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At NUITEQ®, we believe that the success of a company, amongst others, comes from the effort of its people. We even state this in our core values: "The company always has to first take care of its employees. Then the employees will take care of the customers and the customers will take care of the company.”
We are proud of the members of our team and think it's nice for you to know them as well. Today, we'd like to introduce to you another member of our team: Johan Larsson.
Q: Hi Johan! Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
A: My name is Johan Larsson, and I am the Chief Technology Officer of NUITEQ. I’m happily married, and I’m the father of a seven-and-half-year-old (Trust me, to him the half year is very important). I have worked at NUITEQ for nine years, and before that, I studied game development at the Luleå Technical University.
My interests tend to sprawl a lot. I do have a big interest in computers, programming, Information Security, gaming, etc. I also enjoy more physical things like snowboarding and in my old age (of 32) I have ended up taking up things like gardening which is more fun than you would think.
Q: How about working at NUITEQ®? What’s your role, what's the best part of it? What do you like the least about your job?
A: As I said, I’m the CTO of NUITEQ, which is the best job in the world. I get to work with a team of some of the most skilled and most creative people in the world to try to invent things that nobody has ever seen before.
My main job tasks are split into three areas:
- Be part of guiding the direction of the software from a technical perspective
- Manage the developers and lead the day-to-day work of the team
- (if there is time left) Write some code and work on some new features
My absolute favorite part of working at NUITEQ is the other people. They are so passionate and knowledgeable, that it makes it a very inspiring place to work.
The least favorite part of my job is when I have to be the voice of reason. The thing with having a lot of creative people is that they have a lot of very creative ideas and sometimes spending a lot of time on building something because it is cool isn’t very practical when it needs to also be usable by real people in the real world.
Q: What motivates you in doing your job?
A: The favorite moment in my job is when you get that “wow”. The moment of “Oh, I didn’t know you could do that” or even more so in some cases “I didn’t know I could do that, but using this I could”.
That is a vague thing, but I believe that software is not good on its own, it is only as good as it is in the hands of its users, and being able to surprise and delight users is such a rush to me.
As a team, we have on several occasions done things that have been said to be “impossible”, and every time it’s such a great feeling that it propels me to want to reach that again and again.
Q: What do you enjoy doing in your free time?
A: I spend most of my free time with my family. I believe that in a lot of ways spending time with those you love is the most valuable thing to do. In a lot of ways having kids is kind of like taking on a whole extra job on top of your existing job.
I do still, however, find time to do things like working on some hobby projects. Lately, I’ve been toying a lot with the new stuff that is coming in iOS 11, like ARKit and building little experiments and I have my own always expanding experimental AI assistant that runs my home and most things in it for me which I keep adding to.
I also try to keep up with what is going on in Information Security and keeping my skills sharp. I think that is something any developer can benefit from as we can all do our part to make things more secure and a lot of these things are fairly simple relative to other computer science problems.
We also have quite a lot of bushes and plants in our garden that I attend to, and I spend time feeding hedgehogs, birds, and squirrels… So in a way, I’m the perfect 70-year-old in a 32-year-old body. I must say that it is nice to get away from computers now and then.
Thanks Johan for sharing this with us and thank you for reading this. If you want to learn more about NUITEQ and the team, don’t hesitate to contact us by clicking the button below:
