Sebastian Everett Eriksson

I am a software engineer with a lifelong experience of learning.

I was 11 years old when I borrowed some programming books from my family. Since then I've been on a nonstop adventure of tinkering and problem fixing.

My first published program was a multiplication table exercise I made in C++ which I shared with my middle school classmates on a CD.

In high school I dabbled in game development, mainly in Java. At the end of high school I got my first job as a software developer for a professor at Karolinska Institutet, which ended when I started my studies at Chalmers University of Technology.

At university I made websites in Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal for various nonprofit organisations, including Chalmers Students for Sustainability, Intize, and Cykelköket Göteborg. This is where I picked up web development.

After university I made a digital online multiplayer version of the card game Klimatkoll for use in education. It was used in a couple of lessons. When I got a job contract this was discontinued.

While making digital Klimatkoll I was also hired to hold a programming course at Digidem Lab for a group of climate activists, and started volunteering with the IT systems of K103 Gothenburg Student Radio.

I worked for 5 years at CheckWatt, a (then) startup company that sold renewable energy services with a focus on solar. After making a webshop frontend in 2 months I gradually moved on to backend work, with a couple of months as team lead. As the team grew I met experienced software engineers who changed entirely the way I work.

From more experienced colleagues I learned to work in an organisation under pressure, including work-life balance, how to navigate office politics, and how to propose evidence-based solutions.

One colleague showed me data-oriented design, shell languages, and parsing expression grammar (PEG) which would inspire my later work.

In November 2024 I resigned from CheckWatt. Since then I have been researching how to make low maintenance computer systems with the goal to make a website builder.

Contact

+4670 754 70 12

sebastian.vasser@gmail.com

Languages: Swedish, English, Spanish (intermediate), Indonesian (beginner)

Sample skills

Preferred systems

Whatever solves the problem with the least amount suffering and most amount of fun.

In my case this tends to be C+PEG+Shell+Linux combined with a refreshing walk.

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
— John Galsworthy

Employment and education

2019 – 2024

CheckWatt

Main roles: Fullstack developer, software architect (1 year)

Renewable energy services company that grew from a handful of employees to over 50 in the 5 years I worked. My work spanned practically the whole company stack, from frontend design to database structure and distributed systems.

Sample tasks:

  • UX design
  • JavaScript frontend development
  • Requirement specification and follow-up
  • REST API development in .NET and PHP
  • Worker services development in .NET
  • SQL database design, development and maintenance
  • Migrations across server machines, cloud environments, MySQL versions, and operating systems
  • Deployment automation and scripting
  • Billion row database management
2012 – 2019

Chalmers University of Technology

M.Sc. in Engineering
M.Sc. in Pedagogics

Bachelor's program: Civil engineering

Master's program: Teaching and leadership (Lärande och Ledarskap)

The master's program gave me a double degree in teaching and engineering, including a certificate to teach in Swedish schools (Ämneslärare).

Both my Bachelor and Master theses related to pedagogics, with the latter one also relating to UX design and usability testing.

Projects and volunteering

2024 – now

Research into low-maintenance websites

I helped a friend fix a 20 second load time on a wordpress website. This sparked an aspiration to remove as much unnecessary complexity from websites and website builders as possible.

The technique is based on combining shell with table operations (like SQL) and domain-specific languages.

Some technologies applied:

  • Linux kernel
  • Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG)
  • C
  • Relational database design
  • Table operations: sort, join, group by, etc
  • Shell languages
  • Web: HTTP, REST, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
2019 – now

K103 Student Radio

K103 run live radio and podcasts in a studio. Their work is published on various platforms, including their own website. I voluntarily develop and maintain their website and work as a system administrator for their internal network of computers.

The website has worked as a testing ground for my research and has gone through multiple iterations:

  • Drupal-based, never published
  • Wordpress-based, never published
  • Event sourced, made in PHP+MariaDB using the Laravel framework.
  • Simple data-oriented relational PHP+MariaDB. This is the current live version.

Features include a content management system with user account management and a web radio. The last iteration has proven very reliable, with no reported bugs for a year since shortly after launch, with active usage.

I am currently applying my research on the next iteration using domain-specific languages.

2013 – 2019

Mentor in mathematics

I taught mathematics to high school students almost throughout my time at university through the nonprofit organisations Intize and Mattecentrum.

2014 – 2015 I took a break from my studies to work full time as a volunteer coordinator at the Intize office on Chalmers campus.

2017 – 2019

Cykelköket Göteborg: Bicycle repair

I volunteered at a "bike kitchen", a free bicycle repair shop that teaches people how to repair their own bicycles.

At the same place there was a makerspace and a place for cooking together where I also hung out, helped, and taught programming.