This page is about personal stuff - how I got here, the things I think about, and what I'm chasing next.
There's a photo of me from a summer in Iceland, just turned twenty-three, in a basement lab holding a silicon wafer I'd just coated with titanium nitride. I was halfway through a physics degree, two thousand kilometres from home, and had just applied X-Ray diffractometry for the first time to characterise the coating. I still chase that feeling - the moment something theoretical you learned, actually gives you a real result. It's the thread that runs through everything I do.
I'd taken a detour to get there.
I had an identity crisis at eighteen - the quiet kind, where you've envisioned your whole adult life one way and then can't remember why. I'd wanted to study physics for years. At the end of high school, I suddenly didn't want to study anything at all. So I joined the navy, saved up for a year listening to noises in the Baltic, and used the money to get as far away from everything I knew as I could.
About 18.000 km.
Which is how I ended up in New Zealand at twenty, travelling around, bottling wine, packing sweets and picking fruit on a working visa, with a mind that got louder the more repetitive the labour got. Eventually I had to admit I'd been right years ago. I wanted to study physics. I applied to a private university in Bremen - a place I'd actually walked through at an open house in 2007, three years and one identity crisis earlier. The plan had been there all along. I'd just needed go look at it from a distance.
One weekend in New Zealand a few friends and I took a sailing boat out into the Marlborough Sounds. We left the car on the shore. The keys were in my pocket. My pocket had a hole in it. By the time we got back to land, the keys were somewhere on the floor of the South Pacific.
We were in the middle of nowhere. Calling a mechanic out to that stretch of coast would have cost more than the four of us had between us. So I had a long look at the steering column, worked out which wires wanted to talk to each other, and hot-wired my own car well enough to drive us back home. A proper mechanic installed a new ignition later, including a new set of keys.
I think about that weekend awkwardly often. Most situations have a way out if you're willing to look at them as a set of wheels with an engine and spark plug that needs an electric current, rather than a car that you locked yourself out of. Twenty years on, that's still most of what I think engineering is. And teaching. And, sometimes, life.
In Bremen I studied physics, took every computer science elective I could get my hands on, and quietly realised I'd been preparing for both subjects for years without noticing. I'd started programming in high school - Pascal, Delphi, finite automata, the whole oldschool toolkit - and spent a lot of my teenage evenings somewhere on the spectrum between LAN parties and hex-editing the save files of old games, courtesy of a book my mother had given me one Christmas with the kind of foresight I only appreciated later.
After Bremen I added a second Bachelor's, then a Master of Education, in physics and computer science - the CS share growing each year. Then I took a teaching job at a Berlin secondary school. And stayed there for eight years.
Here's the funny thing I only noticed when writing this. I'd already done eight years in secondary school once before, fifth grade through twelfth, and that stretch had ended in the identity crisis that sent me to the navy and to New Zealand. Apparently eight years in a school is my limit. The second time around, the warning signs were the same as the first: a lot of repetition, a mind getting louder, the slow creeping suspicion that I needed to break out and learn something new again.
The teaching part of the job was good. However, I ended up spending most of my time on something else. From early on I couldn't keep my hands off broken processes - anything that looked like it could be done better, I'd quietly push to improve. That habit pulled me sideways into IT, then leadership, then into running the digital infrastructure for the whole school. By my final year I was left teaching one course - AP physics, which I loved - and spending the rest of my time on digitalisation projects, system migration, and the glamerous work of IT support for an organisation comprised of 200 teachers and 1000 students. The former being the more difficult customers.
I left my mark. I'm proud of what we built and where we got the school in those eight years. And it was clearly time to take that same drive somewhere with more room to grow.
I started playing bass at fourteen. When I got to uni, one of the first things I did was look for people to jam with - and the people I found turned out to be good enough (better than me) that we ended up founding the university band of our batch. We took ourselves about as seriously as you can take yourself when you're twenty and your venue is a campus, which is to say: completely (not).
I also met my now-wife there. She was one of our biggest fans, which I'd like to claim was one of the pillars of our relationship. Early on we made a deal: if we ever got married, the band would get back together to play at the wedding.
Ten years later, we did exactly that. We married on a beach in Ecuador, her home country, flew in forty of our closest friends, and spent two weeks travelling around together before the wedding. The band reunited for the reception. We hadn't played together in years. It was, by some distance, the best gig of my life.
I still play, but in a new band. I still believe the bass is the secret engine of a band - but no one notices, until you stop playing. I think a lot of good work is like that.
Outside the band, I boulder, shoot a few arrows with a bow, sail when I can, and paint when the mood strikes. Archery is the closest thing I've found to meditation that also has scoring. Sailing is a useful skill to have around in case you ever lose your car keys overboard. Painting taught me more about how to see than any course I've taken - more on that in a minute. And there's usually an Arduino half-built on my desk or hidden in a shelf for no particular reason other than that I like to tinker around to turn my ideas into reality.
I grew up in the countryside, spent most of my childhood outdoors, if I wasn't tinkering with Lego or the computer, and somewhere in there I picked up the idea that I'd one day go on a proper survival trip. Years later, in 2024, I finally did it and qualified as a wilderness awareness coach: tracking, survival skills, mindfulness, the slow art of paying attention to nature until it tells you things and guiding people - the coyote way.
People assume this is a strange detour from physics and tech. It isn't. Being outside is what keeps the rest of it working, giving it balance. You need a counterweight. Mine has trees in it.
The more surprising thing is how much overlap there is. Some of what I've learned in the woods, I'd already encountered in physics and painting before that.
Take painting a tree. Ask someone who isn't practicing art to paint a tree and they'll give you a brown trunk and green leaves, because that's what a tree is in their mind. But if you actually go outside and look - really look - the bark is almost never brown. It's grey, or green with moss, or orange in the afternoon light, sometimes it's nearly purple, sometimes almost white. It depends on the tree, the season, the weather, the time of day, the age of the tree, what's growing on it and so on. The most powerful skill in painting isn't technique. It's getting your own assumptions out of the way to see what's actually in front of you.
Physics uses the same trick. Good science isn't deciding what the answer should be and running an experiment to prove it. It's setting up the conditions carefully and then watching, honestly, to see what nature actually does. Most bad experiments - and most bad arguments - fail at the same step: someone deciding what the outcome is before they've even looked.
Working with nature turned out to be that same lesson with the volume turned down. Go outside. Stop talking. Listen to the birds, to your own body, to what the forest is actually doing rather than what you expect it to be doing. The skill is the same trick again. Observation is observation first, not interpretation, not predjudice.
The other thing those disciplines share is that they steal from each other shamelessly, once you let them. If you abstract far enough, the world starts to rhyme. Take waves and oscillations. Days, weeks, seasons. Project plans and growth cycles. Friendships, ideation, fashion, politics, history - all of it moves in cycles, and once you've seen the shape in one place you start seeing it everywhere.
That's most of how I work, actually (in my head at least). I look for the connections between disciplines. I borrow a frame from one and try it on in another. A physics intuition turns out to solve an organisational problem; the painter's eye reveals the crux in an experiment; the forest teaches you something useful about a meeting room. Transdisciplinary is a marketing word for it, but it's also an honest one. It's the thing I'm actually burning for.
I've left the school behind to chase the part of the work I love most: finding problems, looking at them clearly, abstracting them down into a process or a model or a clean set of data, and then working backwards to make something better than what was there before. That's the through-line of everything on this page, and it's what I'm building the next chapter of my career around.
I'm currently looking for the right role - project management, product management, business analyst, business process management, or something at the intersection thereof. The problem and the people are more important than the industry. Remember I'm curious about almost everything. If your team is staring at a tangle and wondering how to start pulling on the threads: that's roughly where I'm at my best.
While I'm looking, I'm building. I'm tinkering with GenAI and am developing an Kanban board with agentic AI integration - partly because I think it's where the next interesting layer of work lives, partly because the best way to understand a tool is to make one. Along with it I'm building this website and I'm polishing up some rusty skills and picking up new ones.
If any of that resonates - as a role, a collaboration, or just a conversation - I'd genuinely like to hear from you.
Kindly,
Lars