The short version
A systems programmer and database administrator who retrained as an electronics technician — a winding path that ran through EVE Online, a few years of gloriously varied engineering, and a run-in with COVID that sidelined me. Now I spend my energy on hobby OS development, from Vejle, Denmark.
The long version
I spent the best part of a decade at CCP Games in Reykjavík. I joined in August 2004 as a volunteer bug-hunter and worked my way up through QA to Senior Virtual World Database Administrator — the person whose job it was to keep TQ, EVE Online's player economy database, alive, and very occasionally broken. One deep dive into a rare SQL Server crash turned into a year-long collaboration with a Microsoft escalation engineer and a string of official hotfixes. I left CCP in October 2011.
Next came Jivaro (November 2011 – May 2019), where I wore an unreasonable number of hats. I wrote code and infrastructure across SQL and no-SQL databases — MongoDB and Elasticsearch included — plus .NET and C#, a steady diet of reverse engineering, CI/CD and DevOps, virtualization, and standing up and running the cloud infrastructure. Whatever needed doing, I did it, and I learned maybe more from that job than any other.
Halfway through I went back to school part-time for rafeindavirkjun — an electronics technician's trade I'd had a passion for since I was young. It started as a private "hobby", never meant to become a career. But it grew on me, and leaving Jivaro in May 2019 I set out to actually find work in it. That August I started at Raförninn, where I split my time between software engineering, IT, and the hands-on electronics: repairing medical imaging hardware, building and setting up kiosks for Þingvellir National Park, making custom sensors for monitoring projects, and integrating POS terminals into those kiosks — wiring at the hardware level and writing the software that talked to them. Varied, interesting, endlessly engaging work. I had the time of my life there.
In 2021 COVID took my health. I ended up in the ICU and spent the next couple of years in physical rehab. Even so I managed to finish the last semester of my degree, splitting it across two semesters to get through it — so I graduated late. My health kept declining and I never properly worked again. Raförninn was wonderfully understanding the whole way through: they kept my position open and only handed me small tasks when I tried to come back. It just wasn't to be. I left for good in February 2024.
What I tinker with now
- Rust and hobby OS development — TheseusOS, my long-running x86_64 kernel project.
- Reverse engineering and systems programming — decades of interest, mostly x86.
- Retro tech — a soft spot for the Amiga and all things x86, both as tools and as things to take apart.
- Electronics and low-level hardware — FPGA experiments, NES emulation in Verilog, and other archaeology.
Away from the keyboard
I'm a dad, first and foremost. My daughter lives with me in Vejle, Denmark — we moved here to be closer to her healthcare, and she lives with hEDS, so a fair bit of our world orbits that. My son, now grown and back in Iceland, is just as important to me; we don't live close, but he's never far from my thoughts.
At home it's the two of us plus our crew: Luna, a border collie whose herding instincts have opinions about everything we do, and Monza, the cat who runs the place and lets us know it. Icelandic is my native tongue, and I read the other Nordic languages (Finnish is beyond me — everyone's got a limit).
Ask me about submarines and I'll light up — especially German Kriegsmarine boats and the engineering of modern nuclear submarines.
Ways to reach me
- GitHub: https://github.com/emilf
- Reddit: https://reddit.com/user/emilfrid
I prefer written, asynchronous contact — no phones, please.