DL: So tell us your story. How did you get into IT technology? How did you come to work at Angry Creative?
I worked in an electronics store and a cinema before. At the same time, I was studying at Linköping University, a bachelor’s degree in innovative coding. Before I finished my degree, when I only had my thesis to complete, I applied for some programming jobs. The funny thing is that when I applied to Angry, there were only 15 of us, so I was the 16th person hired.
The interview was not very well planned. But I told them what I knew, what I had done before and what programming languages I had studied. At the end, they said with furrowed brows: “You know that this is a senior position that you have applied for”. I think you should apply for a junior developer position instead. So I happened to apply for a senior position and got an interview! Even though I had not worked with any programming before. They asked me to send in a coding test and two days later they called me back and said I got the job! I got the job because I was lucky, they had a junior position too. So that was pretty funny.
DL: It sounds like Angry Creative was pretty chaotic back then.
Yeah, I would say they were doing their best, but everyone was stressed more or less because the company was growing fast, but on the other hand we were only 16 people!
DL: So you applied then for a junior developer role, but that’s not what you do now.
Thanks to my personality and the person that I am, I learnt very, very quickly. In the same year, several people were hired and I overtook them in knowledge quite quickly. I became a great asset to Angry and that’s why nowadays I also do a lot of other things like teaching and mentoring. Amy recently said that I should be that guy that other developers use when they need to check estimates. I also got to do audits and became a specialist at it. Angry used my standard answers on Jira tickets for predetermined answers as I’m good at communicating with people and so on. So I became a junior, and then they didn’t want to name me as an intermediate developer but I guess I’m an intermediate developer now.
Because I’m so involved in so many things and I know things, even though I’m not a senior, I’m included in The solution Architect channel for example and I’m allowed to have a little bit of objection to that.
I don’t have a senior position yet, but I don’t know, it sounds like I’m something in between.
DL: It sounds like because you were so early in the company and it was a bit chaotic, you’ve kept a slightly broader remit than the developers who came in later have and had a more defined role. It sounds like you’ve created your own professional role a little bit.
Yeah, yeah.
DL: Cool! So tell us about a typical day for you. From the moment you wake up until you go to bed. When do you work? What do you do outside of work? How do you relax?
Well, one thing I’ve struggled with and many others have struggled with is having a project that you can work more or less full time on, but that’s not the reality. So I usually have many tickets and help many others.
DL: Wait, before we move on to work, do you just roll out of bed and go straight to your computer and sit down and work?
Yeah, basically full stop. I work from home now and I have my family here too.
DL: Yes, I can hear them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah At the moment I’m on the balcony, but they’ll leave soon. My alarm goes off early – I’m one of the early workers at Angry, I usually start at 7am. Usually everyone is asleep by then, because I have a little one and a three-year-old. She usually gets up in bed so then there’s three of us in bed and one in the cot so I go out quietly, close the door and I have a smart home so I have sensors everywhere. Usually a few lights come on and I close the door and go to the sofa. I don’t drink coffee or anything then because I’m afraid of waking the family. So I just sit on the sofa, put on a blanket, turn the lights back down and start working. Then one or two hours later I drink coffee. And that’s just because I don’t want to wake up the family.
DL: I read somewhere that it’s good not to drink coffee right when you wake up because you want to give your body a chance to wake up naturally before you take any caffeine that then disrupts your natural rhythm.
People always talk about this. We need to have the coffee so I can have more energy, but I don’t think of coffee that way and I don’t know if I feel any difference from it. So it hasn’t been that important.
DL: Coffee is interesting, because it’s a psychological addiction. And when you drink coffee, your body goes through a cycle. When you feel like you really need that coffee and you drink it, psychologically it takes you back to the level that you were at before you drank coffee. People get caught in this coffee trap where the reason they feel they need coffee is because it’s the coffee that has created that craving in the first place. It can be a positive feedback loop. I definitely went through that for years. And now I drink decaffeinated coffee or a cup of tea that I feel a little bit better. Okay, so you work in the cold and dark. Have you automated it so that when you log into JIRA, your lights go off?
I have an Alexa in every room but I usually control everything with my voice or from my phone. I’ve created a good flow so if I walk past the IR sensors again, they light up even more because it’s wake-up time. But I haven’t made the JIRA connection yet, that would be cool.
DL: Very cool. So then you’ve got up and then it’s family wake up time so I guess you need to eat breakfast and help with the kids and all that? And then you sit back down at the computer and get on with the rest of your morning work. What does your morning job usually involve?
My job usually includes both frontend and backend. Maybe more frontend right now. I also help people in their projects and the CSM team.
DL: Okay, so you have a pretty varied morning depending on what needs to be done and who needs help.
Yes, and usually I plan what I need to start working the day before. Otherwise I get stressed when I go to sleep. So I know I have tickets to work.
DL: I think it’s a really good habit to have. There’s a saying that goes something like “The better you get at planning the future, the easier, more productive and happier you’ll be because it’s when we don’t have things planned that we get stressed and make bad decisions.” So yes, I can definitely agree with that. I always try to make sure my diary is reviewed and adjusted for the next day.
And because I’ve been working in the company for a while, I know how to do things. I often create tickets and communicate with customers. Maybe in some other cases it’s the CSM who does it. For example, yesterday I gave myself 14 hours of tickets without anyone assigning them to me. That’s cool. And I think it’s because last summer I tried the pm role. So I know about the handling of tickets. I also know about how to do things that other developers don’t know, like how you need to synchronise between Trello and JIRA and how to create a new JIRA project and stuff like that. But also a bit more insight on what a CSM needs from the developers.
DL: It has to be useful. Okay, so you’ve made it through your morning of tickets, whatever they were. What does your lunch hour look like? Do you just plough through? Do you have a leisurely lunch or do you try to get some fresh air? How do you divide up your day?
Usually I like to have lunch with my family. So they often ask me when I want to have lunch. I am an early lunch guy. So when I was in the office, I was often alone and had lunch at 11am Swedish time because I start work early. Some people would come in at nine and two hours later I would have lunch. So they just shook their heads like “what are you doing man?” But then I’ve already been awake since six! I could start later but I value finishing my day earlier. And we can end our day at three if we use flex. I’d rather start early so I usually have lunch with my family. And because I value time, I don’t have long lunch breaks, usually I have half an hour or something like that. And then I can finish my day earlier instead.
DL: So presumably you go back to the work that was left over from the morning and you plan the next day. So how do you spend the rest of the day? You’ve woken up early, ploughed through a lot of work and now you’ve got the rest of the day – how do you like to spend it?
I almost never take meetings after lunch, it’s very rare. So my personal goal is to have all meetings before lunch because I also have stand up with the team and then I get interrupted anyway. Then I can have other meetings if I need to. So I can use the rest of the day after lunch to have some focus on coding and this was a problem that I had before earlier this year because I was back and forth and back and forth. And this worked for me. So I would say after lunch is more productive for me.
DL: And then when you’re done with work, how do you use the rest of the time?
As you know I like whisky so it’s a lot about whisky. Since covid, I’ve been very interested in information about what’s going to be released soon and I even have a contact in the Netherlands who can give me some personalised samples! But mainly in my free time I want to be with my kids, because right now my wife is with them both. So after work I want to take some pressure off her so she can do other things. It’s difficult this year though, at least now because we’ve had another one.
DL: Is there anything you like to watch on TV or do you like to listen to audio books or go out and exercise?
I’m bad at working out but I love TV shows. So we kind of have a whole list in the evening, two hours after we put the big one to bed we always watch two or three episodes of the current series that we’re watching at the time.
DL: I was excited because I just saw that there’s a new season of Narcos Mexico out – it’s definitely my kind of show!
I haven’t seen Narcos but everyone says “you have to see this Jim.”
DL: It’s quite violent. But yeah, I like it. Okay, so I imagine you, under a blanket watching a series with a glass of fine whisky in your hand.
Not every day but sometimes!
DL: I’m not judging! Just trying to imagine you in your happy place I guess. Some of the most fun times we’ve had together are when you’re generous enough to organise whisky tastings and send out small sample bottles to people in the team and then meet up after work where we go through and try them and through that I know you know a lot about whisky. And that you’re also experimenting with taking existing whisky and putting it in different casks.
Yes, exactly.
DL: So tell me a little bit about that, do you need a whole barrel of whisky in a cellar somewhere? Or how does that work? I’m curious.
I had a presentation on the education channel yesterday with Tom and my presentation was about how whisky became my hobby. I talked about how I first tried it in Bulgaria on the beach, looking for cocktails on the cocktail list and I knew nothing about whisky. So I read through the list and see Jim Beam, that’s my name. So I took a Jim Beam and thinking it was a cocktail, both me and my wife took a glass. We thought, let’s try this. Thought it was horrible! I spat it out in the sand and I realised years later that it was Bourbon I was drinking! I think it’s been two years now. Me and a friend wanted to do an experiment. There is a company that makes barrels in Sweden and they provide barrels to all Swedish distilleries. At least if you want Swedish oak or French oak. They are good at what they do, quite famous.
We started with a very, very small budget and as an experiment because it was like 1400 SEK and I didn’t know if it would work and we didn’t want to waste too much money and buy a lot of bottles and stuff so we just bought a 3L barrel.
DL: So you can buy like little three litre kegs?
Yes, we did that first and now we have five litre barrels. And yesterday I ordered five litre barrels that are medium charred from Hungarian oak. We will use them to put a finish on a 15-year-old whisky. That’s the next release!
DL: So you are a real whisky nerd! Well done! Okay, thanks for sharing. It’s really fun to learn a bit more about what you do in your spare time. And clearly whisky is a big passion of yours. It’s definitely one of mine! My last question to you is what would you say is interesting, or noteworthy about Angry Creative. If you were a client or a prospective job candidate, what is something you think you would want to know if you were in their shoes?
I have talked about this with other people as well and at Angry you can grow and develop a lot,which is what I have also done. If you want to, you can do and learn a lot. And you can get responsibility if you show that you are ready.
DL: It’s cool. It’s nice.
The company is very generous and tries to do things for the team, like free lunch and having lectures, having Halloween parties and planning for WCEU 2022. So it’s a nice place to work.
DL: I’m glad you feel that way. The production team and the management team work hard to try to create a nice environment and culture. And it’s good to hear that it’s filtering through. Thank you Jim for taking the time and sharing all that. I feel like I know who you are much better. And it’s nice to hang out!
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