Now
I’ve been back in Sweden for about eight months now and careful chaos, my company, is up and running, I’ve paid myself a couple of salaries (earlier than I expected, not enough to offset my costs), and I bought an apartment in Karlstad, right next door to my brother. I’m preparing to renovate, the kitchen is from the 60s and the floors are linoleum/plastic so it’s time to make it a bit nicer. My Singapore stuff is clearing customs in Rotterdam and I’ve told them to take their time so I can get the place in better shape first. 🙂
The dark and cold of winter got me in more ways than one, I really had to force myself up before the sun so I mostly didn’t, and then I kept getting sick every time I traveled. Electric Callboy in Stockholm in November, sick. The Northern Boys in London in December, sick again. I didn’t start feeling normal and energetic until end of January. I’m pretty sure my years of fairly insular living in Singapore didn’t prepare my immune system for European crowds, nor my continued home-office-home routine. I’m considering going to a pub once a week to read and have dinner, purely as a medicinal thing. For health. Obviously no other social or enjoyment benefits in this.
Coming up:
- April: Agentic Dev Days in Stockholm, Här är ditt liv Mangan (theater/comedy show), and Charta 77
- May: Eric Idle in Karlstad, and a trip to Finland with family for a combined 70th birthday (I turned 40, my cousin turned 30)
- June: Friends visiting from Singapore and Berlin, which will force me to actually figure out what there is to do in Karlstad
- July: Local First Conf in Berlin, The Ark in Karlstad
- Thinking whether I should go see Steven ’n’ Seagulls when they get to Karlstad in August (and they always get me thinking of this other video where a tractor is the percussions)
I’ve been listening to a lot of Avatar and Ghost lately, and I hope to find an Avatar concert sometime this year. I know they played in Stockholm at the beginning of the year, but it was before I had listened to more than one song.
a calm company & current bets
I got careful chaos approved in late October and was fully operational by early December (bank account, F-skatt, the works). And then I massively lucked out: the guys who run the coworking space where I have my desk needed some help, so they became my first consulting customer. I wasn’t expecting to make any money until maybe the second half of 2026, so that was a happy surprise.
The gig is consistent work with no strict deadline, which is exactly what I wanted. I’m open to taking on more projects in the same shape, slow and steady delivery, a bit cheaper than the usual rate because I can schedule the work around my own priorities. I value my flexibility more than money right now.
Intentionally so. I was probably pretty close to burnout when I left my previous job, and I’m shaping the company around recovery, not revenue. Lifestyle, not grindstyle (yo). I’ve expected several years of getting going and that consulting will be part of my life for a while, but I’m hoping it’ll shift more towards product as time goes on. But, if I have to choose between health and work, I’ll pick health.
I’m so happy to have somewhere to go every day. I can feel how staying home makes it easy to get caught up doing nothing (partly also from not having a proper work setup, the couch isn’t the most comfy), and the office has been great for both productivity and the social side of things. For example, one of the guys there turned 50 on the exact same day I turned 40 which is very random, and for the office party I got to do some bartending using a seven-bottle bar and some printed recipes. Fun to be able to use that other skill and introduce some new drinks to people. 😀
current bets
The nice part of the consulting gig is that doing things has forced me to think about my craft, and through that I had a breakthrough for the product idea that made me want to start a company in the first place. Breadcrumb is a tool to help people be more intentional, capture thoughts without breaking flow, and connect dots between days (or, you know, crumbs). It also helps organize the work and the artifacts around it. I’m hoping to release an alpha in the coming weeks, something pretty early but hopefully useful enough to get some data on what works for both me and the alpha testers I’m hoping to get onboard.
I’ve also been exploring agentic coding and what it takes to get quality out of it. Not just “does it work” quality, but the je ne sais quoi you want from code before you can trust and sign your name to it. While exploring Gas Town I found Steve Yegge talking about principles as a way to guide agents, and that led me to start bjornstack (bs for short), my attempt at encoding how I want code written into principles with concrete steps that agents can follow. The goal is to bridge the gap between what an agent produces and what I’d actually ship. Because if I regularly pushed code I didn’t fully understand when I was employed, I would’ve gotten fired, not the agent. This isn’t ready for prime time, and I’m focusing on getting breadcrumb to alpha first, and then I’ll continue with bjornstack.
I see these two projects as two sides of the same coin, learning and making those learnings concrete. Flywheels or self-reinforcing feedback loops. Breadcrumb captures ideas, stray thoughts, and “hmm that’s interesting…” while you work. You step back, think about all those moments in different time horizons to distill them into learnings, and later, principles or strategies that guide your agents and humans (bjornstack). As agent output gets more predictable, you can notice more, which feeds back into new insights. And once the principles and strategies are well understood, turn them into intentional practice (LLMs should be able to create scenarios), helping people develop the taste to design and review code from both agents and humans.
Then, a man gotta eat (bread into crumbs, ya know? 😜): a team product. Agents may be ushering in the anti-social coding era, but I still think we’ll only get so far if the humans controlling them can’t work together. Individual learning compounds, and it compounds even further when a team shares what they know. But that takes both the skill of sharing and enough common ground to make sense of each other’s insights.
The principles and strategies from bjornstack are a start, but having docs isn’t enough, people need to internalize them. So I want to build tools that help teams close that gap: go from written principles to tacit knowledge, so people can actually use them when working, and over time become intentional enough to improve them. I bet that individuals understanding and connecting dots across boundaries will continue to be important, and we need to help create those skills somehow. This is what I want to do.
Breadcrumb and bjornstack can be open source and useful for individuals. The team stuff is where I think there’s a product for companies. Will this work? Iunno. My bet is that it will, but I can’t say it’s a guarantee. 🙂
3D printing and making
I got a 3D printer. I wanted a hobby that’s different from computers (heh) and also to change how I see the world. I don’t accept friction when working digitally, and my default in the physical world is accepting “this is what it’s like 🤷,” so I want to get the skills to not accept it physically either. Starting with 3D printing but hoping to continue to woodworking or whatever else I need as I get more comfortable.
I haven’t gone super deep yet, but I’ve made my first model in OpenSCAD (which is a programming language for 3D models, so this hobby suddenly looks a lot like programming). I even used Claude Code to help create the model because it was better than me at it.
So far, one of my favorite prints is the Nanakatana, a twist-open retractable banana katana. I printed a grip strength trainer for my mom that has her opening jars she hadn’t before. And I have little hooks, hangers, and tools all over that I wouldn’t have bothered with before.
The homepage is the firehose of what I’m up to, or follow along how you prefer to get updates.