About Michael

My journey in tech started long before anyone paid me for it. As a kid I was fascinated by building things, and I spent hours in Microsoft FrontPage creating hobby websites for friends and family. Later I moved on to WordPress and other tools, but the curiosity never went away. I just wanted to understand how things worked on the web.

When I moved to Gothenburg, Sweden in my early twenties, I started taking programming seriously. Every night after work I studied everything I could find about frontend development, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and how browsers actually render a page. After about six months of that, I landed a job at Initiva AB as a frontend developer. That was the real beginning.

I worked at Initiva for close to seven years, and I owe them more than I can express. I got to sit alongside highly skilled developers with twenty years of experience and ask them questions every single day. They taught me to care about quality, about structure, about doing things properly even when nobody is watching. At Initiva I worked with custom projects in .NET and C#, built websites and components for their own CMS called Dynamix CMS, and later moved into React where I developed everything from intranets and webshops to larger systems connected to industrial machines.

Somewhere along the way I started thinking about sustainability. Not just as a concept, but as something that directly connects to the work I do every day. The internet accounts for a significant share of global emissions, and much of that comes from how we build things. Bloated code, unnecessary scripts, oversized images. I realized that the same principles that make a website fast and efficient also make it better for the environment. That was the spark behind Sustainable WWW.

What started as an organization focused on teaching sustainable web practices and spreading awareness has grown into a company based in Sweden, helping businesses across Scandinavia build websites that are lighter, faster and greener. Through Sustainable WWW I get to connect my two biggest interests: technology and the environment. The outcome is work that feels meaningful, because a more sustainable web is also a faster, more accessible and more inclusive web.

In 2023 I wrote my first book, Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons, a practical guide to reducing the environmental footprint of websites. I am currently working on a second book called The Slow Developer, which explores how we work as an industry and makes the case for a more deliberate, thoughtful approach to building software.

I also run a newsletter and podcast on Substack where I share reflections on my journey in tech, my work with sustainability and my experience building a company from scratch. And I have had the chance to appear on podcasts like Green IO and EcoSend to talk about digital sustainability.

I never stopped learning, and I never will. I sit almost daily reading about programming, optimization, accessibility and new techniques. I found a passion that I know I will never fully master, because there is always something to get better at. That is what keeps it exciting. I put an honor into quality, safety, optimization and efficiency. Not because anyone is checking, but because I believe that the way you build things says something about who you are.