Olivia5k

Olivia Thiderman - Curriculum Vitae

2025-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

About me</h2>
I started out as a web designer knowing little about code, but over time I developed a liking for it, and seventeen years later I am primarily a backend developer that also does operations. Over this journey, I have become an engineer that is deeply familiar with the entire process of making software; everything ranging from arguing about programming languages, to building build systems, to reliably rolling out releases with zero downtime.
I am passionate about making things fast; execute fast, build fast, test fast, iterate fast, even fail fast. To make this happen, I constantly seek to extend my knowledge of best practices in software development and design, build systems, testing, and monitoring. I am a big fan of history and old computing, and am therefore much more excited learning about punched card programming than language models that happen to be large.
I am an outgoing and social person, and making others laugh is one of the things I enjoy most. As a transgender woman I’m also involved in various LGBT causes in Stockholm, most notably the Cinema Queer</a> film festival. I also build my own keyboards, bake bread, make hot sauces, play the drums in multiple bands, and take care of the 100+ plants me and my best friend have in our apartment.

Technology</h2>
Programming</h3>
I am fluent in Go</a>, Python</a> and Javascript</a>, and I am quick to picking up new ones if needed or desired. Furthermore, my computer is almost entirely in Emacs</a> and I enjoy lisp languages - particularly Common Lisp</a>. In later years I’ve been picking up Rust</a>.
Databases</h3>
I have a long-standing crush on SQL, especially PostgreSQL</a>. Because of this, I am a firm believer in structure, schemas, and data modeling. That said, I also have experience with a variety of Non-SQL databases - including Cassandra</a>, RethinkDB</a>, redis</a>, boltdb</a> and an unfortunate amount of MongoDB</a>.
Web</h3>
Experienced in both the backend (nginx</a>, caddy</a>, apache</a>) and the frontend of developing web applications. Currently exploring HTMX</a>, and have extensive experience with VueJS</a>.
Cloud / deploying</h3>
I am used to both Amazon Web Services</a> and Googly Cloud Platform</a>.
I have used and administered Kubernetes</a> clusters (primarily via helm</a> and Terraform</a>) for both internal and customer-facing systems. I am also well versed in Docker, especially in shaving build time off of it.
In my spare time I have been deploying things to my homelab setup with Nomad</a>, but have recently started to move to a Kubernetes</a> setup there as well.
Build systems</h3>
I am convinced at one point I had used every build system under the sun - starting with Jenkins</a>, going into TeamCity</a>, Bamboo</a>, Travis</a>, Github CI</a>, Gitlab CI</a>, CircleCI</a>, SourceHut</a>; you name it. As such I am well versed in various ways of instructing complex systems how to build things - both locally and in build farms - and how to resolve issues when they arise. I once spent over two weeks debugging a segfaulting container where the root cause turned out to be a CPU architecture change in the hypervisor running the build agents.
Other notable traits</h3>
Strong believer in integration testing and designing software to be tested that way. I also believe that if a developer is not happy with their experience developing on a project, that’s a bug that should be addressed. As such, I love making tooling for managing and improving development setups.
I’m experienced in being 24/7 on-call for critical systems as well as both incident management and post-mortem workflows.
I take pride in my communication and facilitation skills. I’m an experienced recruitment interviewer and have facilitated over 150 interviews in my career, I have facilitated on-boarding training sessions at every place I’ve worked, and I regularly give talks and host training sessions in public speaking.
(If my professional persona was a drag queen, her name could probably be Jacqueline of all Trades. 💅)
Professional timeline</h2> Epidemic Sound</a> (2025-2026)</h3>
Soundtracking record label.
As Senior Software Engineer, I was part of the Sound Platform team. We operated the catalog management and processing pipelines for all audio files managed by the company. Our main projects focused on porting older legacy monoliths (written in Kotlin and Python) to a more modular microservice oriented architecture (written in Go).
I was one of the last people hired before a hiring freeze was enacted, and was later affected by a wave of layoffs where the last people hired where the first to be let go.
Learnster</a> (2025)</h3>
Learning Management System, helping organizations grow through education and knowledge.
As a Senior Infrastructure Engineer, I was in charge of maintaining the health of the fleet of containers running the service. Being the only dedicated infrastructure person in a small company, this entailed a wide variety of tasks ranging from ensuring ISO compliance to handling rollout of new versions of the product to all customers.
Major projects</h4>

Data Platform architecture
As the company was switching its billing and subscription provider, we needed a programmatic way for third parties to query for certain business metrics. We already had scripts that collected those metrics, but no single point to query for them. I built a small OpenAPI microservice that presents that data in a structured way. The same service now powers the BI tools the company uses. </li> </ul>

Switching container orchestration to Kubernetes
Moving our cloud workloads to a more flexible orchestration model, primarily motivated by resource optimization and cost reduction. The porting process was from running everything in ECS</a> with resources pre-allocated per customer, to a more scaleable pod-based workload. This entailed not just infrastructure changes, but also changes to the backend software - such as how configuration and database connections were managed.
As of this writing in June of 2025, this project is still ongoing. </li> </ul>
Mentimeter</a> (2023-2024)</h3>
Audience engagement software, facilitating interactive meetings via presentation software.
As a Senior Software Engineer, I was part of the Enterprise team in the Commercial department. We developed and maintained systems for large-scale enterprises to facilitate their identity and access management on the platform. We were responsible for Enterprise specific features, Single Sign-On via SAML</a>, account management via SCIM</a>, and various other things.
Major Projects</h4>

Revamp of internal back-office tool
The software used for back-office management (license renewals, account migrations, and similar administrative tasks) was in a less-than-desired state; several major versions behind in most libraries and security updates, an insecure data access pattern, functionality that had ceased to function, and a frustration-generating user experience.
The project was to revamp the tool and make it use production APIs (rather than direct database access). I was one of the two leads of the project, and I was responsible for stakeholder management and backend software architecture. </li> </ul>

Core data model redesign
As the company and the product had grown over a decade, some fundamental domain design choices were starting to show some cracks in them. Most significantly, it was too specific to a certain set of product features that limited the ability of the product to be used for different applications. A redesign was commissioned to make a new model that would have increased future-proof flexibility, and I was part of the group of Staff Engineers to develop it. The biggest challenge was to drastically change the data structure of most fundamental part of the product without breaking backwards compatibility at any point.
(this one is difficult to talk about in detail without breaking NDAs, but hopefully the gist of the project comes across) </li> </ul>

Hackathons and event management
In April of 2023 I led the The Rage Hackathon. It was the yearly hackathon that I was asked to hold on a very short time frame. The theme was simple - channel your small day-to-day frustrations about software development and turn it into furious passion that fixes the bad stuff. The event was a big success and it led to me being part of the planning committee for the Engineering Days 2023 off-site in September. </li> </ul>
Sabbatical (2021-2022)</h3>
I took almost two years of sabbatical to focus on my gender transition and my mental health.
Tink (2019-2021)</h3>
Payments processor and general payments platform, later acquired by VISA</a> in 2022.
As a Site Reliability Engineer I was focused on increasing system stability and scalability, as well as helping more junior members of the team grow.
Major projects</h4>

Revamping categorization pipeline
I spent my first few months adapting the deployment of the internal categorization service, which was based on Facebook’s fastText</a> library. My main focus was driving down deployment times and making it easier for non-developers (the machine learning part of our team) to deploy new ML models. </li> </ul>

Multi-customer DBA Management
My later half of my Tink employment was with the DBA team, in which we handled the various stateful databases used across all of the company - primarily Cassandra, Kafka, and Zookeeper. </li> </ul>

Documentation maintainer
I became the maintainer of the internal repository of technical documentation - a statically generated site called Book of Tink. The Book contained information on how the various services of the company interacted on a higher scope, as well as social guidelines for developers. The guidelines included everything from commit message etiquette to guidelines on good integration testing. </li> </ul>

Incident management
I helped organize the follow-up processes for mid- to major scale incidents. Having experienced post-mortem workflows at previous workplaces, I helped out with everything from information collection to remediation planning. </li> </ul>
Unomaly (2017-2019)</h3>
Anomaly detection via machine learning on logs, offering a B2B solution to detect and report on change in large infrastructures.
As a senior software engineer, I led several internal platform projects concerned with customer licensing, business metrics, and API design.
Unomaly was acquired by Logic Monitor</a> in 2020 and no longer exists as its own entity.
Major projects</h4>

Business metrics from B2B customer instances
I built systems that would gather customer instance metrics (amount of users on the system, amount of systems reporting logs et.c.) from customer networks. </li> </ul>

Designing and implementing a customer licensing system
I built a licensing system for the main product, using JSON Web Tokens as the main technology. The product involved a backend service, a RESTful API, CRM integrations, language specific API packages, and a per-instance validation component. </li> </ul>
Spotify (2013-2017)</h3>
Streaming service with a green logo which probably needs little introduction.
I learned and developed countless technological skills, but my biggest take-away is how I honed my skills in giving and receiving feedback. I spent half of my employment in Infrastructure and Operations, and the other half in Payments.

Major projects

Led a team of 50 engineers in a project to increase productivity
Mainly focused on decreasing build times, so my coordination resolved around identifying bottlenecks and advising strategies to combat those. The project lasted about six months, and in the end we decreased the general build times from ~45 minutes to ~9. The project was hailed as a success and as a result I was put in charge of the build system team. </li> </ul>

Migrated the entire company from one SCM system to another
I facilitated the move of 2600 repositories over 45 teams from Gerrit</a> to Github Enterprise</a>. I created tooling that converted SCM-relating tools (i.e. build systems, source code analysis, deployment systems) to be configured towards Github Enterprise repositories, and I assisted the teams in their move.
The Gerrit system was shut down without a single incident reported, and there was much rejoicing. </li> </ul>

Facilitated multiple launches of new markets
I was part of the Payments team that launched markets and campaigns in several new markets, including Indonesia and Japan. </li> </ul> </li> </ul>

Non-tech projects

Pride Parade organizing 2015/16
I was project lead in putting Spotify in the Stockholm Pride Parade twice. </li> </ul>

Tech University 2013/14
A colleague and I completely revamped the onboarding bootcamp for the entire tech organization, where new hires would be introduced to the various internal systems used when developing. About 200 new hires went through the program before it was remodeled into something owned by HR. </li> </ul> </li> </ul>
Coworks (2010-2013)</h3>
Small startup creating an information trading platform, later pivoted into a freelance brokerage. Defunct as of 2019, and the name and domain is now used by an unrelated US company.
As the second engineer employed, I did everything from database design to machine learning and frontend development.
Free time</h2>
Spireblight (2022-)</h3>
A community-driven effort to make supporting software for streamers playing Slay The Spire</a>. I maintain the web components and do general UNIX maintenance of the servers whenever needed. For an example of the work see Baalorlord’s official website</a>, which I’ve designed.
One-Eye Productions (2013-)</h3>
Live-streamed video game tournaments. As the founder and main engineer, much of my free time has gone into developing it and doing so employed and developed my entire skill set as an engineer. Up until the end of 2019, 190 different players participated in 17 live-streamed showdowns of TowerFall</a>, and by then the events were held in e-sports bars around Stockholm. Sadly, the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to sitting on couches in bars next to strangers, so the endeavor was put on hold.

Her Mind

2025-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

This is the script for the talk I was supposed to hold at the Her Mind event for the Karolinska Insititute. Unfortunately I could not make it due to a medical emergency, so I am instead sharing the script. I hope you find it useful.
The slides can be viewed in Googly Slides</a>.
Intro</h2>
Hello everyone. My name is Olivia, and I am a transgender activist, public speaker, and software engineer. Today, I will be contributing to this event by highlighting what women’s mental health means for transgender women like myself. I will try to give a short rundown about what being trans means, how the world will likely treat you if you are trans, and what that means for your mental health.
A small disclaimer</h3>
I am not all transgender or queer people, and I am not here representing any organization today. What I am sharing here today are my observations and personal experiences, in the hopes that I can shine a light on a perspective of women’s mental health that might not be immediately obvious; the perspective of transgender women.
Oh, and also, I am not an academic. I just happen to sound like one sometimes, probably due to my unmedicated addiction to Wikipedia.
Empathy and curiosity</h3>
Whenever I hold a talk, I highlight that my two most important values in life are empathy and curiosity. I try to bring empathy to all my interactions, and I am constantly curious about the world. And when I come across something I don’t yet understand, I start with empathy in trying to understand it. My hope is that you can allow the same with the things I am about to present for you, since my assumption is that a lot of it might be new to you.
About being transgender</h2>
Now I could talk about this for approximately 14 hours straight, but since I only have 15 minutes, I’m obliged to keep this to the lightning version.
A transgender person is someone whose gender identity does not match the gender they were presumed to have based on the genitalia they were born with. This can mean a person born with a penis is actually a girl, and that a person born with a vulva is actually a boy. Conversely, the term for someone who is not transgender is cisgender.
Gender dysphoria</h2>
This incongruence of gender identity commonly leads to a condition called gender dysphoria - which is Latin for “bad feelings about gender.” This encompasses a wide range of scenarios that often lead to mental health issues. Here are a few of the different possible iterations of gender dysphoria:
Kinds of dysphoria</h3>

Physical dysphoria
A general feeling that the physical shape and characteristics of your body does not match your gender identity. For example, your primary sex characteristics like your gonads and genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics like broad shoulders or facial hair for trans women, or curvy hips and waists for trans men. </li>

Social dysphoria
How people perceive you and your gender. This is where misgendering takes center stage. Misgendering is when someone uses a gendered pronoun like he or she for you, but uses one that does not match your gender identity. This might seem small, but it is very uncomfortable for trans people. This used to happen more to me, but along my transition it has mostly gone away. </li>

Societal dysphoria
What roles you find yourself inhabiting in our society. The strongest of these are marital and parental ones, like mother, father, husband and wife. These can show up both before and after you transition. A trans woman who hasn’t come out yet might find a strange discomfort from being called a father. A transgender man who has given birth will struggle with how extremely female-gendered all resources around giving birth are. Furthermore, dating and courtship are highly gendered. One of my earliest memories of a dysphoric spike - a decade before I came out - was when I was doing couples dancing and I was told I was expected to lead rather than follow because I was being perceived as male. </li>

Sexual dysphoria
Closely related to societal dysphoria, sexual dysphoria is centered around sex and sexual relationships. Genitals and gender are closely related, and a lot of sexual activity will likely involve your genitals at some point. If you’re pre-transition, this might lead to confusing and dysphoric feelings when having sex, which can reduce or even remove the pleasure sexual acts are supposed to bring. This can lead to adopting a sexual identity you don’t actually connect with, in attempts to find a solution to whatever is feeling wrong. </li> </ul>
There are several more versions of gender dysphoria, and even the ones above could be covered with more detail than I can include here, but if you would like to know more, I very highly recommend the resource The Gender Dysphoria Bible</a>.
Transitioning</h3>
The main way to treat gender dysphoria is by transitioning. A gender transition can entail many things, from smaller personal things;

Dressing and presenting more according to your gender </li>

Training your voice to fit your gender </li>

Asking people in your life to use a new name and pronouns for you
To bigger and more involved things; </li>

Legally changing your name and gender </li>

Hormone replacement therapy </li>

Medical surgeries </li> </ul>
No two transgender people will have the same journey, and not everyone will do all the things I just listed.
Healthcare</h3>
Some of the transitioning steps are things you can do on your own, but some of them require access to healthcare. How you present yourself to the world is something you yourself can control to a large extent, and it’s the first few steps that you do once you’ve come to the conclusion that transitioning is the right thing for you.
However, many of the bigger and later steps require medical intervention and surgeries, and that means being involved with the healthcare system. Unfortunately, trans healthcare is not in a great state anywhere. The systems we have in place are understaffed, underfunded, and overwhelmed.
When I applied to the trans clinic we have here in Stockholm, they told me it would be 18-24 months before any form of clinical evaluation could begin. I waited 39 months before I heard back. I had my last evaluation meeting with them last week, and I am currently awaiting their final evaluation whether I fit the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria or not.
My story is not uncommon. In most places of the world, the waiting lists are measured in years. In the last decade there have been some very clear improvements even here in Sweden, but in general it’s lagging behind and inadvertently suspending a lot of people in a form of suffering.
This brings me to my next section…
Data and census</h2>
Something that has always plagued those on the margins of society is that it is quite difficult to be recognized. Both in general by other people, but even more so by systems and governments. Queer people in general and trans people in particular have had a hard time making sure that systems count us.
In his book Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action, Dr. Kevin Guyan</a> goes into deep detail about the problems with data and census collection when it comes to queer people. The first chapter is called Gaps and Absences and discusses the data that was never recorded. It brings up that when the British government invested more in census data after the end of the second World War - the big dub dub dos1</a>, as it were - survey questions about sexuality were included. So, for essentially the first time ever queer people could be counted.
At face value, this is a good thing. Societal visibility and recognition in some way starts there - when the systems starts seeing the data. But, by this time in the 1940s and 1950s being a homosexual was still a crime. So while it was now possible to make yourself and your identity seen, it was at your own peril of both social exclusion and state violence to self-identify as someone who by definition breaks the law.
These same systems that have held queer people back have of course also effected other groups of people that are not wealthy white men. Dr. Guyan continues:

[…] it is vital to underscore how the efforts of lawyers, medical professionals and scientists in the nineteenth-century in defining, categorizing, and controlling sexuality were the product of patriarchal ideas of what was worthy of being counted. </blockquote>
These practices result in data sets that do not reflect true reality. Women, queer people, ethnic minorities, and anyone who isn’t a white straight man does not get accurate representation under these conditions. And while that might seem insignificant to an onlooker, that kind of numerical and statistical representation is what leads to actual political representation and therefore actual systemic change.
Politics</h2>
Unfortunately, this means we have to talk about politics. The world is currently a scary place in many ways, and doubly so if you’re a trans person. In the last few years, the world has taken a turn towards authoritarianism, and the places that have done so have used transphobic rhetoric as a political tool. This started in the U.S. around a decade ago, and they have since spread across the world.
After gay marriage was legalized in 2015</a> it only took a couple of months before so called “bathroom bills” started getting proposed. Those purported to “protect women from predators” by trying to police which public bathrooms trans people were allowed to use. This wasn’t very successful because the general public found that kind of policing to be quite uncomfortable for everyone. The target was then moved to “protecting children from harmful doctors”, by introducing legislation restricting or banning transgender healthcare for persons under the age of 18.
The purpose of these bills is to have a politically expedient scapegoat for the political right. It used to be gay people, but after the legalization of gay marriage, the political apparatus moved on to the next marginalized queer group; trans people. Even worse so with the bills targeting trans minors, since they don’t yet have the right to vote and therefore cannot politically defend themselves.
As a direct result of such political messaging, violence against trans people has increased. Rights to healthcare have been taken away. Laws criminalizing parents who give their children gender affirming healthcare have been put in place. Trans people have been forced back into the closet in fear of their own safety. The constant barrage of news of the things I just listed have a mental health effect on trans people regardless if they are directly affected or not.
Most of the things I just described are currently American phenomenons, but we’re seeing attempts to export it out and import it elsewhere. Luckily those attempts have yet to take root in places like Sweden, but the fear still lives with us that they one day might.
Conclusion</h2>
Earlier I hammered on about data and censuses because they are an important tool in politics. If there were more trans people representing the trans community on all political levels, our ability to fight back against the political apparatus seeking to utilize trans people as a scapegoat would be greatly increased. To get to that political representation, we need more data so that the system can recognize us.
Furthermore, the sorry state of trans healthcare is a direct effect of the lack of proper representation trans people have had over the last decades. Even at face value, the fact that the system is so overwhelmed by the amount of people seeking healthcare is a quite clear indication that the resources given to the healthcare system are not adequately scaled to the needs of the population. I believe there are more trans people than current data and censuses show, due to the gaps and absences I spoke of earlier.
The political situation and the healthcare situation are tied together, and as I’ve said a couple of times now, I genuinely believe that the systemic changes needed to improve all of this starts with representation in data. So, if there is only one thing you bring with you after hearing me talk today, please let it be this:
If you’re working with data collection or data processing in any way, please make sure that that you include trans, queer and marginalized identities. If you are unsure on how to do this, please reach out to your local LGBT organizations and they will be able to provide data and support to you. Here in Stockholm, those would be Transammans</a> and RFSL</a>. I’ll have links to them at the end.
Oh, and look into the works of Dr. Guyan</a>. His body of work is an amazing resource on this topic. I’ll link his website at the end as well.
Gender euphoria</h2>
Now, I’m about to wrap this talk up and because I am a bubbly optimist, I want to end on a positive note. In contrast to gender dysphoria, we also have gender euphoria. This encompasses the inverse of gender dysphoria - feelings of happiness stemming from your relationship to your gender.
It’s the reason why we as trans people go through this arduous and gatekept process. It’s the reason why we risk severing ties with our friends and family to be true to the people we are.
This happiness can come from small things like people using your name and your pronouns correctly, to someone you don’t know correctly assuming your gender without you having to do anything in particular, to seeing yourself in a mirror and genuinely connecting with your reflection.
The euphoria is the best aspect of transitioning, and it is much under-discussed since almost all trans discourse is focused on misery. Therefore, I want to highlight that trans people that manage their dysphoria and have achieved gender euphoria are some of the happiest people you will ever meet. Regardless of how you quantify quality of life, be it productivity in society, a utilitarian sense of happiness, or whatever else - systemically helping trans people is a way to increase that. It makes lives better.
That’s why this is all worth fighting for, and that’s why I was on this stage today speaking to all of you. Thank you for your time.

A sly little Behind the Bastards reference for those who partake. 🤭 ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section>

What being a woman means to me

2025-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

I was recently tasked by someone very dear to me to tell them what being a woman means to me. When I think about that, I think of a lot of things. This time those thoughts came out as a poem of sort.
(mild content warning: mention of suicidality)
I think of the abstract</h2>
When I think about what being a woman means to me, I think of the abstract things that are hard to put into words.
Being a woman means a sense of home to me. I visualize it as two rooms. One is filled with men and the other is filled with women. I can exist in the room that is filled with men, but I can never relax. Not because I am under duress or because I fear for my safety, but because I do not connect with the men since I am not one of them (even though some of them might think so). Conversely, I immediately feel at home in the room with women. I might not know any of them in there at all, but I still know that we have a connection and that that connection establishes a sense of belonging and safety I do not get elsewhere.
I’d like to think that this exists outside of the patriarchal structures we find ourselves in, but I also have no way of verifying that.
I think of the contradictions</h2>
When I think about what being a woman means to me, I think of the contradictions that keep popping up.
I have both always been a woman, and I still have a need to continue my transition. I am already perfect, but I have things I want to improve. I am not doing this for anyone else, but some of the changes I do are to get the reactions I want out of other people. Gender in a way doesn’t matter to me, until it suddenly really does. I don’t see gender as something superficial, but the superficial things that I do to enhance my femininity matter to me greatly. I am at peace with my body, but I am also excited to see what it can do the further I go into my transition.
I am perfect and I love myself, but there are still ways for me to go.
I think of all the things that have made sense in retrospect</h2>
When I think about what being a woman means to me, I think of the past and all the times I should’ve known.
I think of when I was ten years old and I was bullied into joining the girl’s basketball team during recess, only because I had long hair. I did not understand why that was something bad, because to me it felt correct. I think of when I changed my gender on my social network profiles at age 16 and justified it as “I’m being a little troll”, whereas I think I always knew it was something else about it that I liked but couldn’t yet articulate. I think of when I was put in drag for masquerade parties and my friends always told me that I smiled with my whole body and that I shone with a glow I didn’t do at other times. I think of when I slept with a bisexual friend and she told me that I “lick pussy like a lesbian”.
I think of all the signals that were clearly there, and how I was always able to rationalize them away. The notion that I was a woman was always there but it could never land, because I didn’t know that was a path that I could take.
I think of what would’ve happened a hundred years ago</h2>
When I think about what being a woman means to me, I think of the fact that I am alive when I am.
I am forever grateful that I am born in a time where my transition is a possibility that exists. The processes we currently have are incredibly far from perfect, but they are also infinitely more than nothing. I often think of what education means for those of us on the margins, and how even in our age of all the information ever it was still a struggle for me to learn the language I needed to vocalize these intrinsic feelings I had. What would have happened to me if I was born a hundred years ago?
I tend not to think about the past too much since the past tends to contain dark sadness and frustrating confusion, but this is one of the exceptions. I am lucky to be where I am, and I am doing all that I can to value that luck and become the person I have been all along. A hundred years ago, I don’t know how long I would’ve been around.
I also don’t think of some things</h2>
When I think about what being a woman means to me, there are some things that are absent.
I don’t think about death anymore. I used to. A lot. In my darkest moments, I visualized myself as floating in deep water, ready to be gone. Just to be a wave that exists in one minute, and then floats out into the bay to disappear forever in the next. I have never been suicidal, and I have never sought to harm myself. But, thinking about death and more importantly - having the pain go away - was enticing and alluring as I was lying on the bathroom floor in tears I had no idea where they were coming from.
Being a woman means that I don’t think about those things anymore. I don’t have to, because they are no longer needed. That pain is no longer with me.
I think of the boy I used to be</h2>
When I think about what being a woman means to me, I think of the boy that I used to be.
He was so tired.
He was tired from all the fighting he had to do, in battles he had no idea how to win or even why he was in them. He tried and he tried, but nothing worked.
He was so very tired.
He lied awake at night, trying to figure out why he was always struggling and why there was never any relief. He knew something was wrong - he knew he needed to fight - but he could never figure out what was needed from him. He helped others, but he could never put the mask on himself first. There was never a mask for him to put on.
He was so so very very tired.
But then, finally, I came along. And almost in an instant it all made sense. The battle was never his to fight. And it was never his fault. So I could step in, and I could give him the one thing he ever really wanted.
He finally got to rest.
He is still with me. He is me and I am him. But he is no longer in charge. I am driving now, and he is in the back seat, sleeping. I still have his memories, and whenever I can I let him see all the things that we are doing together. But, he keeps sleeping.
He deserves that.
I think of where I could go</h2>
Lastly, I think of the woman that I want to be - the woman I am going to be.
She is mothering to those who needs it. She makes everyone laugh, and she heals their wounds when they are hurt. She moves through the world with empathy and compassion, and she is not afraid to seek out her joy. She finally uses her body as an instrument of pleasure for herself and those she holds near. She becomes the cool auntie to the children in her life, and she is the sparkle of life for everyone else around her. She builds a home that is steady and safe and warm. She lives her life with passion and she seeks to see the world. And, all the while, she looks amazing while she does it.
When I think about what being a woman means to me, I think of a woman who lives without fear and without sorrow. I already am on the path of becoming her, and I can’t wait to be even more of her.

The Internet is exciting again

2022-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

tl;dr - i have started to embrace the fediverse, and it gives warm fuzzy feelilngs
Being left out and left behind</h2>
Every now and again my friends and I try out a new game. They are usually the ones discovering the games, and then they loop me in if the game passes the litmus test of not being terrible. But, whenever I join, the others are usually a bit ahead of me. If not in equipment and level, then in playtime and general experience with the game. So, while I’m fiddling around figuring out what weapon to use or what skills to invest into, they are already ahead of me in the level and getting more things done. Not all games are like this, but you can probably imagine that it’s harder for me to get motivated to play more when it happens. I get overwhelmed with a feeling of being perpetually left behind - a feeling of not being able to participate - and that very quickly drains any joy that could’ve been found.
I always felt the same way around social media. Always perpetually missing out, and looking for some kind of joy that can never be found. Until recently, I couldn’t really put a finger on why I felt that way. Not being able to identify the reason for this annoyed me, because I have little to no desire of being social media famous or whatever. So, why was not participating feeling wrong? Also, why do I keep coming back? I should know better than to doom-scroll through repeated hateful speech and advertisements in search of a dopamine kick that never comes. Why am I still participating, when it feels bad and I know it’s bad?
Then… a man-child billionaire bought a corporation.
The old world’s on fire 🔥</h2> So, in case you blissfully haven’t heard of it yet - Twitter’s been in the news a bit recently. The short story is that a dude bought the whole thing, fired more than half of the workforce 1</a>, and then removed the ban of the account of a disgraced former president.2</a> There’s a lot more nonsense going on, but it’s all the bad kind. The re-instating was the final drop for me, so yesterday I deleted my account and the app from my phone.
It’s the internet equivalent of looking at a car crash; it’s really hard to look away. In all honesty, it’s kind of cool seeing such an empire fall in real time. And when I thought about that, that’s when it clicked for me. I don’t dislike the whole notion of microblogging or the general idea of social networks - I dislike that they are empires.3</a>
So, what’s the opposite of the kinds of tech empires?
A whole new world 🎶</h2>
The answer, is Mastodon</a>! Actually it’s the Fediverse</a>, but today we’re only talking about the Mastodon part of things 4</a>. The gist is - instead of a single entity hosting everything, the idea of the Fediverse is that those that want to can host their own services, and then there are tools and protocols to make the services communicate and speak together.
The usual easy pitch is that it is kind of like email; no one “owns” email - but different providers can still talk to each other. For a super nice in-depth guide to many of the concepts, there’s the excellent Guide to Mastodon</a>.
I am now @Olivia5k@tech.lgbt</a>! This showcases how neat the hosting model is. Perhaps obviously, a domain called tech.lgbt</a> is made by and for techie LGBT people. I am one of those, so I figured it would be a suitable home for me in this new internet paradigm. And of course, it was. I posted an introduction post with some descriptive hashtags (like #trans</code>), and some lovely people came by and said hi. When I came out as trans on Twitter I also made a post with the #trans</code> hashtag, only to discover that it was only used for pornography. That was a meh moment if there ever was one, heh.
Another cool usage that I want to showcase is The Internet Archive</a>. They own and operate a Mastodon service</a> that they use for communications. It’s super clear who they are, and since they don’t have open registrations, it will stay that way. Again, very similar to email.
Yesterday when I was browsing around and just exploring things, the service went down for a few minutes. I guess the operators did some maintenance or something like that. While downtime is generally not something that’s desirable, I was actually pretty excited. It reminded me not to take it for granted. It might not be there tomorrow. It reminded me that the Internet is there to be explored, and that just gives me warm fuzzy feelings inside.
Suddenly the Internet was exciting again</h2> I think it’s easy to kind of overstate when a big shift is happening in the world - especially since we’ve been practically bombarded with world-altering historic events over the last few years. I have hope that this opens up a new neat world on the internet though; one that’s smaller, less hateful, and less filled with fucking ads. If you are interested and want to join this movement, you can and you should! Again, the Guide to Mastodon</a> is excellent. Right now many Mastodon services have closed their invitations due to the massive spikes of users leaving Twitter and looking for something else. I have invites to @tech.lgbt, if that’s something that would suit you. Feel free to fire me an email</a> if such is the case! Other than that, the guide linked above has a good suite of suggestions on how to move forward. Is Mastodon going to overtake Twitter (et. al.) and take over the world? No. Actually, not doing that is the point. We need less empires, and more collaboration and communication between humans. Being part of that right now is really exciting though. Feeling good about the Internet. Can’t remember when that happened last. Here’s hoping that the feeling can last for a bit. 💜 There are some conflicting numbers on what’s actually going on, but at least one source</a> says it’s “half”. Regardless, that’s literally thousands of people. ↩</a> </li> I’m being vague and not naming the men involved because I really really never want to talk or even think about either of the two ever again. For providing context here, it’s hard to avoid them though. ↩</a> </li> Originally I wrote a long rant about how a few US tech oligopolies have sold us enough convenience to convince us that all the internet can be is a surveillance machine that injects advertisements into our daily lives, but I’ve decided that’s a footnote for now and a rant for another time. 💃 ↩</a> </li> Actually actually, it’s something called ActivityPub</a>, but let’s not go there today. This whole thing is convoluted enough even before we get down to the protocol tech. 👀 ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section>
What's in a name? 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 People who traverse the gender spectrum face something most people won’t even consider; if you drastically change your presentation as a person - do you also change your name? If you’re assigned female at birth</a> but are transitioning towards being male, will you be able to feel comfortable with the name you were given at birth? Most names are gendered, so the odds of them meshing with a changing gender expression are probably against you. That said, some people have androgynous names - names that are traditionally given to both men and women. Technically, my old name is one of those. I’ve never felt that way though, and the only woman I’ve met that had that name later turned out to be a trans man, so… yeah. Speaking of old names… The name that once was</h3> In trans circles, the term deadname is used to refer to one’s old name. The term is named from two things; in contrast to the term birthname, and the fact that the name is now dead and should not be used. The action of deadnaming</a> someone is to call them by their old name, and it is considered greatly offensive to deliberately deadname someone. People suffering from gender dysphoria</a>1</a> this can cause a wide range of negative feelings from mild annoyance to great discomfort. That said, the harm is mostly felt when it’s deliberate. Different people will of course react differently depending on their own situation, but from the trans people I have spoken to this about and from my own perspective, being deadnamed is neither fun nor the end of the world. Especially when it comes to people close to you that have known you for a long time. It’s understandably a bit of a challenge to change how you refer to someone you’ve known for decades. Hell, it’s easy to do it to yourself at times. It’s only once you change your name you realize how some habits are subconsciously stuck very deep. Things like shaking hands with someone and introducing yourself will probably make you say… your old name. Same with if you’re cooking and your phone starts ringing and you answer it while stirring a pot or something - it’s very easy to use your old name. Does that mean I’m not committed to the name Olivia? Of course not. It’s just part of the experience of transitioning, and much of that takes a lot of time and effort before it becomes subconscious. As such, at least to me it’s not a major deal if you call me by my deadname, especially not now that I’m fairly early into my transition. If you keep doing it in a few years time though, I might be a bit “come on really”, but right now I’ll just politely correct you and we’ll go on just fine. Please don’t worry about it. If you want to take anything away from this, let that be that if someone tells them that they have a new name it’s a baseline of respect to try to use that name. How to choose a name</h2> Choosing a new name is fun, but also kinda… scary. You want to get it correct right away, right? So, how do you go about it? Do you base it on your old name? Do you use the same first letter, so that your initials are the same? Can you find one that sounds kinda similar phonetically, so that there’s some resemblance? Or, do you go buck wild and invent a new name no one has ever had before? You’ll probably notice a theme in my writings about these things, but… this is personal and will greatly vary from person to person. This is my story about it, so… What about my name?</h2> When I first came out, I had a different name in mind then the one I actually settled on. As I mentioned earlier - you feel like you want to get it right, but you honestly might not. I had two candidates for names for myself, and they came from something related but a bit different. They were both names I would’ve wanted to give to my daughters. Not only did I only ever conceive having anything but daughters (i.e. I have no idea what I would name a son), but I’ve never been sure if I want children or not. I’m still not, and I’m leaning towards not2</a>. But still, I had this really strong connection to these two names. If this is a hint towards me being trans or not, who knows? The first name - Zoey</h3> Anyway, when I first came out I named myself Zoey. It means “life”</a>. Following the earlier discussion about how to choose a name, it’s phonetically similar to my old name. During spring of this year I experimented a bit with it, mostly by choosing it as nicknames in online games. Due to the pandemic we played a lot of games like Jackbox</a> where we’d get to choose nicknames, and I choose Zoey (or just Zoe - I couldn’t choose). But, even though I’ve really liked that name since I first saw it on a character</a> in a snowboarding game</a> many years ago, it didn’t feel right. Part of me liking it as my name was that it’s a name that people outside of Sweden can correctly pronounce - something that’s not true for my deadname. But, inversely, it does not feel at home as a Swedish name either. It felt almost artificial on me - it didn’t really fit. The name I ended up choosing - Olivia</h3> I was kind of ambivalent on choosing a name. It wasn’t really actively on my mind. More like on the back burner. Then, on my way back home from doing Högskoleprovet in May</a> it just dawned on me. I had been so focused on Zoey that I forgot that I actually had two candidates for names. And the other was of course, Olivia. Following the earlier discussion, it’s kind of based on my old name. oLewia, if you follow. It has connotations to peace, which I really resonate with. I’ve legally changed it so that that’s my name. I currently have my deadname as a middle name, but I’m probably going to remove that. As of this writing I’m the only Olivia Thiderman there is, so to distinguish my name further seems superfluous. I considered Olivia Zoey Thiderman, of course, but I’m not really living for the initials that would give me, haha. Maybe I could go with something on H, like Hanna Olivia Thiderman so that my initials would be HOT? 🔥 I don’t know, and I’m not in a hurry to change it. Perhaps I’ll change my mind if I have another serendipitous moment, but for now I’m going to go with a less is more approach. The internet nickname</h3> Lastly, I’m at a crossroads about my internet nickname as well. For over a decade, I’ve just gone by the mononym of my last name - thiderman; it’s even the root domain for this blog. For a transfeminine person like myself, going by a nickname with the suffix -man feels ever so slightly off for hopefully understandable reasons. I figured the amount of times I’d be gendered correctly with that nickname could probably fit on a single hand. I use Discord quite a bit, and on there they have a system where the username also has a 4-digit number attached to it, to allow multiple users to have (kind of) the same username. So, I wanted to change from thiderman to Olivia. And, that proved kinda difficult - perhaps not surprising given that it’s a given name that’s not entirely uncommon. I tried the obvious Olivia#6969 and Olivia#1337 et.c., but they were all taken. Nothing worked. I started trying random numbers. All taken. But, then I landed on one that actually worked, and I decided to adopt that as my main internet nickname. So, now I’m Olivia 5000</a>. That sounds like a potentially murderous sexbot in a Black Mirror episode, and I can absolutely live with that. So what’s in a name?</h2> Probably a lot more than you think! It’s one of those things that trans people will get to think a little bit more of than most, and I invite everyone else to think about names and the changing of them; What if you suddenly had a reason to change your name? What would it feel like? What would you choose, and what would you find important when choosing? Giving those kinds of questions some thought is a small thing, but nevertheless it might give you an insight into a gender experience you might not be a part of. That concludes my little internal monologue about names. I thought it would be worthwhile to share my experiences about names and the changing of them. I liked writing about it, and I’m pretty sure I can find more similar things to muse about. Turns out there’s a lot of things happening when one is trans, and there are stories to be told about those things. I’d love to tell mine. Yes, I will keep linking to this site because it is truly fantastic. ↩</a> </li> Which is something I should go into greater depth about, and which should be a topic for another time. 👀 ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section> The human heart in conflict with itself 2021-11-01T00:00:00+00:00 The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. </blockquote> This is a paraphrased quote by the American author William Faulkner from a speech he gave at the Nobel Banquet</a> in 1950. I’ve never read any of his works, but authors I have read have used this quote as something that guides their way of writing. It’s also a quote I’ve had on my mind for a long time now. I like telling stories. If you’re reading this on the day of its posting - my 33rd birthday - you’ve probably already figured out that something has changed and I have quite a story to tell. It actually happened some time ago, but before I tell the story, I want to talk about why I haven’t told it yet; My heart has been in conflict with itself about what to tell and how to tell it. Imagine this</h2> Imagine that you’ve realized something big about yourself. Like, really really big. Life changing! For the first time in too long, you’re happy. You feel good. You’ve found answers to questions you barely knew you were asking. You’re proud. You want to tell the world. You tell people. They are happy for you. You’re over the moon. Everything finally feels fine for the first time in forever. But then… …you meet backlash. From people close to you. Unexpected… backlash. And, so much more than you could’ve feared. It hurts. More than you could’ve imagined. Doubt starts seeping in. What if you’re wrong? Is this just a ploy for attention? The happiness fades. The pride falters. You start feeling sad. Maybe you should try to figure out what’s actually wrong with you and fix that rather than… whatever this is? Then for some reason, the sadness fades. You don’t even cry about it anymore. You can’t, for some reason. Apathy sets in. Months pass. You don’t really… feel anything at all. It just feels… empty. Like nothing. You realize that you’re back to square one. You feel like you did before all of this happened. A story about a story never told</h2> I’ve wanted to talk about this. I wanted to boast about how proud I’ve felt. But then I didn’t feel proud anymore. So, I wanted to talk about what happened. But, I don’t want to be the person that publicly airs their grievances with people close to them, so I didn’t want to talk about that either. The only thing I felt was left was to talk about how it hurts, but I almost want that even less. The world is sad and dark enough as it is. If anything, I want to spread some kind of joy. But I guess writing about the hurt is what I ended up doing. What this is. It’s not what I hoped, but right now it feels like the step forward. The only step forward, probably. I’ve kept all of this deliberately vague and abstract. I’m writing about how something felt for me, not what that something was. I’m also writing about it to try to wrap it up and put it behind me. My last few months have been defined by this and I want to move on. Talking about it any further would just rehash the pain for me. I have gotten the support that I need and now the one thing I need is time to heal. I hope that explains why I’m keeping it vague, and I hope that my wish for privacy about it will be respected. The human heart in conflict with itself. A stalemate of your own mind. But, I don’t want to be in that state anymore. I want to break out of that. It makes for a good writing philosophy, but it’s not where you want your life to be. It’s time. So, let’s leave the doom and gloom behind, and go to the happy part of this post; Hi, I’m Olivia.</h2> I’m a transgender woman. Nice to meet you! My pronouns are she/her. This is me earlier this summer: <img src=“/static/img/olivia-out-smaller.jpg” /> (super big thanks to Jennifer Kilman</a> for doing the makeup 💜) If you know what it means to be transgender, then me coming out as a trans woman might not come as a big surprise. If you’re not certain what it means, let’s have a super short rundown; To be transgender is to have a gender identity which does not match the gender you were presumed to have based on the genitalia you were born with. This can mean a person born with a penis is actually a girl, that a person born with a vulva is actually a boy. </blockquote> The paragraph above is from a site called That’s Gender Dysphoria, FYI</a> which is nothing short of incredible in how it details the transgender experience. If you want to know more I recommend that along with Abigail Thorn’s video Identity: A trans coming out story</a>, which served as the last nudge I needed to stop being in denial about who I am. But what’s really important</h3> When it comes to trans things, it’s really easy to get bogged down in definitions and trying to figure out what is what. Especially when talking to those that don’t fully understand the concept. I think it’s really hard for people to grasp the concept of transness if they’re not experiencing it. It’s so out of the norms, and gender is something most people take so fully for granted that the very idea that you could change it is incomprehensible. Because of this, it very easily becomes your responsibility to educate them and/or defend your very existence. And that… that gets exhausting. Perhaps understandably, I don’t want that either. Not right now, not in this post. Right now I want to highlight one major thing - the main takeaway that I’m writing about here; Me coming out as trans has made me happy. Honestly, that’s the only thing you need to know about me being trans. The rest of it is essentially circumstantial. Knowing who I am has made all the difference, and for the first time I can feel that I love who I am without it feeling hollow and fake. When I do things that affirm my identity, I feel a form of happiness I didn’t know could exist. To go from feeling like an impostor of your own existence to feeling that love songs can be directed inwards towards yourself - that’s a pretty wild trip. And I’m so incredibly happy to be on it. Of course, there are a million more things to talk about, and many of them are sadly very dark. I aim to talk more about them, but not today. Today is a happy day. Today is my 33rd birthday. One third of a century. It feels like the true closing of Act I of my life, and it feels poetic that it’s the day when I’m finally publicly out. So hi, I’m Olivia</h2> And I’m glad to finally be here. 😊 I’m about to go on some really great adventures, and I look forward to experiencing them with you. With tearful eyes and the happiest smile, Olivia 💜 Status Update: May 2021 2021-05-25T00:00:00+00:00 So I did that Högskoleprovet thingy…</h2> …and it honestly went pretty well. I even wrote a little blurb</a> about it just a few days afterwards. I showed it to a few people, and a non-zero amount of them thought it was real, so I refrained from actually posting it. Hopefully it’s obvious why. 😅 1</a> So yeah, contrary to the fiction above, I had a surprisingly composed day. Apart from having to run to the train - it was a few minutes early and I thought I was about to miss it - everything went really well. I wasn’t stressed out, I didn’t feel overwhelmed, and not a single one of the questions caught me entirely off guard. I mean, the reading comprehension parts in Swedish are criminally boring and the use of maps and graphs from literally 1850 is at least a tiny bit academically rude, but I already knew that was going to be the case. While they did release both the questions and the answers publicly by now, I haven’t gone through them to approximate my score. We were not allowed to make notes of our answers2</a>, so trying to guess the score would effectively mean doing like half of the test again. That doesn’t interest me, and honestly I’d rather just wait for the actual result when I get it on June 17th. I think I did pretty well, and I feel like speculating about the score is a bit of a waste of time and might even be a bit of a jinx. And then what?</h2> When I left my job in early March, I took a short break and went out in the woods for a bit. Then, I pretty much went into studying mode to prepare for the test. So, once the test was over, I went into kind of a vacation mode. No plan, no things to do, no need to work. Taking care of the apartment a bit, working out. Reading a bit. Thinking about things to write about in the future. This is kind of why I was a bit “late” on my imagined monthly schedule of posting these updates. I’m not really doing anything worth talking about. I’m doing nothing, and it’s amazing for my soul. The feeling of not setting an alarm for the morning is fantastic; Just doing what my mind and my body needs, rather than forcing something else. It’s a bit of a balance though - because the lack of routine can quite quickly translate into a sense of lacking purpose, whatever the hell purpose can mean. And don’t get me wrong - I have a vast collection of notes and ideas and projects that could probably keep me busy for months if not years on end. I just have a feeling that I’m not done resting up just yet. I know that I’ll be done at some point and that gauge will be full, I’m just not in a rush to get there. That would be kind of the opposite of the point, y’know? What do I hope for in the next update?</h2> I should know my score by then! After that, it’ll be one more month of waiting until I know if I make it into the university programs I’ve applied to! Other than the score, I am not really sure of what’s to come. The light is at the end of the tunnel in terms of the pandemic, but I’m pretty sure thing won’t have changed that drastically in a month. I do have a nice feeling for the summer though. Feels like something big - something good - is on the horizon. We’ll see. 😊 💜 In retrospect, writing it probably postponed the posting of this update. I felt like I had written what I needed to write about it, and kind of felt done with the topic. ↩</a> </li> And this seems to have changed recently. Pretty much everyone remembers that they were allowed to do this when they did the test. Feel free to be the 23rd person to tell me that - one more time won’t hurt. 😎 ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section> My experiences at Högskoleprovet 2021-05-10T00:00:00+00:00 I wake up almost late</h2> It’s going to be a pretty big day. Had a hard time falling asleep, and I don’t really feel very rested. It was pretty hard to let go of the feeling that a lot is riding on getting a good score on Högskoleprovet. My only way in to the university education I want to get to - Psychology</a> - is through this test. So, five tests over the course of almost eight hours. It’s a lot, and I need almost a perfect score. Even though I thought I left early enough, I have to run to catch the train. I make it, but I’m already pretty shaken. Not a great start. With me for the day I have a book called The Invisible Hook</a>. It’s an academic book about the economic and democratic societies aboard pirate ships! I figured I’d read it during the breaks instead of being a millennial who goes immediately to my phone. Next to the book is the little bag with the tiny pill with the PS1 logo on it. It’s weird that something that cost so many bitcoins can take up so little space. The website listed many names and nicknames for it, including the extremely long chemical compound that probably makes up what I assume is the main active ingredient. One of them stuck with me though - Ukrainian Thinking Pill. It’s supposed to make you focus in an unparalleled fashion, starting 30 minutes from ingestion and then lasting between 6 to 12 hours. Since that’s probably a bit more than I need, it’s good that there’s also an out - a very cold shower will kick you right out of it. Let’s do this - test one!</h2> In a stroke of luck, there’s exactly 30 minutes of introductions before the real test begins. So, as we enter the classroom, I pop the pill and sit down and listen. And wait. Sure enough, as we get the envelopes with the questions, I start to notice the effects. The first test is a verbal one, so lots of reading. I immediately feel that I have somehow unlocked a skill I’ve been trying to attain for a while - speed reading. It’s like my mind is taking a photograph of the entire page and then just absorbing all of it in less than a second. Just to make sure that I’m not making it all up, I also try to read a bit “normally”. I conclude that not only does that feel like the slowest thing that ever happened, I had also really read and understood everything. Hell yeah! I’m done with the entire thing in less than a quarter of the allotted time. Just to be safe I go through everything twice over. I made one small mistake, which was easy to correct. When I’m done for the third time, I feel that my stress about the test has all but gone away. This is gonna be great! Test two!</h2> After a short break, we’re back to the second test. Since the last one was verbal, we know that this one is math. Which is good for me - I’ve always had a knack for the math and been able to solve pretty complex equations with ease, and with my current ability of superhuman focus this will be a walk in the park. And, of course, it is. But, it’s different. The math kind of feel less like a language and more like a music. I can hear the answers from reading the questions. It’s like they are taking tones, and the answers that are wrong are kind of off-key. Then it hits me - I’m experiencing Synesthesia</a>. My senses are stronger, but they’re also all jumbled. This realization makes me feel warm, and I realize I’m running pretty hot. Nothing weird though, and I’m able to finish all the questions well ahead of time. Only twice rather than the three times I managed in the last test. Test three!</h2> Just one more test before lunch. Back to verbal tests, so reading and stuff again. I’m still pretty warm, and I feel a drop of sweat fall from my brow and onto the paper. It turns bright blue. Another one falls, and that one turns pink. Oh no. I’m sweating colors. That can’t be good, can it? I touch my forehead, which is remarkably dry. The hell? Regardless of this small impediment, I confidently run through all the questions and small puzzles. Once I didn’t think about it anymore, I kinda stopped sweating, so at least that’s good. Lunch!</h2> By the end of the third test, I feel simultaneously exhausted and super energized. I absolutely devour the wrap I had brought for lunch, and then I decide to read my pirate book. I’m done after like 20 minutes, so I spend the few minutes left on trying to relax. Harder than I would’ve thought, but I manage to shut of the activity in my brain for a bit. Test four!</h2> More verbal tests, which means that one of them is a trial run for future tests and won’t be counted on our scores. No matter - I’m doing pretty close to perfect on them anyway. I’ve cooled down and there’s no sweat anymore. But, as we sit down and open our test envelopes, I spot something that probably isn’t happening; The woman in front of me has a parrot on her shoulder. Why in the everliving fuck did I read about pirates when this is going on? I glance around, and of course every person in the room has a parrot on their shoulder, and they’re all looking back at me. The parrots open their beaks to speak, but the sounds that come out sound more like a choir of 6000 people singing</a>. Awesome, but very much not what I need right now. It’s… getting pretty distracting, honestly. I focus on my test and try to ignore the avian-human hybrid music. It’s futile, of course. I make it in time, but now I have no time left to do a full pass again. The last test and going home</h2> Luckily for me, the parrots go away and the final test passes without any further incident. It’s around this time that I think time is beginning to slip for me for a bit. It didn’t feel like 55 minutes at all. I mostly remember at the end, looking at the answers I had filled in. But, I didn’t feel nervous, I felt confident and honestly kind of relaxed. It was nice that it was over. Now, just to get home and get into the shower before anything else starts feeling supernatural. It… doesn’t. Maybe because I was expecting it to? Or maybe it’s just because it’s starting to wane off? I get home and before even looking at Li I go like “ahshitineedtoshowerbrb” and run straight into the bathroom. I undress in a few seconds and jump into the shower and turn the heat down as much as I possibly can. The ice cold water not only hurts, but it feels like big shards of ice is cracking on my skin and falling off. I feel the effects fading as my temperature drops, and before it’s all gone for good I feel one last batch of sensory overload; I can hear the shapes of the room. It felt like I was a sonar or something. Super weird and honestly pretty confusing, but at least it didn’t last long. Once I was out of the shower, all traces of what had happened to me during the day were gone. No more colors or parrots or photographic reading. No idea what the fuck was in that pill, and I’m not sure if I want to know. Looking forward to my 2.0 score! Status Update: April 2021 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00 When the spinning stops</h2> There’s something special to when an undesirable feeling goes away. Imagine that you’ve been in an older car for hours. On a highway, probably. It’s kinda noisy and kinda loud, but most of all - it’s vibrating. Shaking, almost. After a while, you don’t even notice it anymore. It’s just… there, and you’re accustomed to it. Once you reach your destination and you get out of the car, it goes away. It’s not necessarily a good feeling happening, but the lack of something bad is positively soothing for your entire being. That’s how I felt after a week in the woods. Chopping woods and splitting hairs</h2> If I’m to come clean a bit, I wasn’t technically chopping wood - I was splitting it.1</a> The trees were already felled, and they were also already cut into smaller pieces with a chainsaw. As a virgin of chainsaws and also a person who’s alone in a fairly remote place - doing chainsawing would’ve been downright irresponsible. Instead, my best friend was this nifty machine: Working with it is as simple as it looks: Pick up wood.</li> Place wood.</li> Hold buttons - split wood.</li> Throw split wood into bins.</li> Repeat 2-4 until wood is gone.</li> Goto 1.</li> </ol> And as with many situations - simple is good. The beauty in the rote and the mechanical</h2> Sometimes something boring and unexciting is exactly what you need. It definitely was for me - for a variety of reasons. One of the things that has been bothering me the most about working in tech is that nothing ever feels done. I could and should write more about that, but the gist is that I haven’t felt like I’ve actually completed something work-related in… years. That changed here. Working with something that has a physical definition of done and a very visual form of progress was so incredibly soothing. (It also helped that once I was done there was literally zero chance of the work done causing a compilation of some other trees to fail because a dependency now had a wrong version, but I digress.) Doing… nothing.</h2> I put between 3-4 hours a day into the splitting. At the end of the third day, I was done. The rest of the time I stayed at the cottage was blissfully uneventful. When the weekend came, the rest of the family started seeping back, and even though I’d longed to be alone it was a welcome feeling to not be that anymore. As the weekend ended, I left the woods and went back home to Stockholm. Since I went out on this trip almost immediately after having my last work day, this was the first time I was home after the fact. I guess there’s a kind of universal experience that happens when something that has been a big part of your life comes to an end. Whether it’s a long term relationship, a big project or event, or even finally retiring after working for so many years - there’s this feeling of nothing that shows up. And it’s ambivalently both good and bad; it’s both a soothing calm and a vast emptiness. I think the emptiness comes to me because an unfortunate amount of my self worth is tied up in feeling like I do Something Good for the world, which simultaneously is tied up in… work. “If I’m not working, I’m just a lazy worthless waste of space” and similar sentiments and trains of thoughts are sadly fairly common. Firstly, the biggest and least ceremonial fuck off to any society that instills this subconscious way of thinking in its inhabitants. And secondly, I know rationally that such is not the case, of course. As I said - it’s subconscious, so it just pops up. I’m battling it and I definitely feel that I am winning over those feelings. It’s just sad that I have to at all, you know? I have a plan on how to not do nothing anymore though; The next Act</h2> I think about the next step in my life as the next act2</a>, and I already know what I want to do. I want to become a psychologist. I’m done with computers. Or rather, working with computers. Doing programming on my free time is going to be a hobby of mine for years to come3</a>, but any energy and enthusiasm I had left for doing it professionally is long gone. Instead, I want to work with people. Help people4</a>. Work with the mind. Understand the human condition; how we think; how we heal. I’ve always been fascinated at all of that, and now I want to bring that fascination beyond books and hour-long sessions on Wikipedia. Unfortunately for me, the admission rates for the psychology programmes are insanely low. Like, less than 1% of all applicants. So, right now I’m studying for Högskoleprovet, since it’s my most reasonable chance of improving my odds5</a>. I’m spending my days right now collaborating with a dear friend who is in a similar situation, and I’m just preparing myself for the exam. It’s a quite bit stressful and I have headaches many times when I end studying for the day, but it’s getting there. What do I hope for in the next update?</h2> Perfect score at Högskoleprovet, obviously. That I feel studying doesn’t induce headaches and stress anymore. And, probably some kind of plan of what I’ll do over the summer - between Högskoleprovet and when studying starts. Högskoleprovet is on May 8th. I’ll probably do a status update after that. Wish me luck. 💜 Although, you gotta admit that “chopping wood in the forest” has a much better metaphorical and poetic punch to it than “splitting wood” does, eh? ↩</a> </li> Act, not chapter, since I feel that that doesn’t convey the weight of the process I’m going through. ↩</a> </li> I’m fairly sure at least, haha. Change is the only constant? ↩</a> </li> And sure, there are people in tech and there are positions to work with them. I don’t want those for a plethora of reasons, which could be a topic for another day. ↩</a> </li> I have opinions on my next goal in life being gatekept by an exam that’s essentially a series of puzzles dressed up as an IQ test, but this post is already longer than it should be, so that will also be saved for another day. ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section> Status Update: March 2021 2021-03-29T00:00:00+00:00 It’s a lot right now</h2> And I am not doing all too well. I really wish I could say that things are kinda good, but sadly that would be a lie. As I’m writing this, I’m on a train back home.1</a> I’m going to Mother’s cottage out in the woods, where I’ll stay for a week. Alone. Just me and the woods and a lot of wood that needs chopping. It’s sort of a mini-vacation - a palate cleanse of sorts. And why do I need that? Well… I’ve left my job</h2> A few months ago I decided to leave my job. Not just that, but the entire industry. I might write about why in more detail later, but let’s just sum it up as it being a place that has a zero chance of making me happy about work. So, I sold my apartment, moved in with one of my best friends, and resigned. My last day was Friday last week. I don’t like that it had to happen. I don’t like the things that led up to it. I don’t like the way I acted throughout it. I don’t like how it was handled by the company. I don’t even like the way it ended earlier than was planned, even though that was what I wanted. The only thing I like about it is that it’s over. But… Removing something bad isn’t an instant way to feeling better again</h2> And of course I know this, from an unfortunate amount of experience. I don’t have to go to work there anymore, but I’m still exhausted to my very core. That exhaustion takes time and healing before it goes away. Hence, the trip away to get some rest. A sad thing that’s also exhausting is that because this is big news, it’s practically everything I talk about with people close to me. Everytime I go through what has happened, I have to recall bad things I’ve been through and explain my actions - effectively reliving them, at least a little bit. It sucks, because that’s a problem that’s rooted in getting love and support from people around you, and as such it’s feels entitled and privileged to complain about it. It doesn’t make it any less exhausting though. It doesn’t lead to rest. So what can be done to make things better?</h2> Honestly, just giving it time. I’m dealing with it the best I can, and right now I know what I’m going to do short term - chop some wood. There are of course longer term plans as well, but let’s talk about them later. As for everyone else, the main thing is - as always - to be social with me. I’m a very social creature and social events are one of my bigges sources of joy. Reach out and say hi, schedule a remote video lunch with me, and join whatever silly online events I set up every now and again. That said, I’ll be fairly unavaialable until March 15th, what with my current lumberjack aspirations. And are there any good things amidst all this?</h2> Of course there are. 💜 Not everything is doom and gloom! For one thing, I’m now living with one of my closest and dearest friends - Li. Everyday life becomes so much easier when you’re living it with someone you’re so compatible with. And, we’re being like responsible adults and shit by going on morning walks every weekday. Also, for the past few weeks we’ve been playing video games on Friday evenings on our Discord. We focus on games that work well with remote participation, and especially on games where there’s written dialogue that can be voice acted!2</a> This gives me life every week, and you should absolutely join our Discord</a> so you can partake next time we do so. You don’t have to voice act - just being there and spectating is the default! What do I hope for in the next update?</h2> Calm. I hope March lets me cool off, so I don’t feel like my existence is vibrating anymore. Hopefully I can also share something I’ve created. Not sure what, but I really want to create stuff. I think I’d like to have done a blog post on why there’s been blog radio silence for more than half a decade. That could be fun! If you’ve made it down here, thanks for reading through my little outpouring. It means a lot. 💜 I’m posting this one day later, because the internets connection on the train was unusually unreliable for some reason. ↩</a> </li> And hilariously, 80% of the dialogue gradually turns into offensively bad Scootish accents, even when we really make an effort to do something different. ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section> 2014 - Year of the Rollercoaster 2015-01-04T00:00:00+00:00 Like last year</a> this is a pretty long post</a>. It details what happened to me over the past year. This year had some downs, but luckily it also had a lot of ups. In the end I definitely came out on top, even though it looked bleak for a while! Let’s see what happened: I go to Belgium</h2> Prior to going to Belgium I had not left the country since December 2008 (/o\\). But, it was time. The destination was to go to FOSDEM 2014</a>, the biggest gathering of nerds on the planet. Being in Belgium of course entailed a lot of beer being drunk, usually even at the university where the conference was. I saw some interesting talks, but most of the time the really interesting rooms where so super packed that there was a line to get to the line to get to the room. I did meet some interesting people, like the dude that made grml</a> and had some good beers and foods! !Drugs means something else, probably. We just had food.</a> ##### Belgium is weird. Oh, and I had a really nice talk with a guy that was a serious tinfoil</a>. I love talking to people that genuinely seem to believe that the world is led by lizards in black helicopters! All in all it was nice, and I needed to travel a bit. I’m not sure if I’ll return to FOSDEM next year since it seems to require a ton of planning and camping to be able to attend the really cool talks. However, since it is a free conference and you can drink Belgian beer on tap, there is quite a chance that I will anyway! :> The Github Contribution streak ends</h2> I was super proud about doing the Github Contribution streak</a>. Unfortunately, it ended</a> on a ironic note. Just a few days after I surpassed the original 177 days, I failed it. I tried to pick it up again, but it didn’t really stick. I did get into a very good streak in the middle of September to October. I revamped the idea of “commit once per day” to be “spend two hours a day on doing something creative”, and suddenly I got a shitload of things done. Unfortunately, this was also disrupted when I moved into my new apartment. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the streaks I’ve done and that I challenged myself to see what I could do with habits. I’ve concluded that habits do help, but one should not be too strict on to follow them. Life is pretty chaotic after all. Drunken TowerFall becomes a thing</h2> Last Christmas, we didn’t give each other our hearts. We had the very first showdown of what would become Drunken TowerFall! Now, TowerFall</a> is a beautiful little retro game for the Ouya</a> in which players pit against each other in an archery fight to the death. Late last Christmas Eve, Sam, Dala and I were done with all our Christmas events and families and presents so we sat down to play a bit of TowerFall to relax. Being the sane and responsible adults we are, it took a full three minutes before we had turned the game into a drinking game. !Responsible Adults Inc.</a> ##### And it was beautiful. The game is simple; whenever you make a mistake and lose a point in the game, usually because you accidentally killed yourself, you take a shot. When you do, you refill the shot glass. As such, you have some control - if you suspect that you might get a shot again, you can fill a little and vice versa. We immediately realized the hilarity potential in this. Our first idea was to conceptualize this and make a YouTube channel and become internets famous. In our drunken haze we forgot that we are supremely lazy and that making things requires effort, so this unfortunately has yet to happen. However, we decided to make it a tournament instead. We invited some friends, and in April the second tournament, Drunken TowerFall II: The Quickening</a>, was held. We noticed that the game is very easy to learn and reasonably easy to master. As such, our very first Champion had never played the game before the night he took the throne. We have continued to hold tournaments and we held the sixth edition, Drunken TowerFall VI: Captain Ramirez’</a> Revenge</a>, in the middle of December. January will see the light of Drunken TowerFall VII: Circle of Freaks</a>! !Victory or Death!</a> ##### Drunken TowerFall V: Dawn On East Mountain in action I am very proud of this and I am very happy whenever we organize it. It’s awesome to see so many friends so excited and to hear the roars of the audience when interesting and beautiful things happen. The only thing that I don’t like is that I have yet to win any of the tournaments! I’ve been in the final every time, but I always fall short in the finishing line! Not only that, but the last three times (!) I’ve come second with one point! To get an idea of my pain, watch the video</a> from the final round of the last tournament. If it is not obvious, the screams of agony</a> are mine. It’s a good thing that pain is a very good motivator. Victory shall be mine! I go to Switzerland</h2> Just going to Belgium was not enough! In April, I travel to Switzerland to visit my good friend Francesca! She showed me around the nice little town of Lausanne. I got to see the cathedral and we took some very nice long walks along the shoreside of Lake Geneva. I constantly reflected on how very quirky and tiny everything is in the town; They’ve basically crammed in a large city on the slope of a mountain, and it shows. Also, the nature outside of the city looks like something out of a video game: !A tiny land</a> ##### Switzerland or Skyrim? I think no one can tell. I also got to experience Raclette</a> for the first (and still only) time. Damn that shit is tasty. Oh, and Francesca’s father had some studio space with two drum sets, so he and I had my first (and still only) drum-off! It’s difficult to describe this country in a way that gives it justice, but it definitely gets my recommendation of something that should be seen at least once. I hope I will return one day soon! The MovieNight tribe is formed</h2> Game of Thrones</a> is a fairly popular TV series. Almost everyone in our group of friends were into watching it. As such, a natural thing to do is of course to watch it together! When the fourth season came around, we all gathered every Tuesday (we couldn’t Monday because Sam is an ass and works night shifts then) and watched it together. Unfortunately, like most good things the new episodes were over way too soon. We had all really come to like the idea of gathering during the week to hang out, have a glass of wine and watch something. So, we decided to have Movie Nights! Now, most people know that I really enjoy coding and creating stuff, so it didn’t take me long to actually create an app for this: !MovieNight S02E07</a> ##### MovieNight in all its glory The app lets users collect movies they would like to watch. After we have watched a movie, we click the “Roll next” button and the app does a roulette animation and lands on a randomized movie. Everyone gets one movie per season, and once everyone has had their movie the app creates a new season. We are currently on S02E08! Now, the gang we hang out with were good friends before we started doing this, but having this solidified us as a group. I first only jokingly called us a tribe, but there is probably an actual tribe feeling around us now! I mean, look at our Christmas dinner: !Face sticking out, represent!</a> ##### It looks like I’m photobombing but I swear I am part of the group! Love all of yous. <3 I fuck up Bråvalla</h2> Browalla Festival is a special thing. The festival is hosted in my home town very close to a house my family lives in. As such, we gather friends and let them camp out in our yard for the duration of the festival. This is awesome, but unfortunately this year was not so very awesome for me. After a couple of romantic setbacks earlier in the year and close to the festival, I was feeling fairly sad and hadn’t really had any good time to process it. As a fairly sad man with almost infinite access to alcohol and party, I reacted as one would suspect a fairly sad man with almost infinite access to alcohol and party would. !Browalla</a> ##### We could’ve easily added more! Now, I usually get some gaps in my memory when I drink. It’s not my favorite, but it’s manageable. However, most of the entire festival is either blank or a blur for me. I only recall three of the bands I saw, and I can’t even seem to recall the rain everyone was complaining so much about, heh. It’s not that I did something wrong or bad, it’s just that it does not feel good at all to not be able to recall multiple days of what’s supposed to be a good time. When I got home I was depressed, and luckily I had the rest of my vacation to actually sort that out. I had like a week of bad sleep and feeling horrible until I got out of it. Doing cardio helped a lot; getting endorphins in your system is vital when you need to get out of a bad place. Browalla 2015 will be different. It’s good that I learn from my mistakes. I reconnect with Sandra</h2> Last year I broke contact with Sandra completely. Radio silence style. Late during this summer one of us reached out (I don’t actually remember who; and it does not matter) and we met to have a beer at the local vattenhål. I had a very nice time, and we caught up over what had happened over the past year when we had no contact. Reviewing my past mistakes and explaining Browalla wasn’t really super nice for my already kind of fragile confidence, but when we said goodbye at the end of the night I was still happy. Sandra and I might have had our differences, but we still have six years of friendship, and that’s the kind of connection that will stay valuable. We are still in contact, and we’re probably better as friends than we’ve been in a very long time. I call her out on her bullshit, and she calls me on mine. It also helps to have several years of in-jokes and the like, haha. As I wrote in last years post I was not very happy with the way things ended. I am however very happy that that ending ended and we’re friends again. Friends are always better than not friends. <3 Everything happens so much</h2> Qouth the horse</a>; everything happens so much. In the beginning of August, namely the 4th, a lot of things were happening at once. They all had pretty big significances. They were as follows: I cut my hair</h3> After fourteen consecutive years of having long hair, it was the time to end that era. Quite frankly, I had grown a bit tired of it. I also realized a bit of hypocrisy on my side. If a friend asked me if they should change something with their hair, I would always tell them that change is the best thing there is; I always prompt for the radical fun thing. Yet, there I was and I had done nothing special with my hair for more than half of my life. It was a bit more of a difficult decision than I had thought. For one thing, I really liked my locks. And I was never alone about that. It was a common occurrence for me that girls I’ve never spoken to or even looked at would come up to me at a pub just to ask if they could touch my hair. This is always a welcome thing, but once you realize the hair was all of it; that you were just a cute toy doll for a couple of seconds; it wanes off. I even got in touch with some other guys on the internet that were in the same situation; they had long hair and described similar situations. Some even cut their hair and noticed a general different direction when approaching the opposite gender in bars and the like. I even joked that I’ll get laid pretty much directly after cutting my hair off. !A wild new hair appears</a> ##### First pic of short hair! I chose another since I didn’t really like this one. Shared here for its historical value and magic. Luckily, I loved my new haircut. It was weird in the beginning, mostly since my face looked a bit different given its new frame. I also struggled with some muscle memory things, like not feeling hair on my shoulders when entering the shower or going to bed and then automatically reaching to untie my hairband to let my locks down, haha. Either way, I felt super handsome and found myself constantly checking myself out</a> in any reflective surface I could find. Change is the only constant, and I have not regretted my decision for a single second. Oh, and the getting laid part? Didn’t even take a week. :> I become a Product Owner</h3> On the same day as I cut my hair, August 4th, I start as a new role for my team; the Product Owner. For those not in the cray-cray industry we are in, the Product Owner (PO) is the person responsible for three things: A vision for what the team should build and where it should end up</li> Help the team organize what to do and when</li> Meet other POs for other teams to get requests and sync that the team is doing the right things</li> </ul> So, I basically switched coding/sysadmining for planning and meeting people. I was also not completely new to the role. Our previous PO worked 80%, and whenever he was out and a PO decision was needed, I filled the role. As this happened, a new initiative spanning three large squads was formed. As this initiative had a lot to do with the things I own, I became one of the de facto leaders of the entire initiative. This meant a lot of responsibility, tons of things to remember and to solve, and many meetings and relationships to tend to. After a while, I felt stressed for the first time in my life - the kind when you cannot relax and not really sleep and so on and so forth. Luckily, in the end the project is considered a massive success that has helped improve the overall quality of the Spotify client by a lot. (Sorry for the vagueness, but I cannot go into details for obvious reasons) OP moves out, Sam moves in</h3> The time finally came, and OP moved in with his girlfriend in her awesome apartment. This left Li and I, and once we felt the feeling of paying rent for our large apartment on just two people, we decided that we needed a third roomie again. However, both of us were kind of on the way out. I was looking at apartments to buy, and Li was looking to exchange the apartment with something smaller that she could live in alone. So, finding someone new to live with us was difficult: -“Yeah, we need someone that can stay with us for like a month or maybe two because we’re both moving out soon hehe.” Understandably, no one was super excited about that. So, when I talked to Sam, I offered that wherever I would move when I moved out, he would come with. He instantly signed up and moved in the following day. We still live together in the new apartment, and I couldn’t be happier. <3 I pass below the 100kg mark</h2> I’ve been doing a lot of working out in 2014. Mostly I’ve been doing cardio at the gym and I’ve been documenting the results as I went: !Bikes, sweat and tears</a> ##### Personal best on bike: 15km in less than 29 minutes! Over the year, I did cardio workouts 74 times. During these times, I was in constant motion for a total of 41 hours, 9 minutes and 19 seconds; I traveled 557 kilometers and 509 meters, and I burned a total of 39920 calories! During this, I lost a total of 14 kilos, moving from 112 to 98! Woooooohooooo! |o/ I’ve also added a Google Plus album</a> with the pictures I’ve snapped. No citation needed here! (I did however estimate the times of the pictures where the total time was not visible.) !Suddenly the mirror is your best friend</a> ##### #beastmode Everything in your life gets better when you lose weight, especially sex. Gods damnit does that improve by a million when you reduce body mass and increase stamina! Oh, and this meant I could donate two thirds of my wardrobe to charity since most of it was many sizes to big and made me look or feel like a fat clown: !Nothing more liberating</a> ##### Begone, overly large items of clothing! There is really only one drawback. If I do any kind of minor physical activity, like running 10 meters to get to the subway that’s about to leave, my body instantly thinks “oh, you’re doing that workout thing again, ok” and then I start sweating like a fully dressed Eskimo running a marathon in the desert. I start sweating like that for everything. But hey, I can pay that price any day, haha! Other than that, it’s basically the best thing you can do. Get more fit, it’s so fucking worth it! I buy an apartment</h2> The housing market in this city is well known to be about as sane as The Joker popping LSD. I was looking for quite some time, but didn’t really find anything that was a good fit. Then, I finally found something that was super nice, pretty large, and actually within my price range (with no margins, but shh). It was private showing only, but I signed up to see if I could come by anyway. I never heard from the real estate agent, so I forgot about it. A month later I saw it again, but then the showing was open. We (Sam, Nikki and I) were the only couple at the showing. I signed up for the bidding, and I was the only one bidding. This is weird, but apparently they had tried to sell the place twice, but it fell through both times. It’s hard to re-put a listing without buyers becoming suspicious, and doing so twice was apparently pretty devastating. Since no one else bid, I won by default for the asking price. On October 24th I signed the contracts, paid the monies, and got the keys to the apartment. !Quite possibly my favorite picture of me</a> ##### And what a feeling it was. The apartment is 75 square meters and is located on the top floor of a building on top of a hill. We can basically see all of southern Stockholm from here! While the idea of being in debt isn’t really super cool, it’s totally worth it. This is a place I will own for quite a while. <3 I go to the USA</h2> Just going to Belgium or Switzerland was not enough! A fun thing about being a Product Owner is that you sometimes have business relations internationally. So, for two weeks in November I was sent to the American offices of Spotify! !New York, New York!</a> ##### It’s so oddly beautifully broken. I have no extraordinary events to report from there actually, but I did realize something when I was there; I need to live in a culture that is not Swedish for a while. People are so different - they are open and sociable in ways that don’t really exist here. I dunno, as I was walking down 6th ave and just saw life happen everywhere I just really got a feeling of… home. Via Spotify I might actually be able to have means to do that given that we have US offices. I’ll see what can be done! To be continued it shall! New Years is a blast</h2> In late November I started to form the idea that I wanted New Years to be somewhat calm and that I wanted to cook a nice 3-course dinner for just a few of the closest lovelies. However, Sam got very excited and started inviting people left and right, and suddenly: !A wild crowd appears!</a> ##### Not sure what I was expecting other than this, really… Notable events happening: Everyone was looking forward to seeing the entire Stockholm sky light up with fireworks. Come midnight there is a fog that quickly turned into smog from smoke from all the fireworks. We barely saw the fireworks people shot next door.</li> My cell phone got to see a whole of two minutes of the new year before I dropped it on the floor and cracked the screen.</li> I got to stand on the table and address the entire party</a> three times! Once to organize everyone to go outside because it was about to be midnight; Once to announce a special Drunken TowerFall Champions match; and finally just because I was drunk and I like the rush of getting people exciting and cheering. :D</li> </ul> !Life of the party!</a> ##### Proudly sporting the Wizard’s Hat of Charisma +5 According to multiple witnesses, basically no one knew what I was on about during the last one, but it was exciting and fun, haha! What about 2015?</h2> Being a Product Owner for a while, I’ve finally realized the power of having goals set. So, my ideas for 2015 are as follows: Increase frequency of blogging by 9000. (I’m too hilarious to not blog <3)</li> Send some irredeemably bad software into exile.</li> Create a software project that gets users outside of people I know.</li> Go live in another country.</li> Lose another 14kg (or more).</li> Start dancing at least two different kinds of dance.</li> Put a quarter of what I make into savings.</li> Learn trickier and tastier vegetarian dishes to cook.</li> Learn at least one new programming language, probably Go.</li> Start making paintings again.</li> </ul> All of these are obtainable and fairly easy to measure success of. Now all that’s left to do is to actually do these things and have a successful recap in a year. All in all, I’m glad everything happens so much even though it sometimes takes a toll. Thanks for being a part of it and making it worthwhile. <3 Irony 2014-03-29T00:00:00+00:00 I love irony. Always have, always will. It’s by far my favorite type of humour, partly because it’s smart but isn’t necessarily pretentious; it requires some intelligence to understand, but can still be applied on most things. I even once started a community group for ironists, but after the five first joiners thought sarcasm was irony I closed it down. Think about that for a second. Irony is also constantly present in my life. Three days ago I posted about how proud I was over my contribution streak</a> being longer than the guy that inspired me to do it. Not 48 hours later, I failed it. Yesterday marks the first day in 179 days in which I did not contribute to the world of Open Source software. I never touched my computer during the work day because of meetings, and after work I went straight to my friend Johanna. She had been in Thailand for 6 months, so I was very eager to meet her. After huggings and talkings for a while, I decided to leave. The original plan was to go home, but I felt like socializing a bit more with friends, so I gathered a gang and went for a couple of beers at this new place on Fridhemsplan. It wasn’t until I was waiting for the bus home at 03:00 that a punch of darkness hit my stomach. I had missed the entire window for contributing on March 28th. When I got home, still drunk me thought a slight slip-up was fine and faked a commit and went to bed. Ironically enough, sober me disagrees and thinks that the attempt to save the streak is a sign that it’s time to stop it. Therefore, I am now calling quits on my first round of GitHub contributions. Today I will not commit anything, effectively resetting my streak. I will definitely do another one, but I will wait a month. During April, I want to see how my routine and behaviour will be if I don’t have the streak to think of. I want to measure how much I will do without it. So, today is a bit of a sad day, but not really. It was a fun experiment, and I will always relish the fact that once I was proud and said I beat the 177 days, I borked it, haha. I’ll still continue to contribute as much as I can, I’ll just have to revise my method. I’ll probably start again in May or so, because this was fun and made me better. Now I just need to figure out what to do today since I am not to code. Movie night perhaps? <’3 177 days of Github 2014-03-26T00:00:00+00:00 177 days ago I read a blog post about 177 days of GitHub</a>. 177 days later, I am at my 177th day of GitHub contributions</a>! The apprentice is now at the same level as the master, and as it seems I will surpass him and carry his legacy forward! It has been very interesting, and I’ve learned a lot about myself over the past six months, especially about my habits. I’m very proud over the fact that I have been doing this over almost half a year now. Granted, some days have been less effective and meaningful, but I’ve still always managed to do it. The only time I’ve actually employed trickery was when GitHub changed the rules about timezones</a>. Before this change, contributions ran on PST (San Francisco time), meaning that my contribution window for a certain date was 9:00AM - 9:00AM. One day not long ago, I was coding a bit just before midnight. Before committing, I got a phone call. That call lasted a bit more than an hour, so when it was done and I committed and pushed, my heart stopped. My streak was dead. I calmly panicked and tried to figure out what happened. When I found the blog post linked above, I decided that GitHub changed the rules without me really knowing it, so I tricked the commit back into the streak. Not the proudest moment, but hey. Unfortunately, sometimes life comes in the way. Today was such a day. For more than the last 24 hours, the systems I work with have been having… troubles. Of course, this being the week when I am in a temporary leadership position, this led to me being the one responsible of coordinating efforts to fix everything that’s broken. This is, as one can imagine, exhausting. Especially if it drags on to the point where you need a lot of overtime. As such, my contributions for today have been weak, but I have done them. And that’s a success to me, since I am at the point where I am almost amazed at the fact that I can keyboard coherently. So, all in all, I’ve become a better person since I now have at least a slight sense of discipline, and I’ve contributed back to the world that enables me to be them powerhouse of a hax0r I am today. 177 days, roughly ~900 commits, over 30 projects contributed to, and countless hours of awesome coding fun times! It’s a win-win, it feels awesome, and I hope that I will continue doing it for way more than 177 more days! And to that note, I will now collapse in the most collapsing way anything has collapsed in quite a while. Bonne nuit. (…and then a couple of days later, something else happened</a>…) The happy uncultured peasant 2014-03-23T00:00:00+00:00 Earlier this week, I heard that Banksy</a> was having some kind of action or installation in Stockholm on this Sunday. Since it so happened that I was alone in the apartment, I figured that I would go take a look, especially since I’ve never been to something like it before. My walk there was very nice. The sun was shining, I had a Cornetto, and it was a 20 minute walk to get to where the happening was to be. I also stayed outside a cafe for a while because they were playing Lifts You Up</a> (which made me a happy cat). When I arrived, there was people everywhere, and everyone was looking for what the piece would be. The one obvious thing was some graffiti on an elevated room on a roof that said “Yes…….. I am lonley” [sic]. I didn’t fully understand it. Next to the biggest mass of people was a flight of stairs that got up to the seventh floor or something like that. A lot of people was walking up the stairs, so I figured there was probably something at the top. As I was going up, others were coming down. Some of those coming down said “There is nothing up there.” and tried to tell us to not go up. I continued for two reasons: That statement is unequivocally always true. Nothingness is always present.</li> I figured part of the message was to encourage people to not do it, anti-herd mentality etc.</li> </ol> It was interesting to see everyone still climbing the stairs even though they were told there was nothing to see up there. Turns out they were right, there was absolutely nothing to see at the top of the stairs. I got down, and by then I was kind of not interested of going on more of a hunt to find contemporary art that I wasn’t even sure was there. I started walking back, having a feeling that I was missing something and that I was an uncultured p(h)easant that just didn’t get it. Turns out the whole thing was probably fake</a>. Someone was just using the Banksy name and fame to bring tons of people to the commercial gallery district in Stockholm. Kinda funny in retrospect really. Anyway, as I get back to Karlbarg, I decide to take a little pause. I was standing overlooking the rails and the water, the sun pretty much straight ahead of me. I closed my eyes and just listened to the sound the city makes. As I was doing this, I realized that even though I was trying to, I could not hear the ringing in my ears</a>. It was just… silent. I haven’t heard silence for so many years, and this quickly became overwhelming to the point where I started silently crying the happiest tears I’ve ever cried. During these tears, I thought about what a good place I am at right now. I spend most of my time with people that I love, doing things that I enjoy and working at a place that actively makes me into a better person. When I woke up this morning I had no idea that this day would bring something like this, but I am very happy that it did. Carping of this Diem; check. A perfect Monday 2014-01-27T00:00:00+00:00 Mondays can be horrible. I think most, if not all of us, know that. They are usually that horrible segfault in our brain when we have to snap out of the coziness of being at ease on the weekend to go back to our work. To put it simply, Mondays usually suck harder than a black hole in a vacuum. Fortunately, mine did not. Not today. It actually didn’t even start today. Last night was the first Sunday in months where I actually slept properly. Not even that, I slept like a king. Which I don’t think I should have, because the night between Saturday and Sunday I had a lot of sleep paralysis seizures. Four or more (I can’t really tell), which is by far the worst I’ve had. Still, Sunday was alright for some reason, andI fell asleep pretty much as I laid my fine self in my bed. This morning, I woke up rested and with a smile on my face fifteen minutes before my alarm. So, I woke up, ate a nice breakfast, had a nice shower with no stress, shaved, and even did my hair so I looked extra gorg. On the train, I did my self-imposed language homework</a>, and I nailed it. Then I got to work, which is where the awesome really starts. So, Spotify has something called Hack Days. You pretty much get one Hack Day every two weeks or so, and on a Hack Day you can hack on whatever you want regardless if it relates to your usual duties or not. This week, Spotify has amped that up to eleven with the Hack Week. During the Hack Week, the entire company has Hack Days, for a week. And not only us cool and sexy developers, but all the business people and legal people and everyone else as well. Everyone gets together to create something outside of what we usually do. I’ve been working on kitten</a>. It’s a dear project of mine that I have had since the summer, hacking on every now and then. Today, I got to sit down for more than eight concentrated hours (I left work after three hours overtime <3). This was extra awesome, because that time let me focus enough so that I ironed out a lot of stuff that was just question marks before. And that feeling is one of the best developer-related feelings there are. To top it all of, my colleague gave me a sticker. I think it’s the best sticker I’ve seen in my entire life. !hehe</a> I mean, look at this motherfucker. Look at him! Isn’t he the best sticker representation of me of all time? He is even surrounded by what is basically my catchphrase, Hehe. To top that off, he also looks like a devious little shit who is just about to fuck something up. Ah, he made my already glorious day just a little bit more shiny. Shout out to mango for giving me this gift of Hehe. In slightly related news, a Wikipedia article</a> that I wind up on way to often when trying to figure out if I have internet connectivity or not. It always makes me giggle. So, I’m not sure why, but I am very thankful for having my first good Monday in what feels like a small forever. I needed that, and I hope the rest of you have had at least a bearable day today. You deserve it. <3 2013: Year of the Doge 2013-12-27T00:00:00+00:00 This is a pretty long post</a>. It details what happened to me over this past year. tl;dr it started awesomely, ended in hardships, but I don’t care because nothing can keep me down <3 New years eve</h2> At the very first seconds of 2013, I am with my friends down at Edsviken; the body of water near our apartment. Because of the water, we get a pretty good 360 view of all the fireworks going in northern Stockholm. While down there, we drink and celebrate and hug each other. When we get back to the apartment, I go to the bathroom. I look myself in the eyes in the mirror and laugh as I do when I am drunk but not too drunk. After my little laugh I have a sudden epiphany. “I should work at Spotify.” Little did I know that this year would later come to show me that that very thought would be the only New Years Resolution ever to actually come through. At the time, I mostly dismissed it, because I had a stable job that I liked, and as far as I knew, Spotify was kind of out of my league. OP moves in</h2> A week before New Years Eve, on Christmas Eve, my cousin Dala got a Christmas gift; Li, Sandra and I decided that we wanted him to live with us in our apartment. During 2012 he had broken up with his girlfriend, whom he shared an apartment with, and he had to move in back with his mother. He took us up on our offer, and on January 4th, he became a resident of this establishment. We quickly started to go to the gym together. And, since our schedules could vary, we chose to do so in the morning. We went up at 5:30 AM, and were at the gym at about 6:00 AM. Then, we worked out for between 70 and 90 minutes, with a slight variation depending on how well we had slept the night before. We kept this up on a regular basis for almost three months, and I’ve never been as in shape before or since. We still go to the gym, but the last three months have been plagued by slight sicknesses that keeps us away. Now, he might be a little shit that I regularly want to punch in the everywhere, but he is still my li’l bro. <3 I quit my job</h2> In the beginning of February, Mancx/Coworks presented the news that the company was running out of money. Us developers had two choices; Either we continue our employment for the company but do consulting, or we quit. I took a leap of faith and chose the latter, slightly inspired by my accidental New Years Resolution. In mid-to-late February, there was a Python Stockholm meetup. During it, I had a talk with Jyrki, one of the dudes I knew worked at Spotify. I explained my situation to him and said that I would like to apply for a position as a backend developer for Spotify. He said that he kicked me into the recruitment process. This started the six week long process that finally landed me at Spotify. It was pretty stressful. There was a total of seven interviews (three remote and four on-site on the last day) and a code assignment. During all of these I had a heartbeat that could be used as a Power Metal double bass. Specially notable is probably the code assignment. I got it sent to me late during a Friday, whilst I was at a party. I did the assignment while one of the biggest hangovers of my life was tormenting me. I still did very good, IMO. And it should be noted that I really took a leap of faith. I did not seek any other positions at all, mainly to keep my complete and total focus on Spotify. Had this not worked out, I would have been in a… tricky position to say the least, haha. I quit Sandra</h2> Late March Sandra and I had one of our final falling outs. I finally grew a pair and a spine and told her that living with her made me miserable and that I wanted her to move out. She did not approve, but she understood, and in the beginning of April she found her own apartment and moved out. In late August we had our last falling out. She got me really fucking furious and I kinda flipped and told her that I can’t even talk to her anymore. It was like all the anger I never displayed finally emerged. And I can’t really have that. I am not an angry person, and whatever makes me madly furious has got to change. I haven’t really talked to her since, and I’m not at all proud of how this ended. I think I will be able to talk to her again at some point, but that point has yet to come. I start at Spotify</h2> At the end of March, my very last day at Mancxworks was a short one. I was away for most of the day doing the on-site interview. After completing that and returning to the office, I mostly played ping-pong with my colleagues. 5:00PM came, and my last day ended. Three minutes later, I get a phone call from the man who was later going to be my manager. He told me that they had been discussing since I left, and they had decided that they wanted me on board. I replied something in the vein of “omfg r u srs omg”, and he assured me that he indeed was very srs omg. We exchange a couple of details and decide on my salary (which was/is 50% higher than my then current one, shiet). Before we hang up, I ask if this is when I can start telling friends and family the news that I have a new job. He said yes. We hang up and as all the stress I had pent up for the last six weeks leave my mind, I let go of the biggest “YEEEEEEEEES!!!!!1</a>” I ever have. I then call my mothership and tell her that I have good news and bad news. I tell her that the bad news is that today was my last day at my current job. Without her even saying anything, I could almost feel her panic all the way from Norrköping. I then told her that it didn’t really matter, because my good news was that I just got a job at Spotify. And as I felt the panic just moments before, I also felt her relief when she realized that I was not in peril. We joke a bit and she tells me congratulations and I am so very happi. <3 I get back to my now past colleagues and I tell them the news. The rest of evening is mostly me being on Cloud 9, barely realizing what just happened. I had my first day at Spotify the week after that, on April 6th. I remember getting a lot of stuff, an information overload, and about 50 new names to remember. I also remember going in to one of the bathrooms, freaking out and going “omgomgomg shitshitshit is this actually happening omfg”. I go to Sweden Rock Festival</h2> In early June, Sweden Rock is a yearly highlight for me. It’s one of the most relaxed festivals that my friends and I choose to develop drunken chaos at. The main highlight for me was to see Avantasia for the third time. I think the main fun thing that happened was when I found a camp that had made an impromptu slip-n-slide. While I was coming back from the bathrooms, the people in the camp urged me to take a slide on it. I said that I would if they would just hold my bag. I take a leap and I throw myself towards it. While in the air, I realize from the smell that the impromptu-ness means that the “slip” part is soap. As I’m baffled by this, I forget to completely close my eyes upon landing, so my eyes are drenched in soap-soaked water. As I emerge, I cannot see at all. I can’t even open my eyes. The pain literally locks my eyes shut. For about two minutes, I cannot see at all. I then stumble back to my camp, get laughed at, and then go to the emergency tents. I get Saline for my eyes and I drip as much and often as I can. For the duration of the festival, my eyes are so red that the bouncers to the stage areas didn’t wanna let me in since they thought I was higher than Snoop Dogg. Showing them the Saline and explaining always got me in though. There is a fuck ugly photo</a> taken of me during this period. Please note the eyeliner-induced unibrow. This is quite possibly the worst photograph of me of all time, haha. I go to Bråvalla Festival</h2> In late June, Bråvalla Festival was a new thing. The cool thing about it is that it is held in insanely close vicinity to my parents’ home. Like, the 200 meters kind of close. Because of this, me and 14 of my and my cousins friends were camping in my old back yard, in our own luxury camping. I had a blast, and being able to sleep in an actual bed and take showers during a festival is gloriously awesome. My high points were Gogol Bordello, Hoffmaestro and PANG!, all which were really awesome. We are already planning for next year, and I already have a ticket! I go to Getaway Rock Festival</h2> In mid August, Spotify held an internal competition with the prices being tickets to the Getaway Rock festival in Gävle. As it happened, I got one of them, so my Russian colleague Tony and I went on an adventure up to the northern forests. We got the tickets the same day the festival started, so we had to back, buy gear and get going pretty much immediately. Almost as soon as we arrived, we were drenched in torrential rain and saw a lot of good bands, the most notable ones being System of a Down and Deep Purple. It was not as drunkenly chaotic as festivals tend to be, but it was still loads of fun. A notable memory is also the shithead that played Taking the Hobbits to Isengard (Dance Remix) on repeat for about a million hours. There were times when we were all about to take him and his boombox to Isengard, indeed. I start a blog and decide to change</h2> Not even two days after I get home from Getaway, I decided that it was time for a change. I felt that I was wasting my time too much. So, I started this very blog</a>. I also blocked a lot of sites that I spent a lot of time on and I dropped my following of all TV series except two exceptional ones; Criminal Minds and Modern Family. Community will get pardon once it’s on the air again. Since then, I’ve blogged a fair bit, as can be seen on the link just above. As time progressed, I unblocked all of the sites except 4chan, because 4chan is a vile place. After being away from them for a while, I found better things to do with my time and my procrastination was lowered a lot. And I also realized that sometimes, you actually need some procrastination to relax. wow very terminal doge</h2> On October 1st, I push the very first commits of what would become my most popular project yet; doge</a>. It is still the most stupid project I’ve ever undertaken, and yet it is the most popular by several magnitudes. It didn’t happen immediately though. Mid October, I was at a party (which was also at the same place and same date as the anniversary of me meeting a very dear friend of mine for the first time). When I woke up in the morning and checked my laptop, I noted that I had 27 new emails from GitHub. I had gotten 10 pull requests with tons of comments, and almost 100 new stars. I was like omg wtf and basked in the glory of how Open Source is supposed to feel. I still to this day do now know what happened during the night of that party that sparked the sudden popularity of my script. Some cool dude/dudette probably tweeted about it, and the social avalanche just started. Since then, it just never really stopped. doge recently hit 400 stars with no signs of stopping, and it recently even got semi-Windows support, haha. Doge also in general came to flavor the rest of Q4 for me. Many people speak to me in doge, and I’ve had at least four people tell me that my use of doge-speak has led to a dangerous increase in it for them as well. I’ve even had a colleague send me a (normal) dog related link to me saying “oh I thought you would like this since you’re a dog person”. Just for the record, I’ve owned a total of 17 cats and for the better part of my life I had a crippling phobia of dogs. The phobia has become a lot better these days, but I’m still very much ac cat person, even though I am wow very doge. Oh, and my name is a four-letter change to “Doge Shiberman”, haha. The GitHub contribution spree</h2> My first commit of doge also started something. A couple of days before doing that, I read a blog post</a> about GitHub contributions and habits. It suggested doing something and pushing it to GitHub every single day. And I thought “hey, that actually sounds both doable and nice”. And as such, I have now done almost three months of daily GitHub contributions</a>. Even when hung over and/or sick, I’ve managed to do something. Granted, many of the things are contributions to my own projects and/or contributions to my dotfiles</a>, but nevertheless I’ve had the discipline to do something every single day without cheating. This is something I am immensely proud of, and I will keep this going as good as I can. The only thing that worries me is how I will do it when I go to the festivals of 2014. They are basically at least half a week of disconnected downtime, so I have to figure that out somehow. The goal is to hit the glorious 365 and have a full year of contributions. I reconnect with Milla</h2> In early-to-mid October I returned to Tisdagsölen (The Tuesday Beer). Tisdagsölen is a tradition which I inadvertently created years back (which is a story for another time…). They have been going strong going out for beers at a dive bar called Dovas weekly since 2010. I’ve barely been there at all, so I decided that “hey why not” and showed up there for a second initial appearance. Also making her first appearance there was Milla. Milla and I got to know each other back in 2009, when I basically answered a classified about her looking for a new BFF. We became BFFs quite quickly, but we also fell out of contact. When we said hi once again in 2013, I think we hadn’t seen each other for at least three years. Even quicker than the first time, we became BFFs again. So, now we see each other quite often and we spend our time… sober and proper, haha. I become a pescetarian</h2> On my 25th birthday on November 1st, I decided that I should quit eating meat</a>. It has been great! Vegetarian food is awesome, and I’ve felt better about food than I have in a long time. It should still be noted that I am a very pragmatic pescetarian. If I am sick, sad, tired and hungry and someone in the apartment makes lasagna, I will eat it. I also had a couple of meatballs during the Christmas dinners just because they are also deadly tasty. But, almost all of the time I keep to eating vegetables and fishies. I attend my first Beth Hart concert</h2> On November 9th, I do something I’ve never done before. I went to a concert alone. I went to see Beth Hart, a wonderful blues singer-songwriter I was introduced to during the summer by my Swiss friend Francesca. She sent me a video of her song Am I The One</a>, and I was hooked for life once I heard the full power of Beths voice. Do check the video out. As I submerged myself in her music, I felt the joy of new music I had not felt for a very long time. I’ve spent the better part of the latter half of this year listening to her wonderful music, showcased very well by my Spotify Review</a>. Anyway, the concert was at Nalen, and it was nothing short of amazing. I’ve never seen any blues live (or anything like it, really) and it was so insanely cool. My favorite part was when she demanded from the band to play one of her songs (I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know) a lot slower than usual. She just went “No, slower” to the band a couple of times, and the passion of that song was increased tenfold. Even before the concert, Beth was one of my favorite singers of all time. After the concert, she solidified her position there forever. I’m very much looking forward to when she returns so that I can experience this again. I have an accident</h2> On November 11th, I have an accident</a> and my year turns darker. The damage caused by the accident still haunts me and still keeps me awake at night. I’ve had six fits of sleep paralysis</a>, which is extra horrible since getting out of results in a panic-like mode with a lot of adrenaline. Adrenaline is not really something that helps you fall asleep. Quite the opposite; every time I have a fit like that, I know that I won’t be able to sleep for at least three hours, which sucks balls. I go on vacation</h2> On December 9th I went on vacation to learn how to manage this. I had originally saved my vacation days for a larger vacation come summer 2014, but because of my irregularities in sleep I couldn’t really perform at work anyway. The lack of sleep has generally sent me into a bout of depression. Being insomniac fucking sucks and lowers your ability to focus on anything. And that needs to stop. It should also be noted that I really really don’t want any medication to be able to sleep. Luckily, I’ve found things that work. Externally, two things work: Being slammed drunk and sleeping next to someone. No one needs to tell me that drinking to sleep is a bad idea, and it probably doesn’t come to anyones surprise that sleeping next to someone is one of the best feelings that exists. Even more luckily, I’ve found two internal things that work as well. Both are kind of meditative, and they are basically relaxation exercises about breathing and letting go of all thoughts. They usually work, but they also make me a lot more prone of getting sleep paralysis. So while not perfect, they’ve let me sleep for a while, which is glorious. For a few days I’ve been able to remember what it feels like to not be tired to exhaustion all the time. I win anyway</h2> All in all, the bad things at the end of the year cannot keep me down. I’ll return to work come 2014, and I’ll be as awesome as I ever was. Sure, the circumstances have changed considerably, but I’ve tried being depressed and sad. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not really something for me and I will never let that happen to me again. I’m too good for that. <3 And yeah, I know 2013 was actually Year of The Snake in the Chinese Zodiac</a>, but very whatevs, wow. :D Now, it’s just left to see what 2014 has to give. <3 A month without meat 2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 I’ve stopped eating meat. Since my 25th birthday, I am a pescetarian; a vegetarian that eats seafood. This past month has been great, and I have decided to keep this up! I did this switch because of a couple of reasons. To sum them up: Vegetarian dishes usually taste amazeballs better than other dishes because the taste is not focused on the meat. Some of my favorite things even before this decision are vegetarian anyway.</li> I usually feel better when I don’t eat meat. Especially pork-based dishes make me feel pretty bad in general. It’s kind of like a bad food coma, but in a different way.</li> I like the thought of a guided cuisine. Making me think about what I decide to eat usually leads me to eat better.</li> …and I wanted to see if I can do it, which it seems that I can. :D</li> </ul> So, it’s more about the effect what I eat have on me rather than, well, politics. I don’t think I have found any real negative parts either. At restaurants the selection has slimmed down a lot, but pretty much all places have fish, and some even have vegetarian stuff outright. I am also pragmatic about it; if I am visiting someone and they offer me food, I will not alter it or leave parts out just because it is meat-based. There is also risk for the occasional hangover-bacon in the future, even though that has not happened yet. :> This past month I have not done much new cooking for myself, but I am going to do more of that this coming winter month. If you’re used to this type of cuisine and have a few tips, please holler and I would be very happi hoers! In unrelated news, I played some actual drums today for the first time in years! I jammed with my cousin’s band, and it felt awesome! Lastly, in related news, my sushi consumption is currently through the roof, haha. ’tis good times. <3 The infernal eternal ringing 2013-11-25T00:00:00+00:00 I haven’t slept properly for about a week. This is because I had an accident. So, what happened? Two weeks ago there was a lot of chaos going on for trains in Stockholm. A train had derailed in Stockholms Södra, and this complicated a lot of things for all the non-derailed trains. During Thursday a colleague and I were going home. We were at the commuter train station in Karlberg, just waiting as per usual. For some reason, all trains are passing by in the center, in between the two platforms and unusually close to us humans. We don’t think any more of it, until a freight train passes by and sounds its horn. Keep in mind that the horn of a freight train is supposed to be heard by other freight trains from a very wide distance, so it produces a sound that feels like a million decibels and has everyone on the platform crouching down in pain. I was standing at what was possibly the worst possible place; I was in the middle of the platform, about three meters from the train, I was 90 degrees from the horn when it sounded and my right ear was facing directly towards it. In other words, as close as one possibly could be. Now, I’ve had tinnitus</a> since I was about 13 years old. I was reckless while playing drums, and I played without protecting my ears a couple of times. I’ve come to terms with the fact that it is incurable, that I will forever have some ringing in both of my ears, and that I will never again experience total silence. Since then I’ve been protective of my hearing and I’ve done my best to make sure it does not get worse. Little did I know that after all that, an event I could neither predict nor protect myself from would change that forever. Since the horn, the ringing has intensified by at least the double. Or, at least I think so. It’s hard to remember what it used to sound like, to be honest; I just know that it is a lot worse now. I used to only hear it when I was about to go asleep or when I was reminded of it. Now I hear it all the time and it is louder than the music I listen to and conversations I have. When I go to sleep, I cannot relax and I just lay in bed unable to actually fall asleep. This has even led me to experience sleep paralysis</a>, which is insanely scary because it felt what I imagine a seizure would be like, and I was fully awake and aware during it. That made my trouble falling asleep many times worse instantly. Last week I was home from work three out of five days, mostly because I slept about one hour every night. While I was awake, every five minutes I switched from being depressed by the fact that this ringing will never go away and I will live like this for the rest of my life, to being adamantly indestructible in the feeling that I would overcome this like the unstoppable motherfucker I am. Those kinds of mood swings are really tiring in normal situations, but when you are already insomniac they are exhausting something that is already exhausted. On Thursday I called an ear doctor and I got an emergency time Friday morning. He examined me and concluded that, yeah, I had tinnitus. He also told me that increased tinnitus that happens because of sudden trauma such as explosions or fucking train horns will usually slightly fade away after a couple of weeks. Whether that is because the body slightly cures it or because the affected just gets used to it is unknown. Tinnitus is tricky this way, since it is usually subjective. (As an ironic anecdote, according to the tests I took my hearing is actually better on my right ear - the ear where the ringing is the worst. Go figure.) Anyway, when he told me that it fades, some of the darkest clouds in me cracked and went away. I went from the itchy uncomfortable insomnia state to just being very very very tired, which was a welcome sign. Since then I’ve been able to sleep a couple of hours per night. I’m not sleeping properly, but I am hopefully getting there. I will probably have a tough couple of months ahead of me, but I’ll get through it and finally I’ll be back where the ringing in my head is only heard when I’m reminded of it. I am a fairly strong believer in karma, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what horrible acts I did to deserve this out of nowhere. I also still wonder why the freight train sounded its horn. I really hope it was for a good reason, like someone was in danger. Because, whatever the reason was, it has left me with an infernal eternal ringing in my ear, and I would like it if that was not in vain. I guess I’ll never know. I only know that I will do exactly what my awesome sister did; overcome whatever unfair shit life throws at you and go win at life. Because that’s what we do best. <3 Best practices and when to avoid them 2013-10-31T00:00:00+00:00 This is actually not a blog post. Well, it is, but it was written as the manuscript for a talk for the Stockholm Python User Group</a>. Just as a little disclaimer before I start talking, this is not really a standard talk. This is the story about a talk that never happened, and it is almost more of a monologue that will hopefully inspire discussion. So, let me tell you how the hell this happened. As you probably know, we recently had a poll regarding what the topics for talks should be. When Best Practices was chosen, I was very quick to sign my talker skillz up for a talk. I thought I’d do the very effective Inflammatory Rebuttal kind of talk. You might be aware of the kind; on any conference for any given subject, Django for example, there will always be three or four talks about “Why Django sucks and is horrible”. These talks are inflammatory to gain an audience, but tries to give some kind of constructive notion at the end. I thought I’d do this for best practices. Trendy and edgy. Such wow. I was going to be inflammatory about Best Practices, and I was going to do it with my doge</a> project. Doge is my current little love, and in my mind I had skipped literally every practice in the book while writing it. To me, I had written it for teh lelz and it was a chaotic mess and an extraordinary example of bad practices galore. …and then I started to look at it. I was right about one thing. I did miss out on the most important best practice of all in any programming language; I had no tests what-so-ever. But, other than that and to my chagrin, I found that I actually did follow many best practices without even thinking about them. I mean, I religiously follow PEP8</a> (as one should), I care for Python2 and Python3, and I even write for dependency injection even though I have no intentions what-so-ever in writing any tests for this specific project. This made me think; “What things are best practices, really? I also do Object Oriented Programming. Is that a best practice? It’s literally built into the language, but I’m not really forced to use it. Does that make it a best practice to do it?” I kind of realized that I don’t really know what the hell a “Best Practice” is. So, naturally, I hit the Wikipedia</a>. I didn’t even make it to the third sentence until the word “buzzword” reared it’s head. In all honesty, that kind of wiki page is the kind that I as a developer really do not like. It’s very long, equally vague, and the vague length is filled with the bad kind of manager speak. What it doesn’t contain is anything very related to, well, developing. The only real takeaway was that “best practices are things that are not mandatory but are considered as good goals”. So, Wikipedia didn’t really give me much. Then I remembered! The DD’s! Originating from Test Driven Development</a>, there are now loads of those. TDD is the most well known one. It states that if you want to be a good developer, you should write your tests before your code. That feels like a best practice, right? It’s literally a practice you do so that you can strive for perfection, by utilizing tests. A subset of TDD, BDD (or Behavior Driven Development</a>) is also kind of popular. But everyone knows of those! I find joy in the less common ones! There is also RDD, README Driven Development</a>! It strives for the developer to write a complete README before writing any code. Or tests, for that matter. The imperative is that if you write your README first, you will need to document your interface and put your design idea into practice testing before even coding anything. You’ll eventually need a README anyway, so utilizing it to your advantage early on only makes sense. Relatedly, there is DDD, Documentation Driven Development. Write documentation first. This will net you with, well, documentation. And finally, there is a blog post about Asshole Driven Development</a>, which has tons of new ones in the comments. Anyway, most of these driven developments strive to make developers take some kind of preemptive action before coding so that they don’t forget about important things. To me, that sounds like a very sound definition of a best practice. I was pleased. I know knew more than I thought I knew before, and that is always a very good feeling. But, it still didn’t really feel completely right. The DD’s are very high level, and I felt that there had to be something else. Things like PEP8 and really low level things like “writing good comments” are not really there either, and I feel that they belong. Frustrated like a Farnsworth, I went into my Angry Dome for a while to ponder. Once again, I emerged victorious! After cautious thinking, I reasoned that the DD’s are a subset of a higher abstract. Now, to me, a “best practice” is anything that will help someone else to use your code. And also the inverse; things that when absent from a project make you go “wow this is bad Python”. This makes the DD’s be part of best practices, because all of them will force the developer to strive for the good things. So, down to the nitty-gritty. I need some examples of best practices in Python! PEP8? Definitely. Using performance-focused language features like generators? Absolutely. Writing comments and docstrings? Probably, but not excessively (aka, pointless documentation). Having a proper and working `setup.py` that can be used for distribution and testing? Of course. As I was sitting and writing this list, I became more and more bothered by the fact that no one else seems to have made an effort to document this and put it up on the interwebs, at least not for Python. So, in the beginning I was going to hold this talk about why you should not follow best practices, sometimes. Apparently, my choice of topic was a failure for me, because I found out that I don’t really know what best practices really are. I think I am arriving on an idea and some understanding, but in the end I am now much more interested in documenting Python best practices and putting them on the webs. And, I would like to do that with you guys. During the Open Space after the upcoming speakers, I will sit down with a whiteboard or a laptop or something, and I will, hopefully together with a couple of you, try to document as many best practices as possible, with the intention of putting them online. If you would come and join me, that would be most brilliant. If that is successful and we produce something, maybe I will return in a couple of meetups and actually hold the talk I intended to hold here tonight. Who knows? :> That concludes my monolouge talk thingy. Does anyone have any questions? Thanks for your time, and see you during the Open Space. <3 xoxo A Stream of Thoughts 2013-10-21T00:00:00+00:00 Onoes! The New Blog Syndrome struck again! A month has passed without me updating. Cue the obligatory post about why this is happening! This post is also a random collection of thoughts of things going on right now. Because of reasons. I’ve been out sick pretty much half of October. I don’t recommend it. I was one of the first to fall in the recent wave of late-fall colds, and in true man-with-a-cold fashion, I was practically entirely non-functional for the entire duration of my sickness. And of course, I returned to work too early, and I went bad once again and prolonged my sickness for another week. 2/10 should not do again Whilst not sick, I’ve met some new people. Two of them, separately and on different occasions, asked me what country I was from! They could not believe I was from Sweden because I have such a heavy English accent and mix so much English into my casual speech. It’s actually difficult for me to put down into words how happy this makes me, but it do. I am very glad that I get to spend my days speaking English, and I have noted that every now and again, we converse in English in the apartment as well. Happi tears. <3 Anyway, while I was out cold (hehe) I decided to revamp my life a bit. I read a very interesting blog post</a> about a guy that made at least one contribution to GitHub every day for almost half a year, pretty much solely by riding on the powers of habits. Since I am one of the least habitual people on the planet, I decided to try this and see if it would improve my habits. So far, I’ve been doing it for 21 days (I started October 1st, so it’s pretty easy to remember). Thus far, it feels great! I am now everyday making the concious decision of not procrastinating and rather creating something. Not everything is a patch to a great and awesome Open Source project; updates to my own projects, configurations, and this very blog will count; but at least I am doing something every day. Now that I have something that I do every day, I’ve scaled back on some other things I’ve been doing a lot; watching TV series. The fall season started recently, and some of my favorite series have begun airing new seasons. American Dad, Family Guy, How I Met Your Mother, Walking Dead, Elementary, Criminal Minds, etc. I feel like it is almost too many to count. So, I dropped all of them but one. I’d love to watch every one of them, but I did a very short calculation about how many hours of my life I’ve spent watching these and other shows, and the result was… depressing to say the least. I’d so much rather create and code, since creating and coding always leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction. One of the things giving me satisfaction right now is my insanely stupid doge</a> project. I started it as part of my contribution streak, and I’ve been patching it pretty much every day since. At first the response of it was kind of lukewarm. Some people found it kind of giggly, but not much more than that. Then, this Saturday evening, it went viral on Twitter or something. I actually still don’t know what happened, but suddenly the Stars on GitHub</a> tripled (and landed on 100 whilst writing this!), downloads on PyPi</a> increased by over 2000, and I got multiple pull requests</a>. I was at a party during the time all of this happened, so I had no idea. When I woke up on Sunday morning with a giant hangover, I had more action on my GitHub then I’ve ever had. With the biggest smile on my face, I sat and merged commits others had written for my project, and I felt the glimmering shine of actual Open Source streaming out from my laptop screen. It made me genuinely happy, and I am still riding the good feels from it. I noted that some of the people that starred the project and interacted on the pull requests are people from the community that I know and respect. This makes the fangirl in me squee my pants so hard it’s silly. <3 So all in all, even though I’ve been home sick for the better part of this month, it’s been a really good one. Another! And yes, the title of this blog post will indeed be the title to the 9th book in the Game of Thrones series. The Scales of Estimation 2013-08-21T00:00:00+00:00 Developers create things. Most people know that. What only developers (and by extension, the people who manage developers) know is that developing is a constant struggle against the Scales of Estimation. Let me elaborate: whatever the current task is, a developer always has to ask herself; “What do I need to do and how much time will it cost me to do it properly?”. Properly is the keyword there. For any given task there are very different levels of done. You might solve a problem by the equivalent of using duct tape to make sure something doesn’t catch fire, but if you do so the duct tape will probably instead start leaking water after a while. Quick solutions are just that, and it’s only rarely that they don’t cause other more severe problems down the road. The problem is of course; who has the time to do everything properly when there are a thousand pressing tasks to be done? (sadly, that “everything” is often more in lieu with “anything”) Coming from the startup world, I’ve been beating around this quite a lot. The entire software development community is currently obsessed with the agile</a> trend, and the world of startups is almost doubly so. And for good reason; for startups every day is a battle of sink and swim. If the developers don’t churn everything out at maximum pace, the ship will most certainly sink. Of course, time is not the only factor. Everything needs to be perfect, stable, tested, documented and scalable as well. As the saying goes: “Fast. Good. Cheap. Choose two.”</a> Luckily, as with most things in this world, these are not absolutes. This is where the skill of the Scales of Estimation come in. Whenever we developers do something, we can balance between doing something quickly and cheaply or doing it properly and sturdy. I can honestly say that this skill is the one I try to hone the most. It is one of the ones I value most as a developer, and simultaneously the one I’m probably the worst at. It’s just very difficult to do it right, most probably because every situation and every task need their own estimation and because so many external factors may or may not affect the decision and the outcome. I just always try to remember: “Whenever you do a quick fix, you’re just borrowing time from your future self.” …the blogging begins. 2013-08-04T00:00:00+00:00 A couple of years after this whole blogging trend has been getting kinda stale, I decided that it was high time for me to begin blogging. Wait, why? Why should I? There are enough blogs already! Personal reasons, of course! Firstly, because I miss it. I used to write, and I used to write a lot. But, when I left a certain part of my internets life behind, the writing stopped. Writing gives memories and keeps me smart, so why would I not? Secondly, I believe that I can write interesting and intriguing things. I just need to exercise that to become better at it. My problem regarding things like this has pretty much always been discipline. I am a procrastinator, and the more time passes, the worse I get. So, today I did something I usually advice against; I imposed a technical solution to a problem not of a technical nature. I actually blocked some sites from my computer. So now, I cannot access Facebook</a>, Hacker News</a>, Twitter</a>, imgur</a> or 4chan</a>. They are redirected to a black hole. I chose to still be able to access them from my phone, which means I can still procrastinate while I’m on the move, aka on the commuter trains. I am just so fed up by the fact that I can sum up most of my days with “I spent the day refreshing websites hoping that something that could change my life would pop up. It did not.” I quickly noted that I had some kind of urge to check some of them out. Just a quick check. The realization of this saddened me and gave me a very late insight into how compulsively I am a slave to the content of the internets. It’s like those people that are addicted to video games, but tragic in a different way. It’s time to break free of that. I literally have a thousand better things to do! Oh, and worth noting is that I will be available as usual on the Facebook chat. I’m cutting my procrastination, not my connections with my friends. So, I will try to regularly write about stuff that intrigues, perplexes and/or amazes me. That means that I will write of thoughts and ideas, of actual adventures, of nerdy shit I do with my computer, and maybe (just maybe) the occasional piece of creative writing. So, if this just turns out to be one of these blogs that only has the one “I should start blogging! :)” post, remind me that I should be better than that. Also remind me that I should write more cheerful blog posts, since this is a pretty somber start of what is going to be an awesome adventure of writing. <3

Free time</h2>

So hi, I’m Olivia</h2>
And I’m glad to finally be here. 😊 I’m about to go on some really great adventures, and I look forward to experiencing them with you.</p>
With tearful eyes and the happiest smile,</p>
Olivia 💜</p>

Everything happens so much</h2>
Qouth the horse</a>; everything happens so much. In the beginning of August, namely the 4th, a lot of things were happening at once. They all had pretty big significances. They were as follows:</p>

Olivia5k

Olivia Thiderman - Curriculum Vitae

Programming</h3>
I am fluent in Go</a>, Python</a> and Javascript</a>, and I am quick to picking up new ones if needed or desired. Furthermore, my computer is almost entirely in Emacs</a> and I enjoy lisp languages - particularly Common Lisp</a>. In later years I’ve been picking up Rust</a>.</p>

Web</h3>
Experienced in both the backend (nginx</a>, caddy</a>, apache</a>) and the frontend of developing web applications. Currently exploring HTMX</a>, and have extensive experience with VueJS</a>.</p>

Her Mind

What being a woman means to me

The Internet is exciting again

What's in a name?

The human heart in conflict with itself

Status Update: May 2021

My experiences at Högskoleprovet

Status Update: April 2021

Status Update: March 2021

2014 - Year of the Rollercoaster

Irony

177 days of Github

The happy uncultured peasant

A perfect Monday

2013: Year of the Doge

A month without meat

The infernal eternal ringing

Best practices and when to avoid them

A Stream of Thoughts

The Scales of Estimation

…the blogging begins.

Olivia5k

Olivia Thiderman - Curriculum Vitae

Major projects</h4>

Major projects</h4> Revamping categorization pipeline</p>

Major projects</h4> Business metrics from B2B customer instances</p> I built systems that would gather customer instance metrics (amount of users on the system, amount of systems reporting logs et.c.) from customer networks.</p> </li> </ul>

Free time</h2>

Her Mind

What being a woman means to me

The Internet is exciting again

What's in a name?

What about my name?</h2> When I first came out, I had a different name in mind then the one I actually settled on. As I mentioned earlier - you feel like you want to get it right, but you honestly might not.</p>

The human heart in conflict with itself

So hi, I’m Olivia</h2> And I’m glad to finally be here. 😊 I’m about to go on some really great adventures, and I look forward to experiencing them with you.</p> With tearful eyes and the happiest smile,</p> Olivia 💜</p>

Status Update: May 2021

My experiences at Högskoleprovet

Status Update: April 2021

Status Update: March 2021

It’s a lot right now</h2> And I am not doing all too well. I really wish I could say that things are kinda good, but sadly that would be a lie.</p>

2014 - Year of the Rollercoaster

I pass below the 100kg mark</h2> I’ve been doing a lot of working out in 2014. Mostly I’ve been doing cardio at the gym and I’ve been documenting the results as I went:</p>

I go to the USA</h2> Just going to Belgium or Switzerland was not enough! A fun thing about being a Product Owner is that you sometimes have business relations internationally. So, for two weeks in November I was sent to the American offices of Spotify!</p>

New Years is a blast</h2> In late November I started to form the idea that I wanted New Years to be somewhat calm and that I wanted to cook a nice 3-course dinner for just a few of the closest lovelies. However, Sam got very excited and started inviting people left and right, and suddenly:</p>

Irony

177 days of Github

The happy uncultured peasant

A perfect Monday

2013: Year of the Doge

A month without meat

The infernal eternal ringing

Best practices and when to avoid them

A Stream of Thoughts

The Scales of Estimation

…the blogging begins.

So hi, I’m Olivia</h2>
And I’m glad to finally be here. 😊 I’m about to go on some really great adventures, and I look forward to experiencing them with you.</p>
With tearful eyes and the happiest smile,</p>
Olivia 💜</p>