Life in 2019.
hello again. I accidentally let my blog’s domain expire, then my closet server died, then my google cloud copy of it had an expired card and got deleted, while life happened around me. then I sat next to tobias ahlin a few years ago and he convinced me to switch to jekyll. (he reaaalllly loves jekyll.) I started migrating from tumblr, left it without even pushing to github… unhappy about formatting, tried again a year later… and so on.
a year later, the wonderful ted valentin took the whole office with him into the archipelago (including us on parental leave!!) this week, and I got to sit next to tobias again so he could coach me into finish this thing :)
so here we are at nevyn.me. yay, I got a blog again! I’m not really the same person I was in 2015/2016, so I wanted to reboot the blog with a summary of my recent journey. maybe just for a bit of catharsis.
2015: holy shit how did I survive that.
yeah, that was a year alright.
me and my girlfriend of 9 years broke up. a few months later, my dad passed away. while the breakup was pretty mutual and it was nice to change things up, combining the two made me sort of lose myself.
after a long, intense summer, I met my to-be wife Emma at a music festival. the connection was amazing, and we sorta never let go of each other after that.
then my mom passed away too.
then lookback decided to move to silicon valley.
then me and emma got married so we could move there together and continue being ridiculously in love.
that’s…. just too much stuff to go into a single year. i recommend portioning out the good and the bad across a longer period of time, if you can.
lookback goes usa
two and a half years in san francisco, living the startup life. the world grew, I gained a bunch of amazing friends, and I worked myself apart.
san francisco is an amazing city, with such vibrant communities all being destroyed by a selfish, greedy tech industry. biking past four homeless tent camps, and some of the riches companies in the world on my way to work… made me very sad and bitter, broke me a bit.
combine the losses of 2015 while being half a world away from my family, with overworking myself under a not-so-healthy classic startup tech culture, with the broken city around me… it didn’t feel great.
regardless, I made some really great friends. I miss you brian, bruno, kerstin, kristy, bogo, tarjei, aurora, chris, tiff, phil, carolyn, julia, caro, nehal, alex, lea…
family
so emma got a job back in stockholm, so we moved back to sweden. phew. for the two and a half years since the move, it’s been all about different variants of family.
being near my siblings again and meeting them regularly is worth everything to me. it’s an amazing solace. my youngest brother bengan is my closest friend, and being with him is the best.
we reworked our company culture under the amazing henrik, focused on health and human values, slowed down a lot and… started becoming really successful, perhaps much thanks to these new values?? that made me really happy. using the term “family” for work is a common silicon valley dark pattern, but let’s call it… family-like?
I started working from ted valentin’s coworking space knackeriet, and it’s the friendliest place on earth. every single person there is now a dear friend. it’s like a . .. . second family. really, you’re all lovely!!
and in 2018/2019, the actual family of me and emma become a family of three, as our son Theodor joined us ❤❤ they’re my world, especially now as I’m on paternity leave. from july this year until march of 2020, being a dad is my day job.
it’s a lot of work, in a very different way from startup life; but it’s a really welcome change of pace, and being there with my son as he grows up is such an amazing journey ❤❤
hacks, bits and bobs
while parental leave is really not very easy to combine with coding, I’m ridiculously hyped about VR nowadays, so I try to sneak some hacking in. me, tobias kask and admir husovic organize vr the people, a social evening hack hangout group in stockholm for learning VR and working on side projects. it’s a lot of fun :)
and while I do build various retro gaming inspired toys for my son, the project I try to focus on in the few hours a month I actually have time and space to code is alloverse, an overly ambitious VR app platform thatäs been brewing in the back of my head for a long time. I don’t get very far on my own, but some friends are tagging a long, and it’s open source, so it’s getting somewhere :)
so… that’s my life in 2019! let me know on twitter if you enjoyed reading about it, or there’s something in particular you’d want me to blog about:)