Fear sells

Living in Stockholm is dangerous, at least you can easily get that impression. No, today I’m not going to talk about Covid-19, today I’m going to talk about another danger.

It lurks in the wilderness and jumps on you when you walk by and sucks your blood.

It’s less than 5 mm long.

It’s a tick.

A tick lurking for a host to come by. Copyright Leroy Baptiste

If you have walked in a forest, especially in the late spring/early summer after rain, you have probably encountered it.

Ticks can transfer diseases. One of them — just like Covid-19 — is a disease for which there is no known cure: Tick-borne encephalitis or TBE. There is, however, a vaccine.

If you live in Stockholm, it is very hard to not know this. Big billboards next to busstops, in the subway, and over super market entrances will remind you every spring and summer.

A flyer I picked up at a local drop-in clinique stating: “TBE-vaccinate yourself against the uninvited guests of the summer. Drop-in, open also evenings and weekends”. Complete with a token-BAME person.

For those of you who don’t live in Stockholm, here are examples from a few infomercial sites:

From https://www.fasting.nu (Pfizer): “One tick bite can be enough — a vaccine exists.”

From https://tbe.se (Healthcare Media): “Lethal tick disease more common than previously known” and “2017: More cases than ever before”.

Plus plenty of pictures of ticks and kids. I’m reminded by the scene in The Truman Show where Truman visits a travel agency to buy a plane ticket and there is a poster of a plane being hit by lightning on the wall behind the sales agent.

Into the sales funnel

Ticks are common also in Denmark and Skåne where I lived before, and while I was taught from childhood to check for ticks and too look out for infection, the danger was Borelia, another tick-borne disease, for which there is a cure (antibiotics, if given early). However, in certain areas, ticks also carry TBE, and one of these areas is the Stockholm region.

So as a good parent, I was naturally fully intended on getting the family vaccinated. Who wouldn’t want their kids to go play in a forest? Which parent doesn’t do their best to protect their kids against the dangers of the world?

First summer in Stockholm came and went without us getting vaccinated (or infected), we were busy doing other things. When life started to calm down — and triggered by the ever present reminders all around — I looked into the practicalities of how to get it done. But there was one thing that was nagging me: Sweden generally provides good public health care, at least for kids, with vaccine programs and regular health checks. So if TBE is so dangerous, why doesn’t Sweden provide the vaccine for free?

So I looked into the facts.

What is the risk of catching TBE?

According to the Swedish health authorities, the number of TBE cases reported per year in the Stockholm region are:

2017: 146 or 6,32 per 100 000 inhabitants

2018: 116 or 4,94 per 100 000 inhabitants

2019: 98 or 4,12 per 100 000 inhabitants

The numbers I have cited are the cases reported as infected in Sweden. The region of Stockholm contains about 2.3 million people.

For comparison, the number of people who have tested positive with Covid-19 in the Stockholm region so far is above 15 000. However, the vaccine has been around for some time now and I don’t know how many in the Stockholm region has been vaccinated. Maybe we are the last four in the region who hasn’t got our shots?

Checking other sources, here is from CDC: “The overall risk of acquiring TBE for an unvaccinated visitor to a highly endemic area during the TBE virus transmission season has been estimated at 1 case per 10,000 person-months of exposure.”

Also, even if you happen to catch TBE, most cases are mild. Again from CDC: “The European subtype is associated with milder disease, a case-fatality ratio of <2%, and neurologic sequelae in up to 30% of patients. “

Say we are exposed to ticks for one month per year through our behaviour, this puts the odds of someone in the family catching TBE at less than once per 10 000 summers of outdoor activity.

What does the vaccine do?

Vaccines are not miracles, even if they come close. To be fully effective, three doses must be given over one year, with a re-vaccination every 3-5 years.

From the Swedish Health Authority: “After three doses according to the normal time table, almost 100% of the vaccinated is protected for at least three years”

Not bad. Each dose cost around 400 SEK. So the family could be protected for three years for just under 5 000 SEK.

Why doesn’t Sweden provide a free vaccine?

Åland (between Sweden and Finland) provides a free vaccine to its citizens while Sweden has chosen not to do so. In my search to understand why, I found a study by the Swedish Health Authority from December 2018 which clearly examines the costs and benefits for three different vaccine programs.

Essentially doing the same calculations as above, the study concludes that it is not cost effective to provide publicly sponsored vaccination.

The cost of saving one life-year lands at way above 1 000 000 SEK per year in all of the scenarios. While the study does not put an exact break-even number — as this is essentially a political question — it does state that costs of more than 1 000 000 SEK/year is generally perceived as not cost effective.

This leaves the market open for the commercial actors to convince people like me that what they offer is of value to me. Looking at the dropping number of reported TBE cases for 2019, it looks like they have been very succesful doing this. Or maybe the ticks just didn’t like the hot and dry summers of 2018 and 2019.

My conclusion

My personal risk appetite is definitely higher than 1 per 10 000. So I decided to not get us vaccinated but rely on the well known prevention measures: Wear long trousers and closed footwear when going into the forest, check for ticks when returning home, pay attention also to worn clothes. That saves the family three trips to a clinique and cash for a new iPad. It’s not like we are camping in the archipelago every weekend anyway.

Now after looking into the details, I can safely walk past the infomercials and still feel like a good parent. Of course, if it so happens that one of my kids gets bitten by a tick that causes a serious case of TBE, I will have to live with the consequence of knowing that I — maybe — could have prevented it. Or, hang on, maybe I should buy the kids an insurance, another heavily-marketed product in Sweden…?

Fear sells.

Best of times

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times, … it is a time like any other time.

When Charles Dickens wrote the introduction to a Tale of Two Cities, he was writing a historical novel about the French Revolution. Many times since first reading his gripping story, the first sentence in the book has resonated with me when the present has presented itself from its worst and best sides. Trump, Brexit, and Corona, but also smartphones, drones and internet everywhere.

For me personally, Corona Time has meant lots of quality time with my wife and kids. After the initial disruption and the re-discovering what is valuable, important, meaningful and possible right here, right now, we have enjoyed many great moments.

We live in a beautiful spot with forest and lakes close by, in a suburbia with bike lanes, play grounds, shopping facilities, and still close to nature. A few weeks ago, I took off the supporting wheels on Sofie’s bike at her own request, and soon after she was biking on two wheels. This Sunday, we went to Hågelbyparken, a 3 km ride each way, to enjoy the afternoon sunshine with Sofie biking herself both ways. Saturday on the way back from a car trip to the south tip of Botkyrka, a mother elk and her young kid were grazing in the evening sun right next to the road as we passed by.

It is more than 2 months since I’ve been in the city center of Stockholm and I don’t miss it.

Remnants of fortifications at Skanssundet protecting access to Södertälje from the sea. The fortifications were abandoned by the Swedish garrison shortly before Russian troops arrived and razed the area in 1719. According to local legend, the departing troops should have said: Now you will be rid of us; soon others will come that will hurt more. Copyright Frederik Jensen.

From change comes opportunity

I was laid off from my job a few weeks ago. It’s never fun, but it was the right decision for the company. I was in a strategic position with a short notice period. It was great to get to know the company, but also great now to get to re-invent myself. At work, I had a colleague argue “it has been like that for 15 years, we can’t change that”, while at the same time, outside, people stopped going to concerts, movies, and plays, and stopped visiting relatives and holding parties. A time of change is a time of opportunity, rules are being rewritten.

I’m half way in my professional life, I’ve worked in the space between technology and business for 20 years. I’ve written code, designed libraries, frameworks and tools, I’ve initiated, executed and closed projects. I’ve set up a company to launch a hobby project. I’ve picked up countless new technologies (and vaporised buzzwords) and I’ve worked with lots of smart people. I’ve met my wife at work and we moved to Stockholm to explore new opportunities.

And still the best is yet to come.

So I’m discovering the job market in Stockholm (again). We hear a lot about the companies that are hit hard by the crisis. But there are winners as well as losers. Plenty of open positions are being posted on LinkedIn, at least the kinds I qualify for. So, to land a good next job, is like playing a game or optimising a process, both of which I enjoy!

Here are some insights I’ve gotten so far:

Python & Data Science is hot!
LinkedIn Learning does have good quality content!
Covid-19 has shown that working full time remote is possible! But companies and recruiters have not yet found out!

Getting into Python and Data Science could be great fun — let me explain why.

Python is huge

I first came upon Python 20 years ago. I was fascinated with the core design principle, the Colombo egg of having white space replacing the semantic meaning of curly braces and semi colons. And then, having learned Matlab at university, it felt very familiar.

Then I joined SimCorp and became an APL programmer for 10 years. APL is one of the inspirations for Matlab and Python. APL has a run time interpreter and awesome native array support for working with vectors and matrices. The one thing that puts most people off is the non-ascii characters, which certainly impose a learning curve for newcomers. For SimCorp, this meant establishing its own training programme and developing lots of libraries internally.

Now Python has overtaken Java and JavaScript as the most popular programming language (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og847HVwRSI).

I revisited Python last week. I installed Visual Studio Code and took an online training course to brush up on my skills. Some takeaways:

Great interfacing capabilities (want to run your own analysis of Covid-19 data? https://covid19api.com)
Great libraries for calendar and dates.
Great community of Python lovers.

I also came upon Daniel Ross’ talk from PyCon Sweden 2019 on why Python is huge in finance, well worth half an hour of your time.

Data Science is all around us

Well, what is data science? Beyond the hashtag and buzzword, it is about using domain knowledge and statistical and mathematical models to understand and analyse data. Funny enough, back in my university days, I put together a master program in applied mathematics for myself with courses in numerical analysis, optimisation and data fitting, and a thesis in stochastic calculations. So getting into data science is quite like going back to the roots.

And although I visited the Swedish Workshop on Data Science in October 2019 (https://www.kth.se/en/eecs/om-oss/konferenser-och-event/sweds19), I have a thing or two to catch up on, so I’ve set myself up for a self study of An Introduction to Statistical Learning (http://faculty.marshall.usc.edu/gareth-james/ISL/index.html) and R for Mac (https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/).

The arrival of Covid-19 has popularised modelling and data-driven decision making as never before and correct understanding of a phenomena and the data are crucial for life-and-death decisions these days. In the next Netflix drama, a Data Scientist will be played by cool, young, diverse actor and — in the voice of a prophet — correctly predict the consequences of messing with the laws of nature.

Let me leave you with one final link, an extraordinarily informative presentation of the concepts of epidemiology we now hear every day: https://ncase.me/covid-19.

Caught a rat

This morning I caught a rat. We haven’t seen them for a long time, but yesterday I saw one in our winter garden* and set a trap.

Rats was one of the surprises that came with moving to Stockholm. I guess it comes with many people living “close to nature”, with lakes and forests and dumpsters.

View from Kolmården over Bråviken. For the school winter holiday, we went on a trip to Kolmården — 100 km south of Stockholm — and stayed at a family friendly hotel with spas, pools, play rooms, and events for the kids. Still in the early days of the pandemic, the place was not as crowded as it could have been. Copyright Frederik Jensen.

We discovered their presence shortly after moving in and soon took our precautions. I sealed off entries into the house and under the house, I removed all bushes near the house, we keep the doors closed and the lawn short, we don’t leave food around outside and garbage goes into closed bins only. I also bought a trap and competed with the neighbours to get the most kills, at least those who still cared.

The autumn where they renovated the sewers under the house, the rats were running around in the play ground in broad daylight.

The last year or so has been quiet on the rat front though. So yesterday’s visit was a surprise. Some quick troubleshooting revealed the issue: My wife had left a bag with stale bread in a plastic bag in the winter garden.

Because of the Holodomor*, Ukrainians never throw away food. In spite best effort, we still fail to consume what we buy from time to time before it is spoiled, and as we don’t have animals — at least some we want to keep around — we do sometimes end up with food waste. So we go feed the ducks in the lake with the kids every now and then. Yesterday we were overdue. Today we caught up.

Interesting times

As everyone else we are impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, trying to hit the right level of changed behaviour to stay safe while still carrying on living. Oskar’s party is postponed. My business trip to Denmark this coming week is off. Easter vacation in Denmark to open the summer house for the season is at minimum shortened.

A time of change is a time of opportunity. More time playing with the kids and to enjoy the spring.

Take care, stay safe. Wash hands, cough in your sleeve, and don’t leave food around for the rats.

Notes

Winter garden. With four different languages around at home and after being confused about the Swedish term ‘uterum’ which both means outhouse and an unheated room in extension of a house, we decided to officially name the rooms in our house to at least be consistent. While we do keep flowers the room, it is maybe more aspirational to call it the winter garden, it’s mostly where we store boxes and garden furniture in the winter.
Holodomor. The great, man-made famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine. Millions died of starvation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor.

I found (a) Quest

So I’ve started designing a new game. It’s a text adventure based on the Quest engine and it’s an adaptation of Montsegur 1244, my game about the fall of Montsegur in 1244 at the end of the Albigensian crusade in what is today southern France (1).

A digital game

Up until now, I have only created analog games, mostly tabletop RPGs for game conventions like Fastaval. Creating and publishing Montsegur 1244 in 2008 — 2010 was great fun.

As my kids grow older, I see a lot of good (and some not-so-good) games on the iPad. I also enjoy playing games on my smartphone. It’s like the smartphone format takes everything down in size, making it a one man project to create and publish a game app. It’s ok that you only play a game for a couple of hours, when you only pay 2 EUR for it. Plus you can reach a large audience.

While I enjoy pushing cardboard, dice, and meeples in the company of other people as much as any other, I’m also looking at a lot of boxes on shelves (and toys on the floor and books on shelves) and clearly seeing the advantages of digital content. Travel light, travel far.

So I’ve decided to create a digital game.

The Old Town of Tallinn from our visit in November 2019. While Norman nobles were busy fighting heretics in Provence, the Danish king took the crusade to the “heretics” in Baltikum. Not far from where I took this picture, the Danish flag, Dannebrog — according to legend — fell from the sky at the Battle of Lyndanisse in 1219. Copyright Frederik Jensen 2019.

Quest

A few weeks ago I began looking into tools and platforms for creating games on the IPhone. Very quickly I found Quest at http://textadventures.co.uk. It is a platform for creating and running text adventures.

Quest is open source on the MIT license, which means that you keep the door open for a commercial launch. It is super easy to get started, as there is an online editor where you can create rooms and characters and start playing almost immediately. So that is what I did. The feature set and the stability were good, even if it is a bit slow to play online.

A deadline

Since moving to Stockholm, I’ve mostly played games with my friend Oskar when I found time for playing. Oskar will be 40 next month, and when I asked about what he wanted, he said no presents, please — or to make a donation.

So I’m thinking to publish the game by then for him to play when he is turns 40. It’s a good time box. Deadlines are good to help focus on what is important.

Making hard choices

While I enjoyed puzzle games as much as any other (Day of the Tentacle, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), I don’t want to create a puzzle game for my adaptation of Montsegur 1244. I don’t want players to discover a one true story about the siege, but rather have each play-through generate a story with a statement about why people choose to burn for something they believe in (quite literally in this case (2)). Essentially it is not about finding out how to do what you want but finding out what you want to do and making hard choices in a difficult situation.

Into the trenches

Obviously my ambition leads to more work as Quest aims at scripted events and interactions and now I’m heading into sandbox territory. So this weekend I took a deep dive into writing a custom library in the scripting language of Quest. My goal was to make it possible to sneak past the crusaders but only when it is dark. Something like:

> Wait until evening

You wait until evening. It gets dark.

> Sneak past guards

You sneak past the guards without a sound and escape from Montsegur.

It took a while, learning a new language and new tools, but now I got a time tracker that can keep track of when it is light and dark outside and run the commands above. Furthermore, it triggers events such that characters can go to bed when it gets dark, wake up at dawn and go find something to eat.

So what’s next? I guess I need to model relations between characters and how they influence the decisions at the end of the game.

1. My first idea was actually to create a cat petting simulator, but someone already did that.

2. Trapped inside Montsegur was more than 500 followers of the Cathar Faith. At the end of the siege, they were given the choice to repent or to burn alive. More than 200 chose death.

Why we sleep and alarm clock experiments

Over the holidays, I listened to Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Mathew Walker as an audio book while driving.

If it wasn’t because what Mr. Walker sells is free (sleep), he would classify as a snake oil salesman. There is almost no limit to what natural sleep can do for your health: Improved learning, memory, immune system, and mental health. His writing style is a little bit too American-centric for my taste. Anyhow, if you can endure the chapters where he detailed and relentlessly puts the evidence on the table of the benefits of sleep, you eventually get to the chapter on the impact on sleep of modern lifestyle choices.

Lots of this boil down to common sense: do as your mother said, get a good night’s sleep, 8 hours, every night. Before an exam, after an exam, before a flu shot, after a flu shot, as a kid, as a teenager, as an adult, and in old age. Every day, all life.

Coffee, alcohol, and artificial light (such as from smartphones and tablets) are all stuff that messes with your sleep rhythm. Well known stuff. Worth reflecting over always.

Driving Stockholm – Berlin and back gave plenty opportunity to listen to audiobooks.

So after the long holiday without an alarm clock, I’m aiming to establish good routines to help us juggle the activities that makes up our working weeks. Getting to school and work on time, with proper clothing and homework done and with a mental state to meet the day’s expected and unexpected demands.

As a father and caregiver of two kids (aged four and seven currently), we are past the time where kids woke up several times during the night. While still enjoying the comfort of sleeping in our bed from time to time, we can establish good routines (sleep hygiene as Mr. Walker calls it) and expect long, sleep-full nights all four.

So, here is where my key takeaway from the book came: The impact of the alarm clock. Most of us wake up with the use of an alarm clock (or smart phone alarm). The alarm clock triggers a fight-or-run stress response which can save your life on short term but is bad for your health on the long term. Furthermore, most of us snooze, i.e. voluntarily expose us to the stress factor of the alarm clock multiple times each day.

In response to this, I decided to immediately do an experiment with my alarm clock:

1: I changed my alarm clock for 15 minutes later with a commitment to not snooze.

2: I changed the alarm from a buzz to play Edvard Grieg’s Morning Mood.

As I have grown older, I have noted in myself how I have changed from a night owl to a morning person. I now particularly enjoy the reflective moment between waking up and getting up, where the brain is fresh and rested and can plan and explore how to meet today’s challenges.

My immediate experience was that I woke up before the alarm clock, so I still got this moment of reflection.

However, we had failed to tuck in early the first two nights of the week, so mornings were still a rough ride. So yesterday I started the bedtime ritual early. My oldest was very fresh and rested today in the morning and was ready for school before I was. He said we should go to bed early every evening. Clearly a success!

So now I’m doing a new experiment: I’ve set an alarm clock to remind us when to go to bed. Wouldn’t it be great with an alarm to go to bed instead of an alarm to wake up? Let’s see how it works!

Why not both?

When I joined my previous company, I was pleasantly surprised to be asked if I wanted a MacBook or a Windows laptop when I started. Besides having used iPhone for some time, I wasn’t deep into Apple land. Getting a chance fill in blank space, I jumped at the opportunity and chose Mac.

After patiently taking the time to learn new shortcuts — and to scroll in the opposite direction when reading a text longer than one screen — I became a happy Mac user. As most applications run in browsers these days, I didn’t miss out on many features. Only Excel on Mac had some limited capabilities for Pivot tables, an issue that disappeared when we switched to G Suite…

In the end, the only recurring issues were to find adapters to plug into the video systems in the various meeting rooms and to find a spare power supply when I forgot one at home.

I find it difficult to explain exactly why I liked Mac — other than it was easy to carry around — until now when I have switched back to Windows.

My garden leave is over and the calendar says Autumn. Copyright Frederik Jensen.

Given the same choice when I started in my new company, this time I chose a Windows laptop. Nice, lightweight, good battery life, good screen, good keyboard. Touchpad not quite like a Mac, otherwise quite ok.

After one week, I can tell you why I think the user experience on Mac OS is better than on Windows:

The Notification Center is a constant distraction of messages very rarely relevant to the work I’m trying to do. Virus scans, screen resolution fixes, software updates and reboots required — even Slack notifications as if Slack doesn’t already have plenty of ways to notify about new messages. Day three I turned all notifications off. Windows, if you want my attention, send a letter.

Next, Office. I have used all the applications before, not just on this particular laptop. Still, when opening an application for the first time, a welcome screen fills the entire window. Instead of getting on with my work, I’m searching for the quickest way to kill the tutorial.

When I open Outlook to look in my calendar, it shows me the list of unread emails, inviting me to task switching into reading and answering a new email instead of completing the task I was working on.

Oh, and even if I enjoy coming back to OneNote, the issue that language follows keyboard is still not fixed. Creating a note in English with a Swedish or Danish keyboard will fill the page with red curly lines. Word and Outlook can detect language as you type, but not OneNote. Switching to English keyboard, and I’m chasing the ‘-‘, the ‘@’, and other special characters.

My conclusion

The Windows user experience is more noisy. Instead of getting on with my work, Windows is full of distractions. I simply do more task switching in Windows than on Mac OS.

Things will get better over time, I’m sure. It’s just a tool and what is important is what you use it for and how you use it.

In the mean time, when I get too frustrated, I can always open my personal MacBook and write a blogpost.

How is the job market?

One question I get a lot lately is how is the job market? It is not an easy one to answer. There are plenty of jobs posted on LinkedIn, but I only need one job, so what I care for is if there one for me and how to get it.

When I returned from vaction, I started sending applications. Typically, I didn’t hear anything for weeks besides the automated “application received” response. Then another automated mail, “we have chosen to proceed with other applicants”. Maybe it is just the holiday period, but I think not. Even for the jobs that sounded cool enough to follow up on, responses were slow to come and vague in details. Not very useful (1).

So how to improve?

Yesterday we went mushroom hunting in search of the “gold of the forest”. The top prizes are the King Bolete and the Common Chanterelle (actually, the relaxing walk in a sunny late-summer forest with the family was the top prize), but if you broaden your search to include other edible mushrooms, you will find plenty. However, just like job hunting, do your research well, or you may end up with one that looks good but will cause you a lot of pain. Copyright Frederik Jensen.

What do I want and what are they looking for?

I have had the pleasure of doing many fun and challenging jobs in my career. I like new challenges and have been thrown into different situations and delivered. I want to do more of that!

Looking at my cv, others will easily see me as 20 year experience running complex, financial software development within large development organisations and thinking they will hire me to do more of that. This may not give me the job I want!

So part of the application process has been to tailor the cv to just look right. More emphasis on the stuff that matches the job post (and using the same words as in the job post), less emphasis on the stuff that point towards other interests and skills.

One of the insights gained in this process is that while I may have seen myself as an agile project manager, a lot of what I have done is what is also called business analysis, business intellegence and business process modelling (2). And I prefer heading in that direction rather than towards a role as scrum master or agile coach.

Tailoring the cv to the job post assumes that the company articulates what they actually are looking for — and that what they are looking for is what they actually need and will hire. I have seen job posts that mention specific tools and technologies like Tableau, Power BI, Azure, or AWS (3), when the truth is that picking up a new tool or technology and using it in a specific context could take no more than a week or two, while a cultural mismatch can’t be fixed as quickly.

It’s a broken process

The hiring process seen from the recruiting companies is not super fantastic either: First the hiring manager needs an approved headcount. Then the manager drafts a job description which goes through HR before it is published on whatever platforms the company has chosen to pay for. Then in a week or two, they get 200 applications, most of which are from people with no connection to Sweden or Scandinavia and no insight into the business, products or customers. Screening applications is then outsourced or done by a keyword match. Even if this produces a decent shortlist of candidates, it takes time to set up and do interviews and tests before you maybe get to send out offers. During which the headcount approval may need to be renewed or the candidate may have accepted another offer. Only if you end up signing with one candidate, you get to write feedback to the candidates you didn’t hire. It’s a broken process. It is designed to avoid mistakes, not to act fast on opportunities.

Do it differently

Obviously, there is another way to do things. It is called networking. A few weeks ago, I announced widely in my network that I am available for a new opportunities. I haved received great response, and it was great to catch up with people I haven’t been in touch with for a long time. Thanks!

This resulted in 3 interviews over the last two weeks. One of them led to an offer that I have chosen to accept — I’m starting a new job tomorrow.

Then you can start asking how is the new job?

(1) Feedback should be specific, acurate, objective, timely and usable.

(2) I read the BABOK Guide (Business Analysis Book of Knowledge).

(3) No LinkedIn and your automated keyword completion: AWS does not mean membership of the American Welding Society.

Why I became a project manager

I was a developer for 10 years before I changed career to become a project manager. Several factors contributed to that choice, but one pivotal moment was when I as a Software Architect participated in a cross organisational meeting with mostly middle managers and a senior manager. The senior manager had a problem that the company needed to solve and that he wanted one of his teams to pick up. I had technical insight into the product area that might be impacted but not much background in the business drivers and the organisation outside my unit.

Bridge pillars reflected in Alby Lake on a calm and sunny Autumn day. Copyright Frederik Jensen.

Very little of what happened at that meeting was about exploring the options available, the consequences of these options, and deciding the best outcome for the company. It felt more like the middle managers were playing to avoid taking a home an impossible assignment for their teams. It was frustrating and I felt that I could contribute to better decision making and more informed choices by taking the role as a project manager.

When you go scuba diving, you sometimes see a surface with an appearance of wrinkled glass between layers of water of different temperatures. An organisation can feel like that — the conversation in one layer of an organisation is completely decoupled from the conversion at lower/higher layers. Not only do large organisations have silos, but silos with layers.

Being a project manager, working across the line organisation, bridging silos and layers, speaking the local dialects, and knowing enough about what everyone is doing to ask the right questions, is challenging and rewarding. You parachute into a land of chaos and frustration, engage with people and systems, create order and momentum, and hand back the project to the line organisation. Then move on to the next challenge. Always working for the best outcome for the company and with respect for the people involved.

The best greens

Today’s headline steal from Trump is that he contemplates buying Greenland from Denmark. Maybe he is playing the long game after all? Or maybe he just likes the photo opportunity when he invites world leaders from fossil fuel economies to play golf with him in front of a melting glacier.

I visited Birka a few weeks ago, “the first city in Sweden”. For a few hundred years, it was a trading hub bringing people together near and far. Objects from today’s India, Egypt and Ireland have been found in or near the area. The city was abandoned by the end of the 10th century, some two hundred years before Stockholm was founded. In between, Sigtuna prospered.

Birka today. Burial mounds remain but all houses were made from wood and are long gone. Copyright Frederik Jensen.

One possible reason that Birka was abandoned is the change of coast line as the land rose following the melting of the ice from the last ice age. In this part of the world, near Stockholm, the land has risen 5 meters in the last 1000 years. When you compare it to the sea rise predictions from the melting of the inland ice on Greenland, it’s quite significant.

So anyway, back to Trump and Greenland, if you put your money on that we will fail to reduce the impact of the climate change, buying property in Greenland is a long term bet. It fits into a narrative to delay the burst of the carbon bubble.

200 years ago, people thought buying prisoners of war, sailing them across the Atlantic Ocean and selling them into slavery was a perfectly fine thing to do. 40 years ago, people thought drinking 10 beers and driving a car home was ok. Two years ago people thought burning fossil fuel to fly around the planet for pleasure was ok. Times are changing. Will Trump be on the winning side of history?

I made my claim to say “I told you so” with my 2012 story game Plus 3.0 when it all goes up in smoke and tears.

Milking as a Service

One of the companies that I’d love to join is DeLaval in Tumba. Not just because of the short commute (I still miss my daily bike commute from when I was living in Copenhagen), but also because of the challenge they are addressing: Optimizing dairy farming using IT.

Humans have kept cows for 5,000 years and dairy farming has been optimized quite a lot already.

DeLaval is one of a handful companies who produce and sell milking robots — or voluntary milking systems. I’ve seen these in action at different sites in Denmark — the milking process is fully automated, the robot places the suction cups and milks the cow while the cow chews away on some power grain. Key figures like milk temperature, time since last milking, and quantum milked per udder are shown on a nearby display.

Kosläpp in Skåne 2016. Swedish national television broadcasts live from the yearly kosläpp events where cows are let loose on the spring green pastures after a winter in the stable. Copyright Frederik Jensen.

Milking robots have been around long enough for the technology to mature. When you have 500 cows not being milked while your system is down, reliability and availability are not just about money but also animal welfare. Once the system is in production, it needs to be in operation 24/7. Cows don’t go on weekend or take time off for Christmas.

Dairy stables are hostile environments for computers, they need to be protected from moisture, heat, and being stepped on by animals weighing nearly a ton.

Robots have moving parts that needs maintenance. Hence, one challenge is to service the robots. So far this has involved a service technician visiting the farm and measuring the machines with handheld devices to help decide which parts to replace. As farms often are located in remote areas, having the right spare part at the right place and time is a problem to be optimized. Replacing a component too soon because you are not sure it will last until the next scheduled maintenance visit costs money. Having a wide selection of spare parts in the service car just in case they may be needed costs money. Scheduling an extra service trip to replace a broken part costs money – and a lot of money if it has to be done express due to a production stop.

Enter the cloud: What if diagnostic data from the milking robots is collected automatically 24/7 and uploaded into a database in the cloud? Service technicians and the farmer can then monitor and analyse the data remotely to plan service visits and be sure to have exactly the spare parts needed.

This is what DeLaval is working on right now. In itself a desirable goal. But the implications down the line can be huge as it allows changing the business model:

What if a farmer does not invest in a milking robot but buys milking as a service? The operational risk will be on the milking service provider, not the farmer. Financing dairy production will move from CAPEX (farmer investing in machines financed by a bank loan) to OPEX (farmer paying for a service). The farmer needs to know less about operating milking robots and can speciliase in other areas like breeding cows, optimizing fodder, stable facilities, product development or doing marketing events like kosläpp.

Just like the Cloud has lowered the threshold for new companies to put a new product or service on the market, the Cloud can disrupt the business models around dairy farming. The bank may become less of a gatekeeper for young farmers to enter the business. Independent service technicians will have fewer opportunities to improvise fixes to mechanical problems and upsell while they are visiting.

Times are changing and it would be cool to help create optimal outcomes for the involved stakeholders.

The cows will probably not notice though.

I have actually worked with dairy farming previously: Back in my university days, I had a part time job to optimize scientific calculations to run on super computers. One of the programs did breeding planning for dairy farms.