August 11, 2026 — 12:46
Obsessing over Charli xcx's new album
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August 11, 2026 — 09:37
Going back to work
Deptool
Since beginning to self-host my site and other projects on my bare metal Ubuntu server, there's been a fair share of Manual Configuration Management™ by yours truly. Since I'm a huge Linux noob, this is my design, and it's all very boilerplate. But still, it only takes a couple of websites or servers for the nginx and systemd config is starting to be annoying: I can't scp or…
Covers
Exhaustive list of actually good cover songs: "Nothing Compares 2 U" . Performed by Sinéad O'Connor, original by Prince. "Hurt" . Performed by Johnny Cash, original by Nine Inch Nails. That's it.
My gym app
In the spirit of moving off third party services and becoming more "tech independent" , I decided to code my own gym tracker app. I've been super satisifed with Reps & Sets by Graham Bower. It has perfect UX, follows iOS's UI guidelines mercilessly, and does just enough for me. However, Graham's latest update is iOS 26+ only, and I'm still holding out on iOS 18… Bummer, but…
July 16, 2026 — 12:44
Building my own gym workout app
July 6, 2026 — 23:33
Watched Spain - Portugal (cheered for Spain).
July 5, 2026 — 22:23
Watching Brazil - Norway with newborn son
June 21, 2026 — 23:11
Publishing my new site
Tech nostalgia
A quick post in two parts. Where are all the startups? In the office yesterday, the subject of startups came up. More precisely, the lack of them in the Stockholm tech scenes these days. Where are they? Where did they go? (By "startup", I do not refer to the corporations that are Klarna and Spotify and the likes.) When I was young (2005-2016), there was a myriad of small startups all around. In…
Emailing for Leave X
Based on the initiative Leave X , I wrote to all of the Swedish members of parliament still active on X, currently 230 people. Out of those, 9 people replied within 24 hours. Turns out that "active" is a keyword here which we'll return to below. Rickard Nordin (C) Claims he's inactive , and hasn't deleted his account because he wants to follow sports on there in certain communities.…
Self-hosting johan.im
I've decided to move my personal site stack away from free providers to my own server, for education and fun. Drivers Simplicity I've spent so much time over the years figuring out how to wire together services, just because I haven't gone all in and owning my stack. The allure has been "free static hosting! free serverless! free cron jobs!". But for what? I think it's faked…
Fitlang
Stumbled upon FitLang by Blain Smith. A sweet little grammar to mark up workout programs as well as logging them. Both the idea and syntax reminds me about CookLang — both are wonderfully nerdy engineery solutions to everyday chores. What gets me going on these things is that they're open, shareable text files . My data is not hidden away in some Google spreadsheet or SQL database in the…
Recently, April-September 2025
Seen and done During Summer, we hung around in Stockholm area as well as on the west coast of Sweden. It was totally "lagom" ( appropriate level of travelling ). Well before my birthday in July, I was surprised by a party arranged by my lovely wife. All my friends (new and old) where there. I was so touched. The party lasted until 04:00 in the morning. At work, we've moved offices from the…
Another pasta bolognese
I've added my latest iteration of pasta bolognese , you guys. It's the result of many tweaks and iterations , and is the first one I've actually felt I want to save here on my site, for posterity. We just had it for dinner yesterday and today again, and it's so freaking good: how the meat has melted away into the sauce after 6-8 hours of slow cooking in the oven.
Recently, Q1 2025
Seen and done We came back to Sweden from Cape Town in mid March. The "change management" with the kids went well, but it's mentally quite hard to be back in a different climate and another way of life. I really loved our lifestyle in South Africa, and can't wait to go back somehow. It's just feels weird to be back in Sweden: everything is as it's always been, and apart from…
Code greppability
Code greppability is such an underrated code metric in how we judge and work with a code base. At work, we try to be very diligent in how we name database columns, file names, functions, one-off variables. We pick a noun for a new feature and stick with it throughout the "vertical" that forms from frontend to database . This makes it really easy to trace a feature's flow through the various…
The Framework laptop
I don't need a new computer right now, but if I did, I'd be very keen on a Framework laptop. I first read about this company a few years ago, and are following some people who are posting about updates on the project. Here's a good thread by Andrey Sitnik, for instance. And here's a blog post by Wil Shipley about his first few months running Linux on Framework 16. Why What…
Baxter Dury
I really enjoy listening to Baxter Dury . His voice is very unique, and he’s talking over the music in a cool way. I can just keep him in the background with his London accent. And he succeeds with making catchy hooks, but also intensely deep lyrics. I check out some lyrics and am just swooning over some lines. Once a sexual forest fire My flame had been dampened by the monsoons of fear and age…
The Bear
It’s something with the series The Bear , I’m just so swept away by the acting in it. In every scene, there’s often some gold. They sort of slow things dooooown so much in some settings, and it’s panicky hell elsewhere. Like in life. And how they swing between real deep talk-y bits one second and show a short piece of funny moronic “what the actual fuck you meatheads” shittalk in the next.