EARLY YEARS #building

I've loved building things ever since my dad gave me my first hammer — at the age of three, to my mother's bafflement. Dad built furniture, and in search of my own thing, I quickly fell in love with building websites and applications at the age of 11.

My first job was as a gardener at the local bank (I was 10), before I moved on to greater adventures in the service industry (my brother's furniture store, the local corner store, and an electronics store in the big city). At the age of 18 I'd already sold my first websites, and joined my cousin's start up Smart Media.

2003: GAMING #php #mysql

Gaming was different when I was 16, so me and my friends arranged LAN parties in the local community. To speed up check-ins (we had 100+ participants for the bigger ones), I utilized an outdated barcode scanner from the furniture store. Hooking it up to the seat reservation system I'd built wasn't too hard, so I also made a small cashier software while at it. This way we could sell our pizzas and sodas more efficiently, ultimately spending more time gaming.

2006: FIRST STARTUP #cms #product

At Smart Media I worked as lead developer, building a CMS (didn't we all in the early 2000s?), and various systems on top of this — everything from ticket systems, exercise journals, ad rolls and time tracking. While I enjoyed building, the client meetings and project specifications sparked my life-long interest for product management and solving the user's actual needs.

2008: PUBLIC SECTOR #wordpress #streaming #wowza #ffmpeg #salt #project-management

At the national administration of the Norwegian Youth Festivals of Art (UKM), I gained my 10+ years of Wordpress experience. Building and running a system to manage 400 yearly festival's sign ups, scheduling and communications platforms with a team of 2 is indeed a full time job. But boy did we have a lot of fun!

Despite trying hard, I still haven't found a way to compact 13yrs to one paragraph, so I'm currently working on a separate UKM chapter! Teasers:

• UKM-TV: my pet project streaming service surpassing 6M views
• an RFID area control system playing retro gaming sounds
• a wide range of integrations, ranging from the Postal service, Mailchimp (the electronic postal service?), Statistics Norway to Livestream.com
• a bunch of open sourced code

PUBLIC SECTOR: MEDIA #media #team-scaling #broadcasting #communications-strategy #pr #photo #reporting

I have always had an itch for photography and storytelling, and photography was my way into pr & media.

I was tasked with establishing an all-year media department for UKM. With a handful employees, we created nation-wide youth volunteer initiatives, and spearheaded several large-scale festival productions (some media teams reaching more than 80 people).

I designed and built 5 different Outside Broadcasting rigs (OB bus - one of which was actually a bus), consulted on several others, and led more than 50 multi-cam video productions.

You can't do media work properly without a strategy, and as an extension of the media work, I wrote the communications strategy for the entire organization.

2021: MEDAL.tv #java #postgres #db-replication #telemetry #python #remote-teams #engineering-manager

At Medal I fell in love with Java, a language I'd barely used before. Starting as a Backend Engineer, I was quickly recognized as Senior, before taking over as the Engineering Manager. I'll admit being both starstruck and feeling humble when my first assignment was to create endpoints for Microsoft's Xbox team.

I managed the Discovery, Social & Monetization teams (not all at once), and worked alongside some insanely talented people. Team meetings meant someone just woke up, and others were heading to bed, as my teams were distributed from India to the Pacific Coast — requiring a toolset of its own.

Pushing to prod meant checking Honeycomb for instant performance updates, and now I can't for the life of me imagine running a platform without telemetry like that. The huge datasets we worked on required upping my SQL game, and I still marvel at the performance of my record long SQL query (165 lines).

2023: STYREPLAN.no #iso-27001 #generics

Returning home I was invited to join the team of Styreplan, where I went back to coding Java while I re-gained my work-life balance. Mastering Generics I unlocked a new level of love for Java and strict typing.

2024: UNLOC.app #typescript #react #firestore

When offered to join Unloc, the temptation of returning to the startup scene and the working with actual hardware was too big. The mission of digitizing access resonates well with my wish to create software easing peoples everyday lives. Which led to me embarking on my next adventure.

At Unloc I've been able to put my fascination for telemetry to work, uncovering valuable insights, and improving our over-all service. I may seem like a broken record when I ask for "telemetry", "data" or "monitoring", but my coworkers all appreciate it.

As a full-stack engineer, I've finally gotten properly acquainted with React, although I'll admit I prefer to present my data in a structured manner through an api.

If you've read all this, reach out, or at least drop me a follow, so I can get to know you too!