The short version:
After graduating med school in 2011 I spent a few years as a surgeon in training.
I left that path in 2015 because I wanted to do something with the sad state of hospital IT, and I thought I could do so through a startup.
That did not work out, but the attempt itself taught me more than the informatics studies I did simultaneously on the side.
In 2019 I became an advisor in the governmental agency responsible for planning and building hospitals in Norway. I'm currently in charge of functional IT for a medium-sized hospital construction project, where I operate a significant budget.
It's nice to have a 9-5 with undeniable meaning and societal impact. The work is high-level though, so I satisfy my craving for hands-on product development with side projects.
Over time, my stack preference for these side projects has been optimized for development speed. Especially after I became a father in 2022.
The current flavour:
First and foremost: React with a good component library. I find that chakra in combination with css grids and flexbox allows me to build interfaces almost faster than I can draw them in figma.
Where I earlier would have made a backend in python, I now use node/express, so I can reuse as much code as possible between the front- and backend, like typescript interfaces and validators.
Postgres for persistance. This one hasn't changed, except I've essentially stopped using ORMs.
Infrastructure is probably the area where I've «lost the most weight». After switching to Render, I regret the days sacrificed to sweating over build pipelines, containers, proxy servers, serverless functions and VPCs. Nor do I miss the reoccuring AWS surprise game «find the expense leak.»
Lemon Squeezy for payments, since it takes care of taxes in a way Stripe just doesn't.
Lastly: I enjoy working with interactive visualizations, so I have a sweet spot for d3. It has a tendency to find it's way into most of my projects sooner or later.