About me

I am norwegian, born in 1969, living in Oslo, Norway. I got an early start with computers, growing up during the "home computer" explosion in the early eighties. My first was a Sinclair ZX81 with a whopping 1KB of RAM. BASIC was my first programming language, then assembly language. Disregarding the obvious lack of keyboards, tape recorders for storage and keying in software from magazines, the following quote is a nice illustration of what it was like:

On the ZX81 the only way to allocate memory was to put in really long strings as REM statements in a basic program, then locating that string in RAM and using POKE to put in the proper hex codes for the assembler program before calling it.

I grew up in Oslo, but during my graduate studies I moved to Trondheim (NTH/NTNU), Munich and Karlsruhe. My first job after graduating was with a computer games company (Funcom), where I had various roles (Developer, Producer, Creative Director, CTO, Director). During my years in Funcom I also got to experience life in Dublin and Zürich. After Funcom I've started and sold several companies in the banking/financial space (credit card fraud detection systems and an internet payment processor). I've also worked in the financial industry, both as a developer of screeners and backtester software, venture capital analyst, real time/algorithmic trading and fund manager.

Professionally I enjoy working with technology, software development, business/entrepreneurship and investing/trading.

Outside of my professional interests I play squash and enjoy time with my family.

Building stuff

I like building stuff, and understanding how things work. Which is probably why I do not have any functioning toys from my childhood. Hopefully, my track record with regards to software is better. I consider myself lucky with regards to computers, as I grew up more or less simultaneously together with the first wave of affordable home computers. Too bad I was just too young to build the next Apple or Microsoft. ;-) .

I build stuff on computers (that includes mobiles and browsers these days) using C/C++ for the stuff that has to go really fast, Perl for the stuff that has to be ready really fast, Java, PHP and Javascript / Coffeescript where there's no other alternative (although Javascript is shaping up, both as a language and ecosystem, see V8, node.js etc).

I've also started building stuff in Clojure, meaning I am able to target and integrate with the whole Java/JVM and CLR/.Net set of technologies. It also allows me to learn more about functional languages and candidate models for making use of parallel computing models. I also like the promises in Lisp that a program is just data. And Clojure just has the simplest and most concise syntax ever; could be everything I hoped Perl 6 would ever be.

I also depend on databases (Mysql, PostgreSQL, mongodb) and content management systems like Drupal (to avoid building everything from scratch). I've built client applications for Windows and OSX as well, but most things I build these days depend on Linux server-side and Javascript/HTML client-side.