Gimlichael - a tale from the Matrix

My given name is Michael Mortensen and I reside in Gilleleje - a small town in the outer province of Denmark.

I am a passionate geek whos interest and journey for technology goes as far back as to the late 1980ies. Here i merely disassembled different equipment and tried to make some use of the defective parts; the most interesting being an old osciloscope where i had great fun with the high voltage components afterwards.

In 1994 I continued down this path attending a vocational education with the geeky name of "Datamekaniker/Datafagtekniker". The education focused on both hardware and software, switching between theoretical- (Metalindustriens Fagskole) and practical- education (Lunatronic ApS), for a period of 5 years in total.

1999 was not only the year of "The Matrix" - it was also the year where I graduated my education and shortly after started my professional life in the IT industry as an IT consultant.

While being an IT consultant, my interest for software development was minor, but I was soon sold to a customer as a software developer - thrown in at the deep end.

The challenge was real - but so was the growing interest for VB6 and ASP 3.0. The tools of choice? Visual InterDev and Visual Basic.

My transition from IT consultant to full time software development engineer happened in 2001; the year where the first chapter of Lord of the Rings was released; The Fellowship of the Ring.

Over the years, I advanced in different roles within the same organization; from Techincal Project Leader to Lead Developer to finally reaching my call of Application-/Solution architect.

Finally, in 2018, I began a new and even more exiting work-life chapter; Senior Application Architect for one of the largest companies in Denmark. An added bonus to this was my new engagement with the energy sector (yes, powerplants - electricity - the source of all good things) - with a vision of an all green energy profile.

Meanwhile, writing this post on May 8th 2021, Covid-19 has changed the world forever. In some areas - such as the IT industry - to the better, as we have proven our work can be done the same - or in some cases - even better compared to those misguided "open office" work place strategies. Add to that the tons of CO2 being saved as well as less stress being on the road commuting back and forth.

Lastly - and this is just my take; everything and anything is possible with todays technology and cloud offerings from Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and others. Nothing can stop you if you put your passion to it.

Code with passion 🔥; ❤️ love your code; 🚀 deliver with confidence!

Sharing is caring

This concludes the initial presentation of me, Gimlichael, the alias and branding of my given name and personality.

The alias was a result of me being exited about the character Gimli from said mentioned movie LOTR, merged together with the ending of my first name. I know, not super creative in any way, but the fact remains: naming is the hardest part of our industry.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

-- Phil Karlton

With that said, thank you for reading this post; it will probably grow longer over time 🤓

Background image kindly provided by Comfreak from Pixabay