Today I left my job for the last time. I’m now officially a freelance developer! I had the afternoon off, so I did what I’ve thought about doing for a while: visited KTH and CSC, where I used to hang out a lot a few years back.
Teaching is something I’ve been missing the last three years, so my plan was to see if I’m needed in any course. Turns out I am, I believe the exact words were “Yes yes yes!”.
So in January, I’m going back to teaching programming a few hours a week! It’ll be interesting, because I believe I’m a much better teacher now than when I was as a student. New perspectives, better understanding of people. But …
Back at KTH!
Let's start a business!
Going from being employed to freelancing isn’t that difficult in Sweden. You have to register a company of course, but I did that years ago so it’s basically been sitting there, waiting for me to take the step and stop doing things I don’t really find inspiring.
There is some stuff that’s good to have though. One thing is an insurance, in case you mess up and someone sues you. I was planning to get one from Trygg Hansa, the insurance company I’ve used before, that also has a deal with Sveriges Ingenjörer (my union). Unfortunately for them, they messed up by sending me a horrible form containing questions like these:
22) What theoretical education do the leading persons have? List name …
MacBook Pro ordered! :-D
I finally ordered a MacBook Pro! The last half year of .NET development on Vista has been a bit depressing, especially every time my display driver stopped working, resulting in the familiar blue screen. I’ve been meaning to fix it, but Vista won’t let me reinstall the driver and the blue screen occurs seldom enough to only almost drive me crazy.
Here’s a song dedicated to Microsoft:
Fotomässan (photo fair) -09
This weekend I visited the annual Stockholm photo fair for the first time. It’s actually less than a year ago I bought my beloved Nikon D40 and got completely hooked on photography!
I’ve always liked drawing, but my patience isn’t the best, so I tend to get tired of whatever I’m drawing after about two hours. I have accomplished some OK stuff, but I don’t think I’ll ever be great as I don’t practice at all.
For me photography is amazing. I see something – snap – and there! Instant art! I’ve spent pretty much time doing this the last year, so I’m starting to know my camera and my three lenses well enough to know which lens to choose, the settings …
The Household Chart
I believe in equality in relationships. Naturally, most young people today would agree with that, but I’m a little more rabid than most people.
Household chores should, at least in the long run, be split fairly. Problem is, almost everybody have a skewed image of what 50/50 is. Statistics* show that even in hetero couples that believe themselves to be equal, the woman usually does more domestic chores.
Is this the case in my relationship? Most likely not, I would say the case is the opposite. (I’m not just trying to make my own life more comfortable here.) My point is that the perception of how much two persons in a relationship contribute may not be accurate.
So, I introduce… The Household Chart! …
Experimenting with social web
I’m really excited about all the fun ideas I’ll be able to build once I quit my full time job and start freelancing (it’s only a few weeks left now, weeeee!).
When I was a student a few years back, I had time to build feminetik.se (a feminist community) together with Josefine Alvunger. We didn’t do it for profit, we just had a vision. feminetik.se was our baby, and even if we listened to the users to some extent regarding smaller features, we basically did stuff our way.
Today I wouldn’t choose to work quite like that. feminetik.se never reached any larger amount of members, even if the ones that were there were quite productive (the forum has over 300 000 entries …
Øredev day 3
My blog and tweets have been suffering from some lingual ambiguity lately. When I started out, English seemed like a reasonable language. This is, after all, the internet.
Then I realized that my target audience pretty much were all Swedes, and started to write in Swedish instead, as a foreign language is a bit of a barrier to people (and to me). Then came Øredev and all of a sudden English seemed like a good idea again.
The last day of Øredev was good. The previous days I’d prioritized sleep before keynotes, but since I was a bit curious about Hanselman I managed to catch the last half of his one. He did present some useful tips on how to be more …
Our baby, the Roomba
Once a day a round little robot travels through our apartment. Its little brushes sweep up dust, into a rather weak vacuuming system. The robot is better described as a tiny road sweeper than a vacuum cleaner and it’s not very intelligent. It goes on until it bumps into something, then changes direction, and the only reason it covers most parts of the floor is that it keeps cleaning for an hour or so. The floor has to be free of objects, for even if the robot has a cord untangling system it tends to eat socks. When this happens you’ll typically find a very sad little robot under the bed when you get home.
So, why have one?
Because it’s a …
Øredev dag 2
Trots att jag gjorde mitt bästa för att sova ut i natt så vaknade jag alldeles för tidigt och hade svårt att somna om. Den här dagen har därför, trots flera vändor i Johan & Nyström-caféet, varit minst sagt seg.
De flesta föreläsningarna jag har varit på har dock hållit mycket hög kvalitet.
Jag började dagen med att återigen lyssna på Galbraith och Almaer, som nu berättade om framtiden för webbapplikationer. Canvases och SVG kommer stort, 3D-CSS är på väg och fonthanteringen kommer bli bättre. Debugging kommer också bli enklare med plattformsoberoende verktyg. Det var en del prat om mobile devices och HTML 5 nämndes förstås.
Efter det var jag på en otroligt intressant föreläsing om destruktivt ledarskap. Leo Kant berättade att vi …
Øredev dag 1
Efter en dag av föreläsningar, mat och mingel kan jag konstatera att jag är glad och nöjd, har lärt mig intressanta saker och träffat intressanta människor.
Det tog dock ett par föreläsningar innan jag hittade vilka spår som är intressanta och relevanta för mig. Visst beror det mycket på enskilda talare, något som egentligen inte är jätterelevant för mig kan vara kul att lyssna på ändå om talaren är bra. Och tvärtom.
Nick Johnson pratade om Google App Engine, något jag hade höga förväntningar på. Föreläsningen visade sig dock mest vara ett intro till hur man bygger sin första app och det har jag ju redan gjort. Jag har fortfarande inte riktigt fått något grepp om ifall de mer avancerade saker jag …
