In December 2014 I embarked on a new adventure. I joined a startup company as a programmer. The company creates a service is called Pelp and is currently only available in Norwegian. The past 6-7 years I’ve been having roles such as Chief Technical Officer, Front-end Architect, Team lead, etc. Each position has been challenging and I’ve learned so much. In fact, I still learn from things I’ve done many years later by looking back at them.

Now, there are naturally harder things than what I’m going to talk about in this post. However, given the context of software development and leading teams this is the hardest. Especially if you’ve gone from being fairly good at the decipline of the people of your team. I have spent a few years being in a position where I lead teams, but recently I stepped down to become a team member.

I was fortunate to be able to attend JSConf EU in 2011. This turned out to be a life altering event. Going there I expected to see some nice talks and get drunk in the awesome city of Berlin. While I did both of those things, what happened in the can going to Berlin airport was not expected. I got on board to organise a JSconf-style conference in Oslo: The Web Rebels Conference.

I am fast approaching 40 years old which is pretty fucking scary in general, but even more so when you work in software. No more am I allegeable for jobs, as I’m no longer in a place where I am viewed as something for the future. These amazing and brilliant young people coming through are just so much better than I ever was. It’s a young people’s game, programming. I have many friends who are of similar age and we share a common scare.

I was sitting on the floor playing with my son after coming home from work when my wife said: “it’s great to have you back". I was puzzled, what did she mean by that? Back from work? I hadn’t been away or anything so it had to be that, right? After putting our son to sleep I asked her what she meant. She said it was nice to see me present and participating when returning from work.