My story
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Teknolog BlankOslo, NorwayJan 2018
I am currently working at a small Norwegian consulting firm called Blank.
The last few years I've mostly worked on web applications in Next.js.
I am also building a (Next.js native) CMS called Val Build.
Before focusing on web technologies, I built data pipelines at NRK using Scala and bootstrapped Blank's "sister" company Folq with Haskell and Elm.
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At Futurice, I initially had a pure technical role, but was fortunate enough to later be part of a Service Vision Sprint where I helped guide it from the technical level (and I like to think on a concept and organisational level as well).
While being there, I worked on 2 web applications: one for Carglass and one for Kesko.
Carglass
The Carglass project was a re-write of their webpages in the Nordics. The main functionality of it was online bookings. In my role, I structured the project (infrastructure, code) and led the development on the frontend (React, Redux, JS) and was the sole backend developer (Scala, Play framework, Postgres). After 3 months, our 2 developer (and 1 designer) team released and saw a 50-60% increase in conversion rate.
Our challenges were to complete the implementation with as few bugs as possible (there is no such thing as no bugs) and integrate it their ERP systems (3 in total) and a CMS service (Contentful).
Kesko
After Carglass, I started in the Kesko project, where I took part from the initial sales pitch and up to the time I moved back from Sweden to Norway with my wife for family reasons (this was before we released). In terms of development, I setup the initial structure of the frontend project (React, Redux, Typescript) which also influenced their re-write of their webpage. In this project, I also helped out on a visionary and organisational level, which was very inspirational for me.
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Full-stacker / "CTO" TingeerStockholm, SwedenAug 2015 Jun 2016
My friend had a startup called Tingeer, who needed my help to get it off the ground. Tingeers mission was to unleash the creativity of all jewellery designers.
Our last, and most successful pivot, was to make it possible for anybody to design and sell jewellery online based on only sketches. To do this, we had a e-commerce/sharing platform and an in-house CAD designer. Our long-term strategy was to match CAD designers with jewellery designers. Our campaign on Facebook got about 1500 sign-ups in 3 weeks, and around 10 really happy users (but only a couple of sales). It was fun, but we got a sour deal from our investors later and my friend (who had worked on this for 3 years or so) had to give up.
I made basically all the software for this, mostly normal web stuff: Node, Mongo, Mercury (a frontend vdom library) but I also some cool stuff in Three.js (WebGL library). Here's a recording of the tech I built during this time.
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SDE / Tech lead GradleStockholm, SwedenAug 2014 Aug 2015
Gradle approached me because of the work I had done on Adept (and AdeptHub), and I was convinced that joining Gradle would help me spread it.
I initially started as a contractor and worked a bit on Gradle itself to familiarise myself with it. Later I ended up as a tech lead in charge of the development of the plugin portal (plugins.gradle.org). After the completion of this project, I started on a new part of their system designed to analyse Gradle builds and provide intelligent messaging. In 2.5 months our team developed a vision, demo and prototype that was announced at the Gradle Summit 2015.
As a tech lead I got the opportunity to work on most parts of the system from architecture to deployment and from a Gradle plugin client to the frontend UI. Although, this job left me scared in many ways I think I learnt a lot of really important lessons.
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Founder AdeptHub (my own startup)Stockholm, SwedenJan 2014 Aug 2015
With AdeptHub, I set out to solve the problem of dependency management (think Git for dependency management). My aim was to improve the way software is assembled and maintained, by making it faster, simpler and safer to update dependencies. I was able to prove that my algorithm worked better than the existing alternatives for the JVM (not hard), and was ready to continue, but joined Gradle instead.
AdeptHub was the (monetizing) service on-top of the actual dependency manager which was my open source project called Adept.
AdeptHub was discontinued after I joined Gradle.
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Trainer / consultant Typesafe (now Lightbend)Lausanne, SwitzerlandJun 2011 Jan 2014
At Typesafe, I worked as a Play and Scala trainer and consultant. I gave courses to get people started or helped them by reviewing or extending their application so that it scales both in terms of code base and requests. The coolest project I did was at LinkedIn where I helped them build the basis for their entire service stack in Play. Last time I heard, 130 projects where running on it.
You can read more about what we achieved here.
I only worked about 60%, so I had quite a lot of time on my own projects / startup ideas. One of these projects was a payment app we named, Groosker. I learnt a lot about startups and I also picked up a bit of computer vision knowledge and a bit of mobile app development/Objective-C experience in the process. The last project I had was AdeptHub which I ended committing to.
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Co-founder SpendChartOslo, NorwayDec 2009 Dec 2011
During my off-hours at Microsoft, I worked on a project, SpendChart, with my friend. It aimed to visualise and organise personal finance across multiple banks (like Mint does now).
Although it's dead, you can still have a look at it here. The UX is a bit dated, but it was an excellent learning opportunity for me since we used Scala (I remember upgrading to 2.7.7) and that, in turn, was part of what made me apply for Typesafe later.
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Program Manager MicrosoftOslo, NorwayOct 2008 Jun 2011
After a while as a software developer, I changed my role from Software Engineer to Program Manager.
At Microsoft, a Program Manager is a responsible for delivering and executing the value proposition of a given project. It's a technical role, commonly staffed by engineering, but it usually means no actual implementation work (outside of prototyping) - at least in our office.
During my time as a Program Manager, I did a number of different projects: I continued work on the Alerting sub-system (development was off-shored to Sri Lanka which was a learning experience for me); and worked on the cloud infrastructure for Office 365 launch that I found very cool at the time. In this last project I actually got back to doing some actual coding (although it was mostly Powershell), and discovered that I was better suited in that role.
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SDE MicrosoftOslo, NorwayFeb 2007 Oct 2008
My first real job was in FAST, a Norwegian company that developed an enterprise search engine (think Luscene or Elastic Search) called FAST ESP. My time in FAST was brief as it was acquired by Microsoft in 2008, but my role did not change until later.
In FAST (and Microsoft), I worked on the Alerting sub-system which basically made it possible to 'save searches' (efficiently). It was designed with a custom data structure for extreme single node performance, in addition to being almost linearly scalable and distributed. The Alerting sub-system was written C++ and Python. In addition to working on the actual product, I helped writing a custom testing framework for it in Java, which was a ANT-ish DSL which in retrospect sounds horrible :).
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Student, CS MasterToulouse, FranceAug 2001 Jun 2007
I studied computer science (Génie Informatique) at INSA Toulouse, a French engineering school. There I learnt a lot of math, physics, computer science (projects and exercises were mostly in Ada and C) and french (and a bit about french culture).
From my 3rd year, I spent my summers working for FAST. During the summers I did many smaller projects: porting their document pipeline (which added/found metadata in documents) to a newer version and helping out on their setup scripts for example. Most of the work I did was in Python and eventually ended up working there.
I also attended one year at NTNU in Norway as part of the Erasmus exchange.