A warm-hearted geek from the concrete suburbs.
Still figuring things out. Just faster now.
Born in Angered, Gothenburg's concrete suburb where you either got resourceful or got bored. I got both.
Today I live in a villa in Hästervik, Torslanda, with my family. The distance between those two places is about 30 kilometres and a decent mortgage. It took 20 years.
Met 2006. Married December 19, 2009. Three years of "we should probably get married" followed by actually doing it.
Born 2010. Finally old enough to join the scout competition I've been arranging for a decade. Worth the wait.
Born 2012. Football, floorball, scouts: her schedule runs the household. I operate as Taxi Bellison. No tip required, but appreciated.
Love cats. The family negotiations have entered their seventh year. Outlook: cautiously optimistic.
Honesty.
That's it. Everything else follows from that. Yes, even when it's inconvenient. Especially then.
Friends and colleagues use the same words: a geek in every sense, but a warm, heartfelt one. What you see at the office is what shows up at the dinner table. This is either a strength or a warning, depending on how you feel about unsolicited explanations of data architectures over pasta.
"You can really geek out over anything."
A friend, mid-discussion about vanilla sauce.
Forest trails around Gothenburg. No lycra, no Strava segment hunting. Just mud and questionable decisions about which root to ride over.
Dirt under my nails. Thinking about nothing in particular. The slugs are winning but I respect the commitment.
Preferably in the forest. Preferably without phone signal. The trees don't ask for status updates.
Always something on the computer. The line between hobby and obsession is thin and I crossed it years ago.
Started in kindergarten: broke into the kitchen so often they let me cook with the chef weekly. Sometimes daily. Haven't stopped since.
A multiplayer geo-guessing game, built entirely with AI as my unpaid intern. From "wouldn't it be cool if..." to actual users in actual browsers.
Rebuilt the C firmware for my ESP8266 multisensor nodes (motion, temperature, humidity, light) with MQTT auto-discovery into Home Assistant. Later smuggled the same idea onto the factory floor as a pilot. Covid killed it. The slugs and the pandemic: formidable opponents.
Because a PDF felt insufficient and "have you seen my D3 charts" is apparently not a normal thing to say in interviews.
Scout since age 10. Leader, secretary, treasurer: all the unglamorous roles that keep organisations alive and earn you exactly zero applause. Wouldn't trade it.
For the last decade, my main contribution has been arranging a scout competition for adults and older teenagers every September. We took it on to save it from being shut down. Last year, my son finally got to join as a scout. Ten years of arranging it, and now I get to watch him do it from the inside.
I also spent four years as my daughter's floorball coach. My only qualification was being bad at saying no. Somehow the team survived.
In earlier years, I also managed one of the world's largest amateur boxing tournaments annually. From scouts to boxing to floorball: my CV has range if nothing else.
Two things: something that's almost done, or something that's exactly as difficult as it should be. The zone between "nearly there" and "this shouldn't be possible" is where I lose track of time, meals, and apparently social obligations.
From the scout movement. Still my lead words. Also a convenient excuse for skipping the manual.
Gave me my fantasy and a lifelong habit of checking the back of wardrobes. Just in case.
Got me to read in English. Which is ironic, given the next section. My English teacher would be confused.
Physics, geography, social studies: taught me to consume vast amounts of text and extract the essence almost instantly. Showed me that even without deep subject knowledge, I could still be the most informed person in the room. A dangerous superpower to give a teenager, honestly.
Made me care about words. Still can't write lyrics, but I notice them now.
Taught me that love is more important than skill. Which is good, because I can't sing either.
Where everything I start begins. Famous last words, occasionally. It comes with a companion belief: everyone can learn anything, but no one can learn everything.
I failed every English class from elementary school through high school. Every. Single. One.
Now I lead a team where English is our working language, write technical documentation in English daily, and built a geo-guessing game with an English-first interface. My old English teacher is either proud or deeply confused. Turns out, you don't need permission to learn. You just need a reason.
I dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot. I grew too tall for the cockpit.
The dream survived the rejection. It just changed shape. These days I build things that fly in other ways. And I still look up every time something fast goes over.