Stuff I've worked on
Boords
Web Development, 2017 - presentVisit BoordsAn online tool for creating and sharing storyboards for videos, animations, and similar productions. I joined the company as employee number one. The application is based on Ruby on Rails, with a React frontend and an additional api in Go, although I mostly work on the frontend of the app.
Cluster Player
Coding, 2019 - presentRead more…Spotify's generated and curated playlists didn't really work for me and my wife while we're working, so as a side project I made a tool that generates a fresh playlist at the push of a button.
It allows you to create a mix of "moods" of music you want to listen to consisting of "clusters" of similar moods, while preventing tracks and artists from occurring too often.
Generative Music
Coding, 2017 - presentRead more…An experiment in creating a generative music system (basically: teaching my computer how to compose ambient music), inspired by some of Brian Eno's work. Especially the album Reflection and the apps he made in collaboration with Peter Chilvers.
Music
A hobby with its own pageCheck out my music…I've been casually making music for the last 10 years or so. Sometimes to imitate a style that I liked, sometimes to experiment, or sometimes just because I wanted to.
I've made a page to showcase some of the music I've made, and the stories behind them.
Zukini
Everything, 2014 - 2018Read more…Frustrated by terrible restaurant/cafe websites that don’t have the info that you need, or simply don't work on mobile, I wanted to make something that enables owners to get a great online presence, fast, so for a few years I occasionally worked on my own product; a service for restaurant/cafe owners to take their business online. A hosted website platform tailored specifically to restaurants and cafes.
I shelved the project in 2018 for various reasons; changing landscapes, lack of a testing audience, and a change of personal priorities. It is a bit of a shame, but I guess that's how stuff goes. I learned a lot, anyway.
Card Builder
Front-End Development, 2015 (for Edenspiekermann)Together with German newspaper Die Zeit, our team developed an editorial tool for delivering rich, interactive stories for consumption on all kinds of devices: The Card Builder.
The time frame and the interactive nature of the card stacks made this a challenging project. A lot of modern technology was used to ensure the experience was snappy, exciting, and reliable. Technically, the product featured ReactJS, dynamically generated stylesheet and JS bundles per customer, server-side rendering (and includes), responsive images, and lazy loading. The project has since been taken offline.
SoundCloud
Web Development + Product Design, 2011 - 2014Read more…In my 3.5 years at SoundCloud I worked mostly on the core web products (+related products) and some internal tools. I later joined the Growth team as both a front-end engineer and product designer, where I created a new version of user onboarding, various email campaigns, and designs for the settings page.
Nebula.css
JavaScript, 2015 - 2016Read more…In 2015, while CSS utility classes were coming up as a practical way of dealing with large codebases, I created a system and CSS framework which generates these utility classes based on design rules like spacing, colours, and makes those responsive. It could be used as the foundation for websites and aid with rapid prototyping.
Although it never really passed beyond work-in-progress because of a lack of time, I based multiple websites on it (including this one). It was the backbone for Zukini, and many of the ideas here were later popularised in Tachyons and Tailwind (one of the most popular CSS frameworks right now).
Weka
Web Development + Product Design, 2016I spent the first half of 2016 travelling on the other side of the world, and wanted to have a way of showing friends and family what we were up to. I wanted to make a small service that takes already collected datapoints (e.g. checkins, weather, photos), and creates a rich daily/monthly narrative of it automatically with things like maps. The user can then add to it by adding additional diary entries or photos.
This project was quite challenging, but fun. I did all the necessary backend work, added image uploading + EXIF parsing, wrote extensive unit tests, and made it work partially offline.
react-bem-helper
JavaScript, 2015 - 2017react-bem-helper on GithubThe BEM methodology is a great way of structuring your CSS, but it does lead to some repetition while writing out your HTML and CSS. I created a small JavaScript module that takes some of this redundancy away when working with React Components, making the code easier to scan and work with.
Now with the advent of CSS modules, the necessity of BEM and this module is a bit lower, but when CSS modules are not in use, the module is still very useful. This was my first open-source NPM package, and I'm happy to see there's a decent amount of people use it.
Red Bull Mywings
Front-End Development, 2015 (for Edenspiekermann)Red Bull asked Edenspiekermann to develop a new platform as a home for online campaigns using their iconic cartoons. Its main feature is a infinitely scrolling canvas representing one day in the world of the cartoons.
The website features extensive animation, parallax, and large image sprites, but was still required to function on mobile devices. This required complex logic for lazy-loading, responsiveness, and performance. I was the initial and main frontend developer for a number of months. It has since been taken offline.
FlickrToTumblr
Design & Development, 2014See how it workedI was frustrated that there was no way of easily posting my Flickr photos to a Tumblr blog that kept tags intact, so I created a tool which suits this usecase. I wanted to do some cool things with transitions, responsiveness and single-page apps, and this project was perfect for it. Backend was coded in Node.js. It was my first experiment with Reactjs, and I've learned a lot since then.
Wallπ
Design & Development, 2012At the Music Hack Day in Reykjavik in 2012, I made a tool that visualises the sound from an album by your favourite artist and allows you to put it on your wall. It works by fetching tracks from Last.fm, audio analysis data from The Echonest, and then drawing that data on a canvas. The colour of the artwork is automatically generated from the cover art.