A lot has happened in the past 18 months - I left Atlassian to work at Katasan on Qualify, we refocused our attention on Vire pretty early on, I learned a ton about technology stacks I hadn’t had the opportunity to play with yet (Node.js, React, React Native, Objective-C), and shipped an app to the iOS app store.

Earlier this year I finally made a very tough decision to do something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time: uproot my life in Australia and go to live and work in Europe. I accepted an offer from Jayway and arrived in Stockholm a few days ago.

Part of my post-Atlassian plan included grand ambitions to produce technical content. Write a blog, do more work on side projects, and produce some video lectures on technical content to put on Youtube. These plans have never quite materialised for a number of reasons. One reason was that they were simply over-ambitious, but one factor that hindered me was perfectionism. I was (and still am) unhappy with the quality of my own writing and of the content I was producing, to the degree I was concerned it may reflect badly on my professionally.

To help with this, I’m starting a micro-blog on my new side project: learning to speak the native language of my newly adopted home. This will serve a few purposes

  • help me to keep track of my own progress
  • permit me to practise my writing - in a field outside of my professional expertise
  • keep myself honest about the commitment I’ve made to myself - learning a new language as an adult is simply not going to happen if I don’t spend time on it every day

While it’s often said that the best way to learn something is to explain it to someone else, this is not an attempt to provide my own course and I make no guarantees as to the accuracy of the content on my Swedish micro-blog. I’m making it public mostly to keep myself honest rather than because I think anyone will find it useful. Regardless, if you want to check it out, it can be found here.