I am Robin and this blog is a place where I can write about things I find interesting. I’m an experienced software engineer, living near Trondheim, Norway. I work as a consultant for Arktekk. There are lots of topics related to my work that I’d like to write about:

  • Things I learn. In my line of work, I learn something new almost every day, and I’d like to get better at writing down some of those things.
  • Debugging and tools for debugging complex systems. I love a good debugging story and while I try to avoid outages as much as possible, I do enjoy the intense concentration and focus that a production incident requires.
  • Some technology. These days, I’m enjoying Rust a lot, but I have a lot more experience with languages like Java and Python, and I really like PostgreSQL. I’ve also done some machine learning at work, and I really like wrangling and trying to understand tabular data.
  • Working in teams and building culture. I’ve had the great fortune of being part of several teams with great culture for learning and while I don’t know all the ingredients that made that happen, I’m super interested in making it happen again. Being part of a high-performing team is a great!
  • I’m programming Scala again for the first time in about 10 years, so I’m hoping to write a bit about how that experience is now.
  • I do a lot of data exploration, and it might be fun to post some of that here, in general I have a lot of “I wonder if” moments that I end up checking by pulling in data from places like data.norge.no or SSB.

I have some hobbies that I might write about at some point too, particularly when they overlap with technology in some way:

  • Fishing. The chances of finding me near a lake between May and October are reasonably good.
  • Photography. I wanted to take the nicest landscape photos, but after my son was born I’m mostly taking only family photos.

I used to blog a little bit during my stint in Posten/Bring, so you can read some of my previous blog posts here.

Experience

Here are some technologies and problems that I have a lot of experience working with:

  • Java/Kotlin/Scala (backend development, web)
  • Python (data analysis and machine learning, devops, backend development)
  • Spark (Databricks), pandas, torch
  • PostgreSQL, both ops and using it as a developer
  • Devops and CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Gitlab CI/CD, Jenkins
  • Terraform, Kubernetes, Puppet, Ansible, Docker
  • Grafana, InfluxDB, ELK stack, OpenTelemetry
  • Azure
  • Building data platforms, data engineering, data analysis

These things spark joy right now, and I would love to get to work with them in the future:

  • Polars, Databricks
  • Google BigQuery, Google Cloud
  • Rust
  • Building great teams, creating culture around learning and sharing
  • Building data platforms, data engineering, data analysis
  • Building things that make other developers more productive, making the build and deploy process fast and reliable