About me
Published on 2014-09-30 20:51
TL;DR;
I’m a Swedish dude specialising in making complex problems simple by utilising software I create in a plethora of languages/tools/frameworks.
Mainly in C#/Go with PostgreSQL/MongoDb as database, hosted on Amazon AWS.
There’s a list at the bottom which lists all techs/tools/patterns/languages/etc. I’ve worked with and a list of stuff I want to learn.
1990 - 1996
I was born, did baby-stuff, grew up, started reading and off we go!
1996 - 2005
My very first experience with a computer was a Macintosh running Mac OS 7. Since I was no older than 6 years I didn’t do much in terms of coding. My primary activities at this time was playing games.
I used Linux a few times during this period, but I was too young to understand what Linux was, so for me it was just another OS. It could play some games and that’s all I cared about.
2005 - 2009
This is where the fun starts, I remember being frustrated by how awful Windows was in terms of stability, so I decided to embark on a journey to find something different. After some research I found Ubuntu, which was a quite nice experience, but yet again I got frustrated since it didn’t do the things Windows did, mainly running games. So back to Windows I went… Then back to Ubuntu again. I did this a few times, but then I got kind of stuck in Ubuntu for a while, having left the gaming scene for a while. So, as I started using Ubuntu more and more, I realised that I needed other than games to keep me entertained.
I remembered that I’ve taken a course in webdesign back in elementary school, so I thought to myself, why not make a website? And off I went, researching and started creating something resembling a website. This was done in pure HTML and CSS, no Javascript, no tools to generate HTML. This is what sparked my interest in programming, since I thought having to type all that HTML over and over was cumbersome, so I started investigating in solutions to my problem, which in this case was copying and pasting the menu on each page. So off to IRC I went, describing my problem and people suggested I try this thing called PHP. Having no idea what a programming language was and absolutely no idea of how http-servers worked, but an idea of what I wanted, I started doing some more research. After a while I had some PHP scripts which could assemble a page based on a content page, a header and a footer, and thus, my first website was born. I was hooked. I wanted more!
So I did some more research, I asked on IRC some more, what else could I use this newfound knowledge for? Someone suggested I create some kind of dynamic website, something where people could leave me a message. The idea of coding a guestbook was created. So I figured I need to store this somewhere and after some research I figured I need a database. So what to use? Well, at this time people used PHP along with MySQL, so that’s what I used.
Fast forward some time, I’ve created my hundredth website/guestbook/blog clone, each time making some kind of improvement. I started using frameworks, mainly CodeIgniter. It was around this time (2006) I started my gymnasium school. I choose a major which focused on programming and digital technology (How computers work and how to build them) and there I would be thaught two different programming languages, PHP and C#. Since I already knew PHP I looked forward to learning that, but since that was thaught at the end of the programme I had to suffer through the hours of learning C#, ugh. At this time I hated everything Microsoft, for some odd reason. It was also my first statically typed language, which was a huge shock for me. Having all of these types all around me when it didn’t really matter! Oh well, I suffered through and started doing some more research outside the material thaught in school. I discovered you could do web stuff in C# as well (We focused mainly on creating console applications, since it was beginners courses), using ASP.NET. But oh, using PHP was so much easier!
The time came to find some kind of trainee work (Some programmes in Swedish education have several weeks of mandatory trainee work), so I found a local company called Entergate. They specialise in making survey tools, in ASP.NET. Since I didn’t really know what ASP.NET was, I had to learn it. This was my first experience in learning something while producing something, but I didn’t stop there, I wanted something more challenging, something better than ASP.NET Webforms. This was around the time Scott Guthrie with friends started making ASP.NET MVC, so that’s what I wanted to use. Off I went and started producing stuff in ASP.NET MVC. Not something useful, but it was something. Since Entergate is a Microsoft-shop, they used Microsoft SQL Server, so that’s something I picked up as well.
During spring 2009 I graduated, an experience met with both joy and sadness, realising that I had no idea of what I wanted to do with my life, until some dude off the internet said he wanted to import me to London. Who at the age of 19 would say no to getting paid to do what he loves to do and live in London? Well, probably some, but not me! Off I went!
Then I arrived in London (Well, Stanstedt airport), having no idea of what to expect, heck I hadn’t even seen this dude in a photo! Yet here I was, in a foreign country, talking English with people who only knew English. No Swedes to be seen!
But there he was, Ayo himself! My future employer for a while. He owned a company called DesignSquad, which did small websites, some printing and other design/computer-related stuff. It was fun, we made websites primarly in ASP.NET MVC along with Microsoft SQL Server as the database. We also used my first ORM, LINQ to SQL. But all fun things must come to an end. We had some fiesty discussions on how to do stuff and the least I could say was that we disagreed. Looking back at it, it was me being immature and a bit too picky about things. We did part as friends though.
So it was time to head back to Sweden…
2010 - 2011
…and start finding a job. This was a brutal experience, but at the same time a very easy one. It was quite easy to find a job and get it, but the very thought of having to find a job was weird, why did I, the best coder out there need to find a job, the job should find me. Oh well, I managed to score a job at Industritorget Sweden AB, as their new star developer! My job was to convert the existing website from Classic ASP to ASP.NET. There was another developer already employed to do this task, but management thought reinforcements where needed and that was me.
The existing website was made with Classic ASP, something I’d never seen before. It did have something I had seen before though, it used MySQL as the database engine. The other developer had already begun documenting and figuring out how to structure and design the new website. So we begun writing it in C#, with Entity Framework, in ASP.NET Webforms and using SQL Server as the database. But since we where using the very first version of Entity Framework, which didn’t have code-first, we relied quite heavily on having it generate the model for us, which turns into a huge mess whenever you somehow change the model in code, by adding fields, methods, etc. In short, it was horrible trying to construct a decent domain model using Entity Framework. Since this slowed down development by a huge amount, management decided it was time for a change, so within seconds I was promoted to project lead, a position I’d never held before and in retrospect, something I wasn’t mature enough to handle.
This led to the other developer saying good bye and he left the company. So there I was, alone, converting a Classic ASP application into ASP.NET. A task I wasn’t prepared handling by myself, which led to development grinding to a halt. So management re-allocated my knowledge into the existing website, creating new features in Classic ASP. I also got the responsibility of taking care of the existing server installing, which was handling e-mail, backup, etc. running on Windows Small Business Server. Something I had no experience in. Shortly after this I decided to leave this company, since I was doing something I wasn’t hired to do nor had any experience in. It’s always fun to learn, but learning must be done within the comfort zone if it’s about stuff already in production.
So, back to the drawing board and time to find another job. Which roughly took about 3 monts…
2011 - 2015
…and then I started working as a developer at Bosbec AB.
After almost 4 years I decided it was time to do something new…
2015 -
…so I talked to a guy on IRC. He mentioned that Detectify was looking for another developer to join their crew of three developers. He liked the fact that I had previous experience with Golang, so we talked for a while, then scheduled a meeting in Stockholm at their office for a couple of interviews and the rest is history.
So, I’m currently working at Detectify as a Software architect/Sysop/Developer.
More to come…
Contact
If you’re interested in contacting me, please do so via Twitter, e-mail or find me on IRC where I go by the name Kim^J.
A pile of tags
A huge compilation of stuff I’ve used in past projects in alphabetical order:
- Ansible
- ASP.NET MVC
- ASP.NET Webforms
- Amazon AWS
- Amazon AWS Auto-Scaling Groups
- Amazon AWS Cloudformation
- Amazon AWS EC2
- Amazon AWS ELB
- Amazon AWS RDS
- Amazon AWS Route53
- Amazon AWS S3
- Bash
- C#
- C/C++
- Caliburn.Micro
- Classic ASP
- Cloud init
- CodeIgniter
- CQRS
- CoreOS
- Django
- Docker
- Domain-Driven Design
- Eclipse
- Elasticsearch
- Enterprise Service Bus
- Entity Framework
- Event-Driven Architecture
- Event-store
- Fedora
- Fleetd
- Git
- Gearmand
- Golang
- Graylog
- Hugo
- Java
- Javascript
- Jekyll
- Jetbrains IntelliJ
- Jetbrains PyCharm
- Jetbrains Resharper
- Jetbrains RubyMine
- Jetbrains Teamcity
- Jetbrains WebStorm
- Jetbrains YouTrack
- Laravel
- Linux
- Mac OS X
- Markdown
- Microsoft MSMQ
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2013
- Microsoft Windows 2000
- Microsoft Windows 7
- Microsoft Windows 8
- Microsoft Windows 98
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008R2
- Microsoft Windows XP
- MongoDb
- MySQL
- NServiceBus
- Netbeans
- Objective-C
- Oracle DB Express
- PHP
- PostgreSQL
- Python
- RabbitMQ
- RavenDB
- Rebus
- Ruby
- Scala
- SQLite
- SuSE Linux
- Sublime Text 3
- Systemd
- Svn
- Teamcity
- Textile
- Topshelf
- Twitter Bootstrap
- Ubuntu
- VB.NET
- VBScript
- Vim
- WCF
- WPF
- Wordpress
- Zsh
Looking forward to learn more about:
- FoundationDB
- The Spotify architecture
- Project management
- DynamoDB
- Apache Cassandra
- Jenkins
- Redis
- RethinkDB
- Chef
- Puppet
- ELK stack
- Azure
- Google Cloud
- Network infrastructure
- Monitoring of all kinds
Books
A collection of books I’ve read during the past years.
Clean Code: A handbook of agile software craftmanship
ISBN-13: 978-0132350884
The Clean Coder: A code of conduct for professional programmers
ISBN-13: 978-0137081073
Domain-Driven Design: Tackling complexity in the heart of software
ISBN-13: 978-0321125217
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
ISBN-13: 978-0321127426
The art of UNIX programming
ISBN-13: 978-0131429017
An introduction to programming Go
ISBN-13: 978-1478355823
CQRS, the example
ISBN-13: 978-1484102879
Remote: Office not required
ISBN-13: 978-0091954673
Design patterns: Elements of reusable object-oriented software
ISBN-13: 978-0201633610
Implementing domain-driven design
ISBN-13: 978-0321834577
Scrum: A breathtakingly brief and agile introduction
ISBN-13: 978-1937965044
The expert beginner
ISBN-13: 978-1619849969
The mythical man month: Essays on software engineering
ISBN-13: 978-0201835953
Mastering Regular Expressions
ISBN-13: 978-0596528126
Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
ISBN-13: 978-0131857254
The Docker Book: Containerization is the new virtualization
ISBN-13: 978-0988820234