About me
I started out as a web designer knowing little about code, but over time I developed a liking for code, and now thirteen 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 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 SO have in our apartment.
Technology
Programming
I am fluent in Go, Python and Javascript, and I am quick to picking up new ones if needed or desired. Furthermore, I am fully fluent in Emacs and I enjoy lisp languages - particularly Common Lisp.
Databases
I have a long-standing crush on SQL, especially PostgreSQL. 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, RethinkDB, redis, boltdb and an unfortunate amount of MongoDB.
Web
Experienced in both the backend (nginx, caddy, apache) and the frontend of developing web applications. Currently exploring HTMX, and have extensive experience with VueJS.
Cloud / deploying
I have used and administered Kubernetes clusters (primarily via helm and Terraform) 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 enjoyed deploying things to my homelab setup with Nomad.
Build systems
I am convinced at one point I had used every build system under the sun - starting with Jenkins, going into TeamCity, Bamboo, Travis, Github CI, Gitlab CI, CircleCI, SourceHut; 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
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
Mentimeter (2023-)
Audience engagement software, facilitating interactive meetings via presentation software.
As a Senior Software Engineer, I am part of the Enterprise team in the Commercial department. We develop and maintain systems for large-scale enterprises to facilitate their identity and access management on our platform. We’re responsible for Enterprise specific features, Single Sign-On via SAML, account management via SCIM, and various other things.
Major Projects
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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.
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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 or sounding like a LinkedIn meme, but hopefully the gist of the project comes across)
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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.
Sabbatical (2021-2022)
I took almost two years of sabbatical to focus on my gender transition and my mental health. I can talk about it more in-depth in person if so desired.
Tink (2019-2021)
Payments processor and general payments platform, later acquired by VISA 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
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Revamping categorization pipeline
I spent my first few months adapting the deployment of the internal categorization service, which was based on Facebook’s fastText 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Unomaly (2017-2019)
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 in 2020 and no longer exists as its own entity.
Major projects
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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.
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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.
Spotify (2013-2017)
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.
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Major projects
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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.
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Migrated the entire company from one SCM system to another
I facilitated the move of 2600 repositories over 45 teams from Gerrit to Github Enterprise. 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.
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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.
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Non-tech projects
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Pride Parade organizing 2015/16
I was project lead in putting Spotify in the Stockholm Pride Parade twice.
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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.
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Coworks (2010-2013)
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
Spireblight (2022-)
A community-driven effort to make supporting software for streamers playing Slay The Spire. 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, which I’ve designed.
One-Eye Productions (2013-)
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, 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.