Jaran Flaath

December 8, 2023

Moving

I am moving my writing space over to a new home at https://jaran.flaath.no/ Subscribe there if you want to continue to follow my ramblings.
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November 10, 2023

Hvorfor jeg løper

Løping har for min del blitt både meditasjon, mosjon og livsglede. Hvordan kom jeg hit, og er det bærekraftig de neste 20, 30, 40 årene? Løping har for meg alltid vært noe jeg bedriver i perioder, går lei av etter noen måneder før jeg setter skoene på hylla. Noen måneder eller år senere plukkes de ned for nok et forsøk, og slik fortset...
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November 1, 2023

En Sjøens Helt

Jeg har fullført "En Sjøens Helt" av Jon Michelet det siste halvåret. Etter å ha latt bøkene fordøye en stund har jeg gjort meg opp noen tanker om verket. Dette var ikke en bokserie jeg nok hadde begynt på uten sterke anbefalinger fra personer jeg har stor tillit til og hvis anbefalinger jeg ilegger stor tyngde. Historisk fiksjon har i...
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August 23, 2023

Ta i mot skryt

Å akseptere skryt og anerkjennende ord, kan ofte være overraskende vanskelig. Ikke som i det å akseptere at anerkjennelsen er riktig, eller at ordene varmer, men som i det å ta det til seg og si "takk" - uten at det føles kleint og at man må vitse det bort. Det å lære seg å ta i mot skryt og anerkjennelse øker både gleden ved å motta, ...
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April 21, 2023

Our Natural Best

Our natural best is the performance we are able to muster at any particular point in time, in an environment of psychological safety and free of friction. My natural best will be different today than what it was yesterday. It may be due to better sleep and feeling full of energy, or perhaps I have been up several times during the night...
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March 15, 2023

People, not users

Inspired by Simon Sineks chat with Seth Godin, I started reflecting on how we talk about the people using the things we make. "Users" is a very common concept in the world of software and services. What if the way we talk and think about the people using our products and services impacts how we see them and our empathy towards them - a...
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February 27, 2023

Something radical

I have done something radical. I have deleted my entire Goodreads "Want to read" list. All 164 books. Well, almost. I have 8 books left, but the rest is gone. We keep making never ending lists. We create todo lists of everything we want to do, but never get around to doing. We create bookmarks of internet sites we will never look at ag...
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January 10, 2023

Minimum Viable Signup

Following up my previous rant on signups, I am proposing a new tool into the lean product development toolbox: The Minimum Viable Signup. We often focus on the process of signing up and onboarding users, but I want us to focus more on the information we collect during the signup and onboarding instead, and let that drive the process. L...
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December 28, 2022

Stop making signup so painful

Too often is onboarding about getting as much information about users as possible, before they are given access to what they actually came to you for. We take our users through screen after screen, asking for contact details, adresses, names, newsletter preferences, interests. You name it. There is an opportunity in turning this on its...
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October 27, 2022

We should stop enabling junk values

I often wonder where we would be today, if all the effort we put into making products and services whose only goal is to enable and enforce junk values, were instead put into solving real problems for humanity. If we instead created products whose purpose was to enable humanity to be the best we could possibly be. Imagine that. Why do ...
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June 1, 2022

On parenting

Being a parent is hard. It's easy to fall into strict, rigid patterns in your parenting strategy. We're blasted with articles, books and know-it-all parents that want to tell us the right way to do parenting. It's easy to believe you have to find the correct stance on every aspect of parenting and stick to it. What's become clear to me...
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April 15, 2022

Debating in private

It is no news that the online debate climate is polarised, aggressive and more focused on getting your point across at the least possible characters, than actually engaging in a healthy debate. Many topics benefit from being discussed in the open, and there are still arenas for open civilised discussions. For most online media today th...
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March 17, 2022

Building trust through a change of mind

Changing our minds is one of the most difficult things we human beings do. We very easily marry our beliefs, and this bond grows stronger and stronger with more evidence to the contrary of our stance. As David Heinemeier Hansson points out in one of his recent posts, this is perhaps even more difficult when your opinions has been filli...
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March 7, 2022

The Culture series 📚

The last two years I have been reading the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. It's a grand space opera set in an incredibly immersive universe - in fact quite overwhelming at times. As a kid I used to love reading fantasy, dreaming away into magical worlds filled with heroes and monsters. Becoming older, I have a hard time immersing in t...
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March 3, 2022

A new versionCode scheme for Android

The official Android documentation gives little in terms of best practices around versionCode, apart from that it has to be an ever increasing integer. We have been using the Git commit count as the versionCode, on the projects where I have been involved. This has been a success in most cases, however there are a couple of issues with ...
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January 28, 2022

Star inflation

Think about how you consider purchases, new books to read and what apps to install: How often do you look at items with 3 stars and think "Hey, I'll try this one today!"? We have a star inflation and it's causing us great disservice - both users and producers alike. The 5-star system we are rating after today, is scaled something like ...
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January 1, 2022

We should stop obsessing with technology and start obsessing with user experience

We love to obsess with technology. That new UI framework, that new paradigm for software design, functional versus object orientation, multiplatform versus native - there's no lack of technological details to immerse in and fall in love with. Moving from backend to frontend over the last four years I've gotten a new guiding voice at th...
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