Me in February 2014

My name is Bosse Iseborn, and I live in the town of Linköping in Sweden.

My surname is not a typical Swedish name, it was taken by my father Helge and one of his brothers when they where young. As far as I know, the only people in the world named Iseborn are their descendants, and there are already quite a few of us so I’m kind-of proud of that name

My first name on the other hand is a very common Swedish name. I am actually named Bo, but everybody have always called me Bosse, which is the common familiarization of Bo.

I was born 1966 in the rather small town of Bollnäs, and there I remained until 1985 when I moved to Linköping to study mathematics at Linköping University at the age of 18. After one year of studying mathematics I had decided that this was not for me, but I stayed on, took some computer courses and drank beer – a lot of beer. I also did a year of military service here in the artillery, and then I started to look for work instead.

In 1990 I moved to the town of Arboga to start my first real job as a computer programmer at FFV Aerotech. FFV is part of the Swedish military industry, and FFV Aerotech mainly handles support and maintenance planning and evaluation for the Swedish air force. I started out programming FORTRAN on VAX computers, but over the six years that I stayed there I sort of upgraded myself from a “simple” programmer to a software and systems engineer, designing and building small and large systems. I also worked a lot with DEC RDB and Informix databases and dabbled as sysadmin for a development VAX.

I really liked my job and the town, but pay sucked badly, and I realized that this would never change for as long as I stayed there. So in February of 1996 I moved back to Linköping to start my new job as an IT consultant for Mandator AB. I had various assignment as a consultant, but mainly I worked for Saab as a software engineer in the Gripen fighter aircraft project.

In 2002 I quit my job at Mandator (then Cell Network) and started my own one-man IT consulting business. Though this was not my plan, Saab didn’t want me to get away that easy and made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse. So I kept consulting for Saab in the same capacity as with Mandator. The problem was that I had constantly worked about 25% overtime every year since I got my first job in Arboga, and the added stress of running my own business got the better of me. To make a long and painful story short, I got burnt out. Even now, seven years later, I find it hard to talk about, and I still very much suffer the consequences. I am now employed by Saab since a couple of years, and that has relieved a lot of the stress, but I had a deep depression a few years back and I’m still struggling to get back to full capacity at work.

*** WORK IN PROGRESS ***

I have been programming computers since age 13 in 1979, i.e. for 34 years (Wow ! Has it really been that long?!), but I have never really bothered to learn web development before now.

History of my web sites

• A couple of years back (2002?)  I built my first web site, but it wasn’t very advanced. I basically just used it for housing two CGI programs that I wrote in Perl. One analyzed the log files from our Quake 2 sessions, and displayed a lot of statistical data about the players and matches. The other was a web based system for time-sheet handling that I used in my IT consultant business. So both were rather advanced, but not in the “advanced web applications” sense. What I mean is that the Perl programs were advanced, but they where not really web applications in any other meaning than that the could be used from a web browser over the internet.
• In 2011 I decided make another go at this internet fad just for the fun of it So I registered the domain iseborn.eu and found a nice web host hotel, and that is about as far as I got for about a year and a half. In April 2013 I finally actually got around to at least start to think about what I might do with the site. And what I thought was “PHP”, so I put together the Prof. Einstein’s random quote script (here) It is a very simple script, but it was the first thing I did with PHP so I am actually rather proud of it

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