John's Blog

A talk from JavaZone 2026 on exploring Gleam and the BEAM VM: a statically-typed, functional language with no exceptions, running on a VM where every process is tiny, isolated, and embraces "let it crash".

I was linked to the blog post "Don't be a meat proxy", written by Niklas Gruhn, by a coworker on Slack.

A talk from Gleam Gathering 2026 on how surtoget.no was built with Gleam — part social commentary on Norwegian rail, part deep dive into driving correctness through the type system.

I made a programming language.

...

Typing is something many developers take for granted, and many see it as a nuisance rather than a valuable skill.

For about six months now, I've been running my website using Gleam, and I recently launched [surtoget.no](https://surtoget.no) as a side project, also using Gleam.

While writing a different blog post, I began running performance tests on my recently released side project, [surtoget.no](https://surtoget.no).

Welcome to what is, most likely, the most niche project I've ever undertaken: [surtoget.no](https://surtoget.no/).

It is time to move away from Squarespace and finally code my own webiste.

Test more and better with less friction is a talk I did @ JavaZone 2024, all about reducing friction in our automated tests.

Most developers are aware of SOLID at this point, and 'I' stands for 'Interface Segregation Principle'.

There are a lot of wildly misunderstood concepts in programming.

It was not long ago I championed anemic models.

The waves towered above our ship.

Technical debt is a sinister issue that plagues many companies, yet many of us are happy to ignore it.

As developers, we've constantly faced the choice between reusing existing solutions or writing them ourselves.

The other day I read 'Testing Without Mocks: A Pattern Language' by Jame Shore.

Everyone has their view of what a well-built system looks like.

Authorisation can be represented by if and else statements, but the impact of how one decides to implement authorisation can have broad and long-lasting consequences.

A few days ago, Github released a completely new tool to the world called Copilot, and I am very excited about what it may lead to, which is why this post exists.

There are so many different websites for news and articles these days.

This is my “master list” on literature which I believe to be relevant to developers.

These days, most projects tend to use one form of ORM frameworks.

If I had to choose which aspect of software development I am most passionate about it would probably be how we make our products, which includes things like what kind of standards we follow when writing code, which tools we use, how we get our final code…

This is a very spicy & hot take of mine: I consider most utility or helper classes I’ve seen throughout my professional career to be a code smell and, generally, they are detrimental to the overall solution.

Architecture happens at all levels of the application.

Some of the most dangerous and scary things a developer does is making changes to the database.

Most ORM frameworks allow developers to code in values into the models which is actually not a part of the database model.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has shocked the world.

The names of our unit tests might seem like the most insignificant part of our code.

I’m a keyboard guy.

The other day some of my coworkers and myself had a discussion about what it meant to do a code review.