SSWC #3 Discussing the future state of the Swedish web

Emily Green Haskell SkrivaPå-Scrive-SSWC-Social Swedish-Web-camp-Tjärö

Social Swedish Web Camp 3 at Tjärö Nature reservoir, Sweden 2011 gathered developers, thinkers and other internet enthusiast to share their thoughts on the ecosystem around the Swedish scene, ideas and culture around the future state of our internet.

Emily Green and I hosted a SkrivaPå tech session about Haskell, we´ll she did most of the talking on functional programming, functors and monads, and i continue looking t tutorials on sundays. I introed a short talk about SkrivaPå and  most of that info can be read in the blogposts here, and the talk can be found on SlideShare.

Pernillan asked me to participate in a talk on how to do an internet un-conference (like GeekGirlMeetup.com) together with Kristin Heionen + Thomas Wennström (who arrange SSWC) and Stellan Löving who arranges Webbcoast in Gothern burg. A lot of questions were raised of how to organize un-conferances and personally I believe control is an illusion, what you can try achieve is adaptability to change and clear communication of the state of the project and how much effort is needed/spend in projects.
A happy and fun thing i observed was PM Nordqvists Twitter printer, that he built during his maternity leave, just for fun.

Talking of fun, this year i did not jump the cliff, like the first and the second year, as i didn’t think it felt like much fun, but mostly pressure. Clapping pressuring hands before i jump wasn’t what I opted in for, I just did it for fun. Altho i was happy to see the fun continue in a good tradition.

The most appreshiated sponsors were as always Binero with morning coffee, chasing away the sheep, and the guerrilla pillow sponsors.

London calling + SkrivaPå = Scrive.com

. I’ve moved to London.

. I´ve joined the Stockholm based startup SkrivaPå.se to internationalize the service with the new name Scrive, opening up the London Office, yet we are still a highly boot-strapped, lean start-up developing in Haskell. SkrivaPå & Scrive.com do digital signatures for contracts and legal-papers.

I first met lead-developer Gracjan Polak, while presenting my last startups RunAlong API at Disruptive Code conference in Stockholm autumn 2010 (post from Programmable web). The Startup community is Sweden is a close knitted newtork and we know eachother, and here was this new guy asking excellent questions, who was he?
Gracjan Polak, the Polish technical co-founder of SkrivaPå, introduced me to the Swedish founder and Stockholm School of Economics student Lukas Duczko. We ended up talking all evening about API´s, scrum, web-strategy, and how to manage distributed teams and other fellow founders startup-issues.

As we continued talking  about business and strategy during autum 2010 and spring 2011. To make a long story short, i moved to London, the UK working on opening up the RunAlong.se API publicly, and letting go of that for a bit. Lucas was fast to ask me to join SkrivaPå, after all the discussions i knew the product well, understood the business model and had no doubt when i said yes to working with this garage startup.

The fun part that i discover what it is like working with a highly effective distrubuted team. Scrive has 3 people working in Sweden, 3 in Poland, 3 in London, one in Turkey, and one travelling. We have things like the Tibetan Patches, pieces of code that our developer Eric Normand wrote in Tibet and Xian, and pushed up to the dev server when accessing wifi in the Himalayas. How wonderful insn’t that. Let me put it this way, i feel like I work for the most modern startup i can ever imagine, giving co-workes and co-owners freedom to do what they love.

As part of my work with Scrive i can also continue my work with GeekGirlMeetup.com, an un-conferance about web, code and startups aiming to create more female role-models in tech, new networks for women in tech and active knowledge exchange. Conclusion, Scrive gives GeekGirlMeetup.com an active sponsorship, it’s the first of the organisations sort.