My friend Peter says I am “The nicest American there is”. I was born in America, moved to Sweden in my 20s. I live in the south of Sweden with my wife and son, our dog and two cats. I like to build and fix stuff. I’ve done major mechanical work on our family cars, rebuilt a moped with my son, remodeled our house with my wife, built a large deck in our backyard, and numerous other projects. My wife an I like to cook and I enjoy barbecuing and entertaining friends. I’ve been online since dial-up modems, freenets and IRC.
Currently, I work as a Senior Systems Engineer in the Observability Enabling team at Ingka Group Digital, part of IKEA. I spend my days enabling teams to do better Observability, helping develop our Observability Framework, teaching workshops in SLOs, distributed tracing and our Engineering Baseline. I advocate for Open Source, vendor agnostic solutions for Observability and help guide teams on best practices and overcoming technical hurdles. I participated in Ingka’s Native Clouder program both as a student and as a contributor and SME. Native Clouders taught me quite a bit about imposter syndrome and not being afraid to ask questions.
Previous to working at Ikea I worked with Splunk at Securelink/Orange Cyberdefense and had a long career in Satellite Communications Networks at Constellation Networks. At Orange I was a SIEM specialist and along with my colleague Robert Johansson built a composable Splunk deployment in Google Cloud using modern cloud and devops practices. At Constellation Networks I helped connect the world to the internet via a small satellite teleport outside Malmö, Sweden. I was able to contribute to all kinds of interesting projects: the Austrian Space Agency’s Mars Analog mission in 2013, the tsunami relief efforts in 2004, the webcam at Pete’s Pond in Botswana, internet access for hospitals in Lesotho, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, testing of portable satellite systems for various manufacturers including Swe-Dish.
I volunteer as an Arbiter with RIPE NCC. It’s a bit of a throwback to when I worked at Constellation and we were a LIR. I sometimes miss working with big networks, IP allocations and BGP.
