[hacker me | social me]

Education can change people, and that’s what happened to me. I never thought that my four years at Culture, Society, Media production would change my direction in life the way it did.

First of all: Theoretical studies makes you think differently, makes you apply multiple perspectives on things, and makes you a better analyst – at least I think so. During my studies I targeted on contemporary social studies – including sociology, cultural studies, media and communication studies and more – which gave me a greater understanding of our society at large.

Secondly: The program I attended also include practical parts, and it was at one of those occasions I got bitten by the Web (and multimedia/hypermedia production). We had a project where we did a web production – nothing to brag about today regarding the technical level, but content wise it’s still pretty interesting – and this was the first time I had to deal with things like HTML and Flash, and since then I knew I was going to work with web and multimedia production.

So by today, a couple of several years later, I’ve not only become an academic, got huge student loans, surpassed the age of 30 36, but I’ve also become a computer nerd and geek! But I try to compensate for the geekiness by making music, mountainbiking, playing golf road biking and hit a pub now and then.

Hacker me

Someone asked me: How do you define your self? Lets say that at work most people – who don’t work too closely to me – think I’m an engineer or technician. Maybe not too wrongfully since I write a lot of code, but I see myself more as a humanist. But the nice thing about coding is that it’s fairly black and white: If it works it works. Life in general isn’t that black and white!

Here’s a list of programming languages and techniques I’m using or are familiar with:

• Pike

  Pike is a strictly typed object orientated general purpose language that is quite similar to C, C++ and Java except Pike is compiled at runtime.

  You can check out my Pike modules at Github

• PHP

  PHP is what I started off with and probably the language I know the best. PHP may not be the best, most beautiful, fastest programming language, but you know what you get, it’s easy to use and has a HUGE community

  You can check out my PHP framework PLib at Github

• XSL

  XSL is used to transform XML into other formats. Roxen CMS that we use at work is using XSL for templating, so I use XSL almost every day.

• Java

  Java may be the most generally known programming language. I’m far from an expert, but all SOAP clients for Tekniska Verken’s (my work) My Pages – where our customers can view their district heating, electricity, water and waste consumption – I have written in Java.

• Javascript

  You can’t work with web development without knowing Javascript! I’m quite familiar with frameworks like jQuery and Mootools.

• C#

  I wouldn’t call myself an expert in any way at C# but I get along pretty well and have written a few applications in C# – both on Mono and .NET. My Linux version of the Roxen application launcher is written in C#.

• C

  Perhaps the mothership of programming languages today. Most other programming languages I use is them self written in C. I’m soo a newbie when it comes to C, but it’s good fun experimenting with and maybe someday I’ll be a hardcore C hacker, who knows!

• CSS

  CSS is what we web developers use to transform dull HTML into something more aesthetic. Due to my faschination for accessibility I have grown some pretty good knowledge of CSS.

…and I’m quite familiar with industry standard applications like Photoshop and Flash.