Like many other people in tech, I've been fascinated by computers since my early teens. I've always enjoyed tinkering with them so a career in programming came as no surprise! Programming is useful pretty much everywhere these days and through different kinds of projects, one gets to learn a lot about and contribute to all kinds of business domains.

With programming, there are always new things to learn and a lot of room for creativity so it never gets too repetitive. Seaber's goal of helping shipping companies reduce their emissions really resonates with me and it feels great to be a part of that. Another reason that makes Seaber a great place to work is the awesome people and the laid back atmosphere.

Exercise and music belong to my workday

My average day starts with taking the kids to daycare. After that, I usually go for a run or spend some time listening to music and reading the news while enjoying peace and quiet before starting my working day.

Having a separate room for working in our house is very convenient. I didn't really pay much attention to ergonomics or anything when picking furniture for the home office, but so far I've been happy with the setup I have. I used to have a standing desk but now I just try to get up and have a short walk or do some light exercise as often as possible. I also have all my musical instruments in the same room. Having a guitar closeby is a great stress reliever.

I usually start my workday by reading through any new messages on Slack - our communicating app - and checking if any new issues have been reported by our clients. Most mornings I jump into our remote meeting room on Slack early to chat with colleagues before our daily meeting. We normally do most of our planning during our daily meetings where we decide who's going to work on what as a team. The freedom of deciding one's schedule is really important to me, and I often do some non-work stuff, such as take a walk or go for a bike ride - especially if the weather outside is great - during normal working hours and continue working later in the evening.

What is it I actually do then?

My workday is mostly spent developing new features and polishing the user interface for Seaber's frontend application. I work closely with our designer on these aspects. I've had the opportunity to fix issues and develop new features for our backend, too, and learn a lot about our PostgreSQL based server-side stack and the cloud infrastructure that runs Seaber in the process. The frameworks I use the most are TypeScript and React-based frontend applications. I've completely fallen in love with TypeScript at Seaber, it has improved the quality of my code a lot and also saved me countless hours of refactoring and looking for issues in parts of the codebase I haven't touched before.

I spend a lot of my time outside of work with the family. In addition to that, I enjoy fixing and riding bikes and spending time outdoors. I've also picked up reading again after several years of not really touching any books at all. Currently, I'm ploughing through Cormack McCarthy's Border Trilogy - over 1,000 pages of Western stories.

My work during the pandemic

Corona didn’t change my life much, to be honest. At Seaber we have all been working remotely since the start of the company in 2018, so we could continue as before when the pandemic started one year ago. During periods when the daycare was closed and having the kids at home, of course, brought some disturbances, but it's also been nice to be able to have lunch with the family in the middle of a workday.

Sometimes I miss the office environment and chatting with colleagues face to face, but the fact that I don’t need to commute and that I have an increased amount of free time outweighs the negative aspects of working from home. And I have a back-up plan: I have promised myself that if I ever start missing having people around me while working I'll go to a co-working space once in a while.