About this page 👨🏼‍💻

This page was built with the Astro framework, which I highly recommend for content-heavy pages, like this.

It’s hosted on Netlify, which is a free hosting provider (for personal projects like this), with many cool features, such as deployment from Github.

About me 🍀

TLDR; I have 25 years experience in Software Development. You can find my Curriculum Vitae right here.

Also, if you want to build a professionel looking CV, 100% for free, check out my Curriculum Vitae generator project right here. You’ll also receive some free advice of what to include in your CV.

My introduction to computers 👨🏼‍💻

The first computer in my family’s house was not much more than a glorified typewriter. It could probably do a lot more, but since I was too young to experiment with it (and also not allowed), my family really only used it for text editing. Nonetheless, I was intrigued, and I did create my first, very simple maze-finding game on it. Needless to say, a decent amount of fantasy was required to enjoy it, but a game it was!

Growing up as a tech-interested kid in the 90s brought about endless possibilities. My first introduction to the World Wide Web was through a computer at the school’s library. I was intrigued. In the beginning, accessing the Internet was only possible at the libraries meaning my friends and I would spend hours and hours at the library (not reading books, unfortunately). Later on, we moved to the Internet Cafes that popped up everywhere, and although that had a price tag, I still spent as much time as possible playing games like Diablo 1 and Delta Force.

Eventually, my parents got me a computer, that was decent enough to run advanced graphics, which more or less resulted in three friends and I permanently rigging up in my parent’s basement. We hooked our computers up in a LAN, ordered a state-of-the-art ADSL connection (512/512), and went all-in on gaming, mainly Counter-Strike and Diablo 2 (it was pre-WoW times, thankfully, otherwise we might not have made it out).

My way into Web development 🌎

Being a very successful Counter-Strike clan (TDA - The Danish Assasins), we needed a website. Since I took a great interest in software development, I took up the challenge to build a nice, state-of-the-art website. The features of the website included a visit counter (based on sessions, not IP, so it was almost useless, tho fun to write none-the-less), a gallery of cool in-game screenshots, a tag wall (guestbook) where all our friends could write messages (which rarely happened) and of course a section about the members of the clan. A some point we also had a webcam recording live from the basement. That turned out to be a bad idea for many reasons. The page was built in PHP, and the layout was done in tables (!). How simple times were back then.

For hosting websites, the options back then were more limited. You could of course always get a free subdomain, but that would make the whole feel of it less cool. And back then, being cool mattered. So instead of turning to a hosted solution, we decided to buy an old machine at a flea market, and turn it into our own webserver - we did pay for the ADSL connection anyways, and my parents paid for the power, so why not? We set up an Apache web server on Linux Debian, and having zero experience with UNIX at that point, that was quite a hassle. But we learned a lot, and it ended up running for almost 500 consecutive days, without a reboot. Actually, we turned that same machine into a private Counter-Strike server, but with its limited hardware and our limited connection, we could not host more than 6-7 people, which was 3-4 short of hosting a proper ClanWar :-).

Gaming can be very anti-social, but bringing your computers together for a LAN party typically means connecting with people with the same interests. I’m not a fan of anti-social gaming (grinding WoW alone or with people you’ve never met and never will), but playing with friends that you connect with, can only work to tighten your relationship. I’m still playing the casual Warzone game with friends now and then when my schedule allows it.

Simultaneous with the CS website, a friend and I built a website where all our friends had their profile pages. It consisted of some metadata about them and then a lot of shit that we wrote about them - in a fun way of course. Had we developed just a little more on that concept, we, and not Mark, would have started Facebook.

Projects, projects, projects

Way before I even realized that you could actually make money and build companies by just building cool websites, I made a bunch of interesting projects. The most remarkable ones are the following three.

Raptekster.dk
My biggest and most successful side project was probably Raptekster.dk. It started as a frustration, that it was not possible to find the lyrics for Danish rap music anywhere online. I decided to change that, and a close friend of mine bought into the idea, and Raptekster.dk was born. We collected more than a thousand lyrics and started a bulletin board that at one point was the place to discuss Danish hip-hop music. After 10 good years, we eventually shut down that project, since RapGenius had more or less the same lyrics, and we didn’t wanna do the maintenance.

DobbeltDate.dk
Living as singles in Aarhus, a good friend and I thought that the world needed better and more relaxed dating. Instead of going on dates, that sometimes turn out to be cringy affairs, it would be way more nice to always have your favorite wingman at your side and just meet people in a relaxed atmosphere. We succeeded in getting funding (not a lot, but enough to get us going), building and launching the product, and hosting a launch party at Zenza in Aarhus. But that was about it. Our go-to-market strategy failed (probably because we didn’t have any), and I learned that; timing is everything, and building the product is only 1/10 the work.

Sikkerarv.dk
Sikkerarv.dk evolved into TestaViva, which at the time of writing is a company with 50+ employees and a 50 million turnover. It started as a dream of disrupting the regular lawyer business, by making it easy, accessible, and cheap to create legal documents online. The lawyers in the established industry just grab standardized paradigms from a backlog of paragraphs when writing your legal document anyways, so why not make a decent web-interface and have people doing it themselves? We did that, as the first in Denmark, and yeah, the rest is history.

Professional career

If you made it this far, you probably realize that I’m more of a self-thought developer than anything else. At some point it felt like the right decision to have my skills certified by a school, so in 2013, I finished my bachelor’s in Computer Science. If I live long enough, I’ll do a master someday.

Since completing my education, I’ve been working at some digital agencies in Aarhus and Copenhagen, before kickstarting TestaViva and spending a good part of my life on that project.

You can find my entire Curriculum Vitae right here: here.

Thanks for reading :)