About

I grew up in Aarhus, Denmark. The second-largest city in the country after Copenhagen. Sometimes we say that it’s “the world’s smallest biggest city”, which I tend to agree with. In high school I used to compete for Denmark in algorithmic problems. I wasn’t that good at it (Denmark has a small population, not as hard to be selected as in, e.g. the US), but I learned a lot. At the same time, I worked at Firmafon. They build a fantastic phone and chat support tool for the Danish market. In 2013, I moved to Ottawa, Canada to work as a software developer at Shopify. They found me through a clickbaity article I wrote about not having a smartphone. It started as a ‘gap year.’ I am now many gap years in.

When joining Shopify, I was interested in the infrastructure team. That’s the team that gets paged if the site isn’t working. The goal of the infrastructure team is to make software as reliable and fast as possible. I worked as an infrastructure engineer for several years: the initial system that sends data to our ‘data warehouse’ (Kafka, 2013), moving Shopify to containers to make it faster and more predictable to move code from developer’s machines to the data-center (Docker, 2014), and improving resiliency of the platform (Toxiproxy, Semian, 2014-2015).

In 2016 I became the lead of a small team (3-5) and was tasked to make Shopify able to run out of multiple data-centers at once, which we completed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2016. In 2017, I grew the team into two teams, one responsible for moving shops without downtime between regions and another responsible for the ‘job infrastructure’, running workloads outside of web requests made to Shopify to do large-scale data migrations. In 2018, I started building the Service Communication team that’s building the software to make it as easy as possible for applications built inside Shopify to talk to each other.

Starting in 2019, I ran a lab called New Capabilities which boots up highly technical teams, straddling a role somewhere between project manager, manager, and engineer. I take help get projects off the ground, while building the team and enabling everyone on it to grow. My goal is to put the team in a position where they no longer need me as fast as possible.

In 2019 in New Capabilities we started a team to do a complete rewrite of the Shopify Storefront, which serves all merchant store traffic. It’s architected based on everything we have learned from running Shopify at scale. It’s able to serve read-traffic out of multiple regions, cache better, and is much more performant. About a year and a bit after we started the project with a team of ~8, it was serving the vast majority of production traffic, much of it up to an order of magnitude faster.

In 2020, we’ve worked on patches to MySQL and real-time components for the Admin of Shopify. For half of 2020 and 2021 I worked on expanding the search efforts at Shopify. In May 2021 I left Shopify. No plans currently. Enjoying life, and will learn and live until I jump at the exact right opportunity.

I spend time reading, cooking, weightlifting, working on personal software projects, and paddling.

If you need to pronounce my name in English.