Recent content on MartinHaagen.se
I’ve come to realize that it’s just as hard to sit down and write code as it is to write text. There’s a romantic aura around coding. When you think about it, you picture yourself sitting there, solving problems with ease and style. But when you’re actually doing it, you struggle. Small, simple things like naming variables or deciding how to structure the code become tough calls to make, at least…
It feels like a hundred years ago that I went to one of my first big conferences. I believe it was QCon in London. After that, I also visited a few others. Dreamforce, Salesforce’s huge yearly conference, really blew my mind. At the same time, I started to play with the idea of actually creating my own session and standing in front of a crowd of people. 
 A few years later, there was a “call…
I’ve heard people say they don’t buy books anymore, claiming that everything they want to learn is available on YouTube or somewhere on the web. I regularly buy books. Sometimes I pick up something in a completely new area to broaden my knowledge, and sometimes to deepen it in an area where I already have experience. Since I work as an educator and create the courses I teach, a book can be a great…
Lately, there have been multiple supply chain attacks targeting the npm ecosystem. I know that these types of attacks have happened in the past, but when two occur within a fairly short period of time, you have to start thinking about the viability of this way of handling dependencies. 
 The first attack — I don’t know if it ever got a name — but in the beginning of September (2025), Kevin…
A few days ago I found out about something called the IndieWeb . It is, I would say, a loosely connected internet movement built on a social web. Not a social platform, but a network of websites that are able to communicate with each other. 
 This is nothing new. It is actually something that has existed for a while. In mid-2014 the W3C started The Social Web Working Group that grew ideas into…

 This is a submission to the IndieWeb Carnival monthly writing challenge.
 


 The dry Italian landscape rushes by outside the train window — hills, small houses, tunnels, and power lines. We are traveling from Rome to Lake Garda. Over the last few days, we have explored the capital and all its sights: the vast museums of the Vatican, the hidden squares in the old town, and…
I’m a fairly normal person, living a fairly normal life, doing fairly normal work. And, like many others, I think a lot about AI — how it is working and how it might potentially change our world. I am in no way an AI propagator selling the promise of effortless work, nor a doomsday skeptic who only sees problems with it . This post is in no way an attempt to sway anyone in any direction. It…
This is a bit different post compared to what I usually write about. But, hey, this is my blog, my rules. I write about whatever I want… The last few days I visited the Sweden Rock Festival, without a doubt Sweden’s biggest rock and metal-oriented music festival. This year there were more than 90 bands in the lineup and 40000 ticket holders according to Swedish Television. A lot of…
LLMs and AI are what everyone is talking about these days. Tiring, I know. But it’s an important topic to discuss — whether we want it or not, it will change our lives and how we live. Better to do our best to share our opinions as much as possible. At least it might change something or someone. 
 First off, I’m an AI user, and I pay for a subscription to the service I use. I find it…
Yet another reflection based on a session at myConf . Erik Dörnenburg talked about GreenOps — ways to utilize your computing resources as efficiently as possible in terms of environmental impact. It was a quite interesting talk about moving your resource needs to different locations in the world depending on where green electricity is available. 
 There were also several other considerations…
A few days ago I attended the myConf conference. In one of the presentations, the LEGO® Serious Play® concept was introduced. My first impression was that it seemed a bit forced — a way to sell more LEGO. But after mulling it over, my perspective started to shift. There could be real value in the process. As an educator and occasional facilitator of workshops, I can see potential in the method.
During the last few days, I attended a software development conference in Varberg, Sweden, called myConf . Over the past decade, I’ve participated in several industry-specific conferences, but this was my first purely development-focused conference in more than ten years. It was very different from the trade shows I’m used to attend – in many ways. 
 As you might know, I’ve been working in the…
I work as a teacher helping adults become developers. I do this at a few different schools as a consultant periodically during the work year. This year, I will have a lot of classes, and some of them will run in parallel, making my life quite busy. 
 My MacBook Pro has now passed the five-year mark, and its economic lifetime has ended. It still works well, but I worry about the stress and…
The Internet is a dangerous place. Some companies are spying on you and, want to get as much of your private information as possible. What are your interests? What sites are you visiting? What can we sell you? Your information is the new gold. 
 As a countermeasure, a range of browser plugins has been developed to enhance your privacy by blocking information-gathering attempts. A few of the…
During the last few years, our internet has become more private and secure with encrypted traffic using SSL certificates. A certificate is used by the webserver to prove its authenticity on that domain and to set up a secure encrypted channel to the browser. When the traffic is encrypted, no one between the visitor and the server can look at the traffic and see what is being transmitted. Since we…
A week ago I joined up for the Ship30for30 digital writing course. 
 I have been writing and creating content for the internet for years. But I never really felt that I was any good at it. The analytics didn’t really encourage me to push it either. It is hard to get a big enough following on a personal blog to keep it up. Some of my posts has made it very well with 1000s of views and…
How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens is a book packed with information. The reason I found it was that I started to read up on how my new text editor, Obsidian, worked and how I best could structure my notes in this new world of note takers. The forums of Obsidian was the natural place to go to. There I found multiple suggestions and good ideas but the main theme of many of them was the use of…
Drive was a book that I started to read a long time ago. But for whatever reason I got sidetracked and it got left untouched on my bedside table. I did not give the book a real chance. A few days ago I thought I should. This time around I read it carefully and with intent to learn and understand. 
 Drive is a book that investigates motivation by looking at what was the motivational factors in…
I have always been stunned by the beautiful time-laps videos of clouds slowly rolling by on a beautiful blue sky. Or why not a building project slowly taking form by having hours or sometimes days become compressed into seconds or minutes. It is of course no secret how those are done. Setup your camera to take pictures every few seconds, download them to your computer and stitch them together.…
A couple of years ago I came across a special notebook. It is not a notebook of the normal fashion but more a combination of a notebook and a calendar. The reason I got interested in it was that I wanted a tool that helped me focus more on the important things. It was, and is, too easy to get caught up with “being busy being busy” - getting things done but not the important ones.
Pomodoro means Tomato in Italian. The Pomodoro Technique is a way to eat raw tomatoes without getting tomato juice and seeds on your checks… no, just kidding. The Pomodoro Technique is a productivity technique that helps with focusing on different tasks at hand. The inventor of the technique, Francesco Cirillio, gave it the name when he used a simple tomato shaped kitchen timer to measure distinct…
“Mastodon is a free and open-source self-hosted social networking service. It allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different servers. These servers are connected as a federated social network, allowing users from different servers to interact with each other seamlessly. Mastodon is a part of the…
Since I started to use Linux many many years ago, I have been exposed to many different text editors. In the beginning I used Midnight Commander (mc) and the built-in editor of it. If my memory doesn’t serve me wrong, I found and editor called “joe” that I found comfortable. My main use case was to edit configuration files so nothing fancy was really needed. As all new Linux users, I…
A certain amount of paranoia is good for you! Even if you are using secure and unique passwords someone could get into to your systems if they would get hold of it. That’s why it is a good idea to protect your logins using a second factor, thus 2 factor authentication. First factor is something you know (password) and the second factor is something you have (token). In my case I am using a…
A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post about me trying out Debian on one of my laptops to figure out if it was something for me. I have been using Linux since the 1990ies and have at time used it as my main OS. The last couple of years I have been living mainly on MacOS but also spent some time with Windows (client requirements) and only used Linux on the server side. This experiment was to…
This weeks post was supposed to be about my Linux on the desktop/laptop test, but I ran into something quite interesting so I have to push that topic to the next post. I found a post from Larry Sanger about a social media strike to give visibility to the bad things the big social media cooperations are doing to our privacy. And since this strike will be already on the 4th and the 5th of July I…
I am writing the draft of this blog post as I am travelling out of Amsterdam and the Netherlands after spending a couple of days here to meet a few of the worlds most productive people. Here I attended the GTD Summit which was also my first event related to GTD. It is 10 years ago since the last summit was held and this is most likely the last that will happen with David Allen, the writer of the…

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 When you browse around the web you are constantly being monitored. You can protect yourself a bit by using various browser add-ons like uBlock Origin ( firefox , chrome ), HTTPS Everywhere (…
I am spending most of the days in front of the computer. Writing emails, code and the odd blog post. I came to realize that I don’t spend any effort in having a good writing experience. So lately I decided that I should treat my self and get hold of a great keyboard. This turned out to be a challenging task to complete, there is so much to choose from. There are tons of different makes and models,…
As you may know by reading post from this blog, I am a bit nerdy. When I was in my early 20ies I was on the verge of hitting the famous wall. I had a ridiculous stressful situation and I continuously dropped the ball. To make things worse there where also a lot of things out of my control that I needed to keep track of but did not really have the tools to do so. Too much stuff to do and no way to…
I have been a long term iPhone user and this mainly because I have been everything Apple; iMac, Mac Book, iWatch and iPad. Apple is all over the place. I really enjoy the coherent experience that Apple provides but as much as I like that I also dislikes the hefty price tag that comes with it. Another concern I have is around privacy. Apple still have a pretty good standing, at least in my eyes,…
I installed Linux for the first time… a long time ago. I remember downloading the 10-12 floppy disk images to my 250MB hard drive equipped 486 computer. It took quite some time because it was not only slow using a 28.8k modem I also had to watch out so that my parents didn’t find out I was hogging the phone line. It quickly got expensive since phone was paid by the minute in Sweden back then. I…
In October 2008 I joined Facebook and my first status update said “have given in to the facebook pressure..”. I was really late in joining because I didn’t really feel I had a reason to join and frankly I did not get the whole thing. But as soon as I joined I was hooked and found it a great way to connect with old lost friends and also find new ones. Now, a bit more than 10 years later and after…
This year, I did not have the opportunity to go to San Francisco to attend Dreamforce. But as Robert Gustafsson says when he plays Tony Rickardsson: “I’m not bitter!” (I am well aware that this reference doesn’t make any sense what so ever if you have not been watching Swedish television). I’ve been to the conference several times before, but this year I regret that I…
During the last few years, chatbots have become a major topic in the discussion about finding ways to improve our customer interaction. The customers we work with haven’t seen the need to implement bots for any business processes before, but in the last month, multiple clients contacted us to ask about bots and how they could implement and use them. 
 Bots are becoming more interesting,…
When you frequently work with web-based applications, such as Salesforce, you may run into small things that annoy you. It might be that you work in multiple environments—such as a sandbox for testing and development vs. a production environment—and occasionally get them mixed up. By mistake, you may make changes to a production environment that were intended for the sandbox. 
 One way of…
The blog has been silent for a few years. My focus has been on other things and I have not been able to produce any content to publish here. I have neither been involved in too many presentations or public event. There hasn’t been enough time. 
 I missed doing this so I will now start producing content to this place again. My goal is to have at least one new post with content every week. As…
Dreamforce is over. It went quickly this year. I met a lot of people and had tons of fun! I discussed and shared ideas with people from all over the world. My takeaways from the conference is mainly lightning with it’s components, connect and process builder. I will revisit these in future blog posts. The new APEX debugger will be interesting to look at when it’s released. The…
The Salesforce platform is great when you want to quickly build applications because it will give you a lot of functionality for free. As a developer on the platform, I have often worked on building real-time integrations on other systems. These are usually implemented by writing a web service call out from a trigger. The platform requires you to write test code that should have at least 75% line…
I ran into an issue the other day while trying to deploy to an org with a lot of ongoing activity. I ran into the annoying error message: 
 Error: Apex class has Batchable or Future jobs pending or in progress
 (line 1, column 21)
 I checked the Apex Jobs queue and found that there was over 5500 queued jobs. Some which had been waiting for hours. I decided to clear the queue so that I…
The 27th of June is almost like Christmas—it’s the day when you learn if your Dreamforce session was accepted or not. It’s not a lot of words that go into a proposal but a lot of thinking. For me it’s a great honor and a learning experience to be able to host a session at one of the largest computer conferences in the world. Last year was my first year as a submitter and a speaker. I was very…
Go, or golang, is a language I thought looked strange and sloppy, but with my long C-development background, it didn’t take me many hours to start loving the language and the large community growing around it. As a Salesforce developer and user, I was, of course, curious to find an easy way to start working with the different platform APIs. 
 A great starting point for this journey was…
On April 9:th I made a presentation at the Stockholm Salesforce Developer User Group Meetup about migration strategies and git. Below are the slides from the presentation. 
 
 force.com Migration strategies and GIT 
 

 
 This blog post is a repost from Martin’s old blog called webaholic.

When you build solutions on the force.com platform you should always try to make them robust but yet flexible. Customisations you build should be created in a way that they are org independent so that you can handle sandboxes and maintenance in a good way. It is not uncommon that you need to build triggers or classes that to a degree will be org dependent - this is the effect of the business…
I have been using the force IDE for a couple of years while doing development on the force.com platform. I have seen the demos of and have sometimes used the developer console but we never really became friends. When I do development my tools needs to be super quick and I must be able to work offline and the developer console just doesn’t cut it for me (I love the watches / heap dump feature…
One of the smallest but very interesting things I saw during this years Dreamforce was a small open source utility called force.com CLI. It is a small tool that you can use to interact with your force.com instance from a shell or a prompt. You can do a lot of different things like running SOQL queries, anonymous APEX and create and modify objects. 
 You may ask why this is cool or useful at…
Dreamforce is one of the biggest and most exciting computer software conferences. During Dreamforce 13 I was invited as a speaker to talk about web service integrations with focus on the .NET and PHP environments. Below you can find a link to the slides I used during my session. Demo and example code is available in this GitHub repository. 
 
 Integrations using Web Services – examples…
Wow, yet another personal blog! This place will serve as a collection point for the various things I do – all from articles and pictures to videos. The array of topics are diverse to say the least and to make the mess even more messy – you will find content in both English and Swedish. I hope that you will find stuff here that are interesting and fun! I would be super happy if you sent me a…
2025 
 02 Nov – It's tough to be creative 
 26 Oct – Back to the stage - talking about code 
 25 Oct – Book: Test-Driven Development with Java 
 05 Oct – Supply chain attacks against npm packages 
 03 Jul – The IndieWeb Brings Back Old Memories 
 28 Jun – The Trip From Rome 
 21 Jun – We Are All Nuts 
 08 Jun – Sweden…
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