, han har en bakgrunn fra oppstarten av FINN.

For nesten nøyaktig tre uker siden var jeg så heldig at jeg fikk lov å sette meg ned med Torbjørn Larsen, IT-direktøren i NAV og prate med ham på video om hvordan man fornyer en stor offentlig virksomhet. NAV har de siste årene blitt et av de mest ettertraktede fagmiljøene for IT-folk og jeg tror dette er takket være Torbjørn. Konteksten av intervjuet var i Dataforeningen sitt nye samtaleprogram Alvorlig Talt.

I’ve long time been a critic of the mechanism of compiler checked exceptions in Java. Whether you love them or hate then, one thing is sure: There’s situations where you don’t want to have to deal with them. The solution in Java is to wrap a checked exception in new RuntimeException(e) but this gives long stack traces without adding useful information. Sometimes, we just want to tell the compiler to chill.

As the year comes to an end, I describe some gloomy clouds in our future. This Norwegian language article was first published on the web site of the Norwegian Computing Association. Hvilken fremtid overlater vi til våre barn og barnebarn? Endringstakten i samfunnet ser ikke ut til å sakke ned og en ting er klart: Programvaren som bygges i dag vil skape muligheter og problemer som vi så vidt kan se konturene av.

To avoid the big problems with projects, everybody recommends risk management. At the same time, I’ve rarely seen risk management practiced effectively. Do we identify the same risks and do we actually prepare to handle them? The ironic thing is that I think most projects have the same top four risks. In this blogpost, I explore these common risks. To avoid exposing my customers and colleagues, the examples given is based on hearsay and not actual experience.

Recently, my organization reached a big goal and we decided to celebrate by taking everyone out for dinner. What happened was a GDPR nightmare. Or was it? We sent out a Google Form with three simple questions: 1. What’s your name, 2. Are you coming to the dinner? 3. Do you have any dietary constraints? But wait! According to article 4 of the GDPR, “‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person”.

We’re running Mobile Era for the second year on October 5th-6th and I’d like to share some experience on how we’re using scripts and Trello to help with the organization effort. If you’d like automating simple tools, this is the article for you. If you haven’t signed up for Mobile Era yet, you can leave a comment in this blog post for a discount code! Google Forms is great! You can simply design pretty advanced forms and easily get responses.

If you are working with software development as a developer, manager or tester, then you will be impacted by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – the new EU laws regarding data privacy. In many ways, the regulation is likely to have as big of an impact as the Y2K problem. But this time it’s because of a good cause! And you cannot ignore it, as the fines for doing so can be crippling.

Trailblazing the first delivery of a software system requires courage and conviction, especially on projects that replace existing business critical software. When I’ve been acting as system architect I’ve employed a number of tricks in order to structure functionality and technical solutions in such a way that we can complete these early deliveries without sleepless nights. The most important is to find a subset of functionality that can be used with the rest being completed and investing in bridges from the old to the new.

On the futility of understanding Is true understanding actually possible? I use my fingers to tap out keys on a keyboard and the light from your screen hits our eyeballs, but is it reasonable to think that there is any correspondence between the patterns in my brain and the patterns that were just created in your brain? Or are we just lucky if we have the same thoughts? I used to think that if I just used the right words and asked the right questions and if only those I spoke with responded with the right words, then I would really understand what I needed to know.