Melhus · 63° north · light until 19:55

From SagatoSyntax

A place where I gather ideas, projects and reflections. Programming has somehow sharpened everything else I have learned. Hold a culture up against a system and its habits have to explain themselves. That is usually where a good routine turns into a better one.

The intro Where this site has been: a board on one line in 1992, two lines in 1997, the web in 1998, and today.
On over-engineering He will tell you the servers are named after Norse halls. He will not tell you how load-bearing that turned out to be. Strike the match and light the candle.

Welcome to my laboratory!

This is where I keep my thoughts, projects, experiments and whatever else I happen to build. It all runs on hardware I own, in a place I control, where nobody can suddenly rebuild the floor beneath my feet without telling me.

This is not meant to be the prettiest presentation on the internet. Usability, interface design and presenting work to customers, colleagues and decision-makers are things I know well and have worked with for years. But that is not the assignment here.

This site is my workbench. Here I can push a technology further than the task strictly requires, learn something new by using it to build something real, and find out what actually happens when theory meets reality. Things get assembled, tested, broken, rebuilt and quite often end up with a few more components than they really needed.

That is part of the point.

Much of what you find here is deliberately overengineered. A links page could have been a list. A text player could have been a text box. But the simplest solution does not necessarily teach me anything new. I have been learning technology in roughly the same way since I was a kid: understand the parts, build something with them, try it, figure out why it does not work, and try again.

Over time, this has become more of an archive than a portfolio, and more of a personal site than a showcase. Things end up here because they are useful, because they are still being developed, because I learned something from building them, or simply because I think they are worth keeping.

The Norse theme is not accidental either. History and mythology have been interests of mine for a long time, and I like the idea of stories, knowledge and traces of the people who came before us being preserved and carried forward. Here, that idea has taken on a form of its own: servers named after halls, Norse details where they belong, modern technology under the hood, and no particular desire to hide how everything is put together.

Some of what you find here started with a problem for which I could not find a good solution. Some started with a question about how something might work if it were done differently. And some of it exists simply because I wanted to find out if I could build it.

123456 × 8 + 6 = ?

Written down

All of it