I was born in 1970 and got a Commodore 64 when I was 14 years old and have been fascinated by computers and software engineering ever since.
In my teens (1980-1989) I coded some demos for C64 but when my mom, who was a real estate agent, bought an IBM Personal PC for her work I started using the PC for school and went on to starting a consulting business when I was 18 years old doing databases in DSI-SYSTEM for real estate agents, so I have 35+ years of professional software engineering at the time of writing 🙂
In my 20s (from 1990-1999) while studing for a Master of Science in Software Engineering I worked as a developer on a range of different software projects. I continued working for a company that did systems for real estate agents and coded what is basically an email server in Turbo Pascal. Then I went on to work on some military stuff at DDCI which technically was some of the hardest and more interesting stuff I’ve worked on to this date – I learnt about optimizing code for embedded bare board systems on Tomahawk missiles 🚀. Towards the end of my studies I ended up working the Danish Institute for Fisheries Research (DIFRES) where I did a lot of mathematical modelling and implemented some systems to calculate the amount of bacteria in fish based on storage temperature over time. I wound up with a real job at DIFRES and became their first lead developer. I loved the research and the “smell” of laboratories and I still feel the same way when I visit the Carlsberg Research Laboratory. After DIFRES I moved on to NNIT where I worked as a consultant developer in the beginning.
In my 30s (2000-2009) while working as a lead developer in NNIT the role of “architect” became more common and I quickly grew into the role and took responsibility for larger and larger projects spread across national and international companies in both public and private sectors many of them in regulated industries like pharma. As an architect I moved from software architecture to solution architecture to enterprise architecture and from being an individual contributor to leadership roles. I never stopped coding though as I still believe that architects who code are superior to powerpoint architects. I participated in Executive Briefings, Product Advisory Meetings, Internal Product Team Meetings and more with Microsoft and still have contact with some of the products teams through internal networks in Microsoft. I left NNIT to become CTO in Traen (now Formpipe) where I was responsible for bridging the gap between technology, customer requirements and strategy. I spent almost 6 years working and learning how to manage “real” software products, budgets and people at scale. I managed our relationship with Microsoft and grew from nothing to a Gold Partner. In 2012 Traen was acquired by Formpipe and I left the company to pursue a completely unplanned career as a freelance consultant.
In my 40s (2010-2019) I worked as a consultant for a wide range of large companies (Statoil Fuel & Retail – now CircleK, Bluegarden – now Visma and DSV and a few others) where the common denominator for all my work was how to enable faster and better business through innovative use of technology resulting in faster, cheaper and better IT projects leading groups, teams and programs. Cloud Computing became a pervasive driver in this and still is if used the right way – just doing lift and shift doesn’t provide you with any real benefits. At Bluegarden I worked with Microsoft with Azure API Gateway in early access where we bolted it in front of a mainframe and enabled API access to payroll services. Microsoft wrote a nice casestory about it. At DSV we used bleeding edge technology to disrupt the old ways of doing stuff with new smarter ways and we managed to out perform existing vendors of route management systems by merging Cloud PaaS with deep knowledge of business processes in the DSV ETA Calculator. I also built the first public API Gateway in DSV so that partners can create shipments from their own systems.
I started my 50s (2020-2029) by walking in the door at Carlsberg to help Agnes with software architecture on the then just started CS+ project. The project and scope grew at a massive rate and we were hit by Covid just 3 months after I started. Over the next almost 4.5 years I built up a software engineering department from 20 to 150 and back to 75 engineers. We work hybrid/remote with developers, architects, devops, dataops, qa & support in Portugal, England, Spain and Poland.
I set the direction for architecture, software development, processes, support and budget to ensure continuous improvement across usage of technology in all aspects within the growth products area. See posts about Carlsberg.
I continue to be driven by technology and I still code in my spare time to keep up with new technology. Lately I spend a lot of time thinking about AI and how we can use it to solve software engineering problems faster. See posts about AI.
