David's Perspective

Today is the first day I’m working for my own company Kodskepp (Swedish for code ship). It feels strange but also very exciting. I’m started with a part-time setup. I’m have two days (in a regular work-week) dedicated for my own, and the other three days I work at my jobby-job.

I’ve always known and wanted to run my own company, and really, this is not my first stab at running a company, but it is the most serious attempt yet. The first company I started was an IT repair consultancy company helping friends, family and others to fix their IT stuff, yes that printer that never worked, I even helped set up a Minecraft server once. This was a really great learning experience. However, I grew tired at fixing other peoples stuff when I started learning programming and game development. 

So, during the last years of secondary school and just before starting university, I and a couple of friends started a small company to build mobile games. This was during the Flappy Bird hype and we thought if he can do it, so can we! We managed two create and release two fully functional games and even made few cents on it. Then, basically because lack of time, we decided to not continue running the company. I think this was simply the wrong time for all of us involved, everyone was so focused on their studies, our none-existing budget (students, you know) and the admin overhead just became a burden instead of fun. 

Fast forward to 2024, I’ve been working professionally as a software engineer for five years and it has fun and very rewarding. I’ve been lucky to end up in just the right environment for me to grow. 

Then, one day in the beginning of January, I was thinking to myself, what’s the next step for me? Should I apply for a new job, a new role or just continue on as is? 

Then this familiar little voice in my head said, “Isn’t it time to start that company you always wanted?”. I quickly replied, “I don’t have a good business idea”. Over the coming months, that little voice persisted and I always came back to YES, I do want to starta business! But I have no idea what to do. 

I just knew what I didn’t want to do, become a freelancer (which, financially makes a lot of sense). No, I want to build product, but what product? No idea.

I finally realised that I just need to start putting in time into this, otherwise it will never happen, the other great things in my life has not just fallen in my lap, they have been the result of hard work, over time. This is the first day of many where I try to put in the work needed to find what to build, how to build it and how to make it a successful business. 

Over the months since I decided that this is happening and that the 4th of September is my first day, I’ve actually decided on the first product that I’m going to build and try to sell, but that deserves its own post.

This Saturday, Midnattsloppet (the midnight run) took place. It’s a 10K that takes you around the lovely island of Södermalm (one of the ilands of Stockholm?). The best thing about Midnattsloppet is that it almost feels like a festival, the city is buzzing with people that is out looking at the runners, cheering them on. Along the track there is several music venues and dancers. It is just great fun. Another quirky thing about this race is that everyone has matching t-shirts (the color changes ever year) and being part of the sea of turquoise shirts is a special feeling.

I’m kind of disappointed of my result, but I was down with a cold the week leading up to the race so I’ll have to accept that I was not performing at my best. Well, better luck next year I guess!

I’ve picked up biking again. And it is really nice. Perhaps one of the best ways to get around in Stockholm?

One of my colleagues has been nagging me to fix my bike and start commuting with it to work. I put it off, mainly due to the bike not being in such a good shape, and perhaps most problematic was not even at my home, but at my parents!

But then last week, I finally got the bike to the city and I tried to fulfil my promise to actually bike to work. So I did, and it was tough and sweaty. And the bike rode bad, and the chain even got stuck very badly. Sigh…, but on my way home I road past a bicycle workshop and I asked them to take a look and see if they could do something with my bike.

Oh wow, did it get better! It runs so smoothly now and I want to take the bike everywhere.

I just wish I had done this sooner. Perhaps, it’s like with code, if you maintain it, it will work better in the long term.

Today, I was trying simply setup a local installation of Plausible on my mac. I read through the self-hosting guide, and exclaimed: “How hard can it be?”. Famous last words, huh?

Everything started fine according to docker and the logs, but I could not access the Plausible web portal at the designated port. I think I wasted a few hours tweaking the docker-compose file, reinstalling docker-desktop, and then finally I gave up. I caved. I thought, probably I was not cut out to do use this fancy new cool analytic software.

But then I remembered the wise words from The IT Crowd.

… and of course it started working after a reboot. And this is why programmers drink.

All good blogs by programmers starts with a Hello World post, no?

Basically, I could not decide on a blog engine, everything feels too complicated or too pricey. Instead, I went the other route, just simple html files served by a web server. Hurray! 🎉 It will probably come back and bite me, like my overuse of emojis.

Probably, the best options is just to use wordpress, but I could not be bothered to set it up right now. However, it looks quite straight forward to use this docker image. Do you really need a database for a blog?