About me!
The life of me
My name is Johannes, at the time of writing I’m 31 years old, I live in the southern parts of Sweden, close to Malmö and Copenhagen and far away from polar bears.
For the last 6 or so years I have been working as a developer at three different companies, after hitting a wall a while back I finally decided that I would “run by my own” and started a company.
My career with programming started when I was a kid - back in the early nineties - and we bought our first computer, a Mac Classic…
My first attempts with development was with HyperCard and later on Macromedia director, making small games and videos.
After a few years, while in middleschool, I started to play around with HTML and JavaScript. Remember, this was years ago, way before any fancy ecma5 or similar, I never really liked JS nor the Markup stuff which was connected to HTML, but I kept playing around with it.
The years went by and I graduated highschool. At this point I was so tired with school that I didn’t have any motivation going on with higher education. So I took a year at which I intended to work instead… Yeah, as it is, there where no jobs for a kid with no other education than highschool. I spent about a year as unemployed and/or in different programs for kids without jobs. At the end, it was too much, so I decided to go back to school.
Level1 - WebDesign
After my period of no cash and no job, I applied to a webdesign programme at a “folk high school” which I attended for a year.
The design parts of the program was kind of fun, but what I liked the most was the small parts of PHP that I had the chance to get introduced to.
Now I’m sure people will frown “oh my god, the poor thing, php!”, well… yeah, but I’m alright!
Disclaimer: Php 7.1+ is a very potent language, I use it a lot in my projects and I do think that its good. But back then, stable php was in version 4 and php 5 was just introduced, so it was not close to what it is today.
Level2 - C#.net
Quite directly after the webdesign program I decided to apply to another school. This time it was a “C#.net programme”, a education at a polytechnic education which was supposed to run for two years. Sadly, I only attended the first year, because - even though it was not supposed to be like that - the education was directed to people with a bit more experience than me within the field of programming. I left the school after a year, I had not learnt much but it gave me a taste for more programming.
Level3 - TGA
I spent a year or so working at different factories and such, and right before the summer I got a mail from “The Game Academy” (later The Game Assembly) in Malmö, which was a newly founded polytechnic education within game development (they had programs for programmers and artists back then). I did not hesitate and applied for the programme. After interviews and a long wait for results I finally got a letter from TGA…
I was accepted!
I don’t think that I have ever learnt so much so fast. TGA was a intensive education. A school which intention was to be able to release us into the wild as fully hire-able game devs. And they did actually deliver.
When I finally finished the education (which included 7 months of internship) I was hired as a Gameplay and GUI programmer at the company at which I had my internship at, Junebud AB.
Work work work
I worked at Junebud for a while, probably one of the most enjoyable jobs I have had ever, but sadly - in 2012 - the company went bankrupt and we all lost our jobs.
I went to a few interviews and at the end I ended up at Talkative Labs.
Talkative was my first more general programming job, it was not a game studio, but rather Web and application development.
And this is when I was reintroduced to JavaScript.
I’ve always felt that its kinda funny how little a language can evolve in 10 years or so, because seriously, JS was not much better back in 2012 than in 2002. Node.js was a good-ish idea, but before ES6 and without the use of Typescript or similar, with callback hell and before promises was something commonly used, it was messy… like really messy!
I had fun, but after a couple of years and a while after I moved away from Malmö I felt that it was time to move on.
I started working at Auranest AB, here I worked with PHP and NodeJs. Node because I had experience with it, PHP because it was the company language of choice.
I worked mainly with the php-backend and with crawlers and such using JS, it was fun, but not the job or the assignments of my dreams.
And then I left.
Jitesoft
In October 2016 I decided that it was time for me to no longer work for someone else. I started Jitesoft.
The original idea was to in the future become a full-fledged game company, but start out as a more general development firm doing some consulting and in-house products, but it is now more of a consulting firm working mainly with customers or open source projects.
KRIG / KRIG collective
While working with my own company I joined a group of like-minded people in about 2017, we did a lot of projects together and after a while the core team decided to start a company
together. The company was named KRIGio and I and two others where the board.
I took the role as CTO.
Shortly thereafter and after an internal dispute which took a lot of my stamina, I decided to resign as CTO and bord member and left the company.
I decided to keep on focusing on Jitesoft and to stick to what I’m good at.
And that’s my life!