About

Computer programmer and principal double bass player at Gothenburg Opera. Based in Gothenburg, Sweden.

1983

My mother brought home an IBM PC/XT from work to learn. I figured out how to use DOS to make the screen blink in bright colors (yellow text on blue background). She did not know how to fix it — neither did I. Her solution was to buy me a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K and to forbid me ever to touch her computer again.

The Spectrum had rubber keys, 48 kilobytes of RAM, connected to the TV and had a cassette player for storage. It was perfect. I learned BASIC and some binary PEEK/POKE commands, wrote a few games, and eventually bricked the machine by short-circuiting the connectors on the back-side expansion port — which incidentally produced psychedelic blinking patterns on the TV. A clear echo of the damage inflicted on my mother's PC/XT.

Music

By then I was fifteen and had started focusing on music, playing electric and acoustic bass. No computing for roughly ten years while I studied — eventually got my degree as a classical musician. I auditioned at the newly opened Gothenburg Opera, got a position as a tutti player in 1995, and the year after was appointed principal (solo) double bass.

The Internet

Around 1996 I picked up computing again, just as the internet was starting to become "a thing." Got a PC, a modem, and quickly started learning HTML and Perl to create web pages. I acquired the domain musiker.nu (musician.now in Swedish) — offering email forwarding for Scandinavian musicians and web hosting for musicians and groups.

I'd pestered my hosting provider with so many requests and suggestions that they took me on as a consultant to work with everything Linux and server related. The company quickly grew from a few hundred customers to around 20,000 in a few years. Those were the wild west expansion days of the internet — everyone and their grandmother wanted a webpage. The growth rate was staggering, and so was the technological development in both hardware and software. You had to compile most everything from scratch, usually involving patches and customizing. Or you simply wrote the software yourself.

So many languages to learn in quick succession: Perl → C → Bash → PHP → JavaScript → C++ → Java → Python → Ruby, with some Pascal/Delphi and Visual Basic thrown in for good measure. I helped build that company from 1997 until around 2014.

Since then

Took a break from consulting in 2014. No programming for a few years. Enrolled in a CS program at university in 2017. Enjoyed the math classes. Loved functional programming in Haskell. Left the program early, returned to consulting in 2020, and have been going since.

Still playing double bass at the Opera.

This Site

Built with PHP 8.4, Bulma CSS, and Datastar. No build step, no npm, no JavaScript framework. Hosted on shared hosting because sometimes that's all you need.

Contact

Find me on GitHub.