About

I'm a software engineer up north in Oslo, Norway, living with my wife, who is also a software engineer. Together, we have two boys who have caught the bug too and build their own software and games, with ambitions that grow with each model release.

I grew up with the web and Open Source. I learned HTML in 1997 by reading the source of other people's pages, and found my first CSS when I dug into why the links on a game magazine's CD changed on hover. Usenet newsgroups taught me about specs and validators, and as a young teenager I could tell you exactly what was valid HTML and what wasn't.

Linux came next. I never got far with the Red Hat 5.2 CD I picked up in Stockholm one summer, but since the release of good old Slackware 8, every year has been the year of Linux on the desktop for me. At the ripe age of 18, I co-founded Above, a domain registrar and web hosting company powered by the infamous LAMP stack.

A summer job on NAV, an Open Source network monitoring system, introduced me to Python in 2006, and I left PHP behind for good. Python has been home ever since, despite detours through Java, Ruby, and plenty of JavaScript. Agents do most of the typing these days, but the years with Python still pay off: they taught me what good code looks like. So has following Rust since 2012. I've written little of it, but borrowed plenty of its ideas.

At Cisco, I was one of three engineers behind the web app on more than a million video conferencing devices, used for everything from configuration to making calls.

As the first employee at Otovo, I built the software backbone of an electricity retail and solar installation business, from a fleet of Debian-based solar production loggers to infrastructure, back-office tools, and the customer app. Otovo later grew to more than 500 people and went public.

At the online grocer Oda, I helped rebuild the in-house software that runs logistics from purchasing to delivery, so the company could grow from a single fulfillment center to four, across Norway, Finland, and Germany. When we moved the warehouse system to the cloud, we did it in a few hours between two shifts, and operations never noticed.

Invoicing and accounting have followed me since I did the books for Above, and later automated electricity billing at Otovo. In 2023, I co-founded Cardboard to take on the part most companies still do by hand: managing their software, AI, and marketing spend. No more shared company cards, hunting for receipts, or hours wasted on accounting every month.

Outside work, I've stuck with the same two hobbies for years: Open Source and running. Much of my Open Source work has grown out of Mopidy, which I started in 2009. The projects below have had busy years and quiet years, but somehow I keep coming back to them.