So, who is this guy anyway?

My name is Nalle Rooth (as you might have guessed by now) and I live in Västerås, Sweden, together with my wonderful wife and our son.

Short facts

• I currently work as a senior developer at Joint Academy.
• I published my first website in 1996, on Geocities.
• I spent about 5 years at Mälardalen University - learning a lot of stuff I don’t really use today.
• I fancy Manjaro Linux, the KDE Plasma desktop and the Go programming language.

The early years

I’ve been interested in computers for as long as I can remember. I really started to learn about using them when I got my first Amiga 1200, back in the early nineties. Back then I primarily used my Amiga to play games (I’ve probably spent years playing The Settlers (Serf City if you’re American)), but I also used it to try out digital graphics (Deluxe Paint IV) and type in the Amiga Basic code examples from the Swedish computer magazine “Datormagazin”. Of course, if you mistyped one single character - you were on your own.

As a 10 year old boy, with no real knowledge of English - this turned out to be a bit of a problem. Let’s just say that the amount of programming books in Swedish wasn’t rally that great.

This changed in 1995, when I got my hands on a PC with Windows 95 and started learning HTML. If I remember correctly, I published my first website in the first half of 1996. While I don’t have a copy of the site today, I can tell you that it was heavier to load than my site is today. There were images EVERYWHERE. And 28.8 kbps modems.

After learning HTML and copying and pasting Javscript snippets (without knowing anything about what they really did), I started to build pages using PHP. I’m quite sure that I managed to implement every possible security vulnerability possible during my first year programming. Luckily enough, the Internet wasn’t filled with all the great tools for automatic SQL injections and such, as it is today.

The not so early years

In 2014 I started a new position at Pingdom, where I built a lot of different tools for website monitoring. I helped come up with a plan for moving away from the old monolith powering My Pingdom (the control panel for Pingdom’s services) into more modern, separated systems.

Naturally, I learned a lot about web performance and how to measure different load times. As a reward for being such a geek, I got to build the new Real User Monitoring agent, which our customers added to their websites in order to collect the load times their visitors experienced.

While some decisions were made higher up in the organization, I did what I could to enable collecting of performance data, while preventing collection of any personal data (which was a good thing then GDPR entered the scene).

Since then I’ve been busy doing the following things (among others).

Education and Work experience

• 2021: Got recruited by Joint Academy.
  Converting parts of an old monolith into microservices written in Go.

• 2014: Got a great job offer from Pingdom, which I happily accepted.
  I began as a Frontend developer, moved on to full-stack and ended up doing backend development.

• 2012: Began working as Systems Developer at Beguine AB.
  Mostly PHP (FuelPHP, Laravel) and MySQL stuff.
  I also did systems integration, data synchronization and custom CMS module development.

• 2006: Enrolled in a Game Development program at Mälardalen University.
  I primarily studied Computer Science and Interction Design.

• 2005: Got a part time employment at Securitas Värde AB, later Loomis AB.
  Cash processing. I worked part time during my time at University.

• 2003: I got my first job as a web developer (read: template programmer).
  There’s not too much to say about this except that I was self taught.

• 2001: Military service.
  Squad leader, mechanized infantry.

• 1998: Upper secondary school.
  Studied art, fotography, and web design.