When we sold Got Ethics to German EQS, I was part of the deal.

It was a hectic year with many changes, and I tried my hand at management and planning.

The first six months our small team was successful in building a support portal to manage all our customers internally.

The last six months I helped pass on my knowledge to a number of new teams to prepare our product for the next part of the journey.

It was educational but also hard. But I came to know some wonderful and talented people.

I also found out that I am passionate about problem solving. Finding creative solutions to complicated tasks.

Everything can be solved, but sometimes it requires input from an unexpected source. Sometimes from the pressure of deadlines, sometimes from a creative environment.

When you are a team of just two developers in an industry with competitors with over 50 on staff, you have to be creative.

We worked with compliance and had to ensure that we adhered to all rules and laws to the letter.

We worked closely with our legal department. We had 3 main priorities:

1. Protect the anonymity of the reporter
2. Make the system so secure that developers cannot access confidential information
3. Make it so easy to use that we minimize the need for support

One afternoon our chief lawyer called.

"We need to ensure that we comply with Russian legislation so that we can offer our solution in Russia"

The law stated that all information had to be stored in Russia before it was stored in Europe.

In addition, the Russian Government should be able to decrypt data on demand.

The challenge was that the company we had to do it for was located in Denmark.

We didn't want to make a "mirrored" setup as it would take too long to implement.

We didn't want to create a "back door" in our software as this would make our system weaker.

We did not want to give Russia's government access to more than they needed. They only had to see "Russian" cases.

After long working hours and small-scale prototypes, our solution became a proxy.

On a small simple server setup, hosted in Russia, we installed a service.

When a user chose Russia on our site, we forwarded the request to the Russian server.

Everything sent to and from users was sent through this server to end up on the Danish server

This data was then saved with a public key where the corresponding private key was stored by a Russian company that could provide it in case it was requested.

Other competing companies failed to offer this service and we won a number of customers exclusively on this feature.

Sometimes the simple solution is not only necessary but also the best.

One week into the employment period, the phone rings. A man briefly introduces himself at the other end and asks me the following.

"Haven't you worked in telephony?"

I answer: "Well, a bit at Midtvest Bredbånd."

"Great, can you go with me to Aalborg on Thursday? I'm planning on starting a telephone company. See you there!"

My boss looks at me.

"That was my boss", he said.

"You're gonna love him!"

I received an email shortly after with an address in Aalborg at Telenor.

The days went by and Thursday morning at 9:00 am I found myself at Telenor's parking lot.

A newer "family container" car with child seats swung in in front of me. It parked and a younger man jumped out.

"Hi, you must be Philip!" he said as he shook my hand.

"We're going in there", he said as he led the way at a quick pace.

"The mission today is to find out what we can and cannot do. We need to create a mobile company, so we can invoice customers as soon as possible."

I nodded and after a short walk I found myself in a meeting room with 3 other people.

The meeting was formal and full of talk about companies, accounts and commitments.

Suddenly, the conversation fell on the technical aspects.

It turned out that we got direct access to the mobile network.

We had to register SIM cards ourselves, process payment info, add products, everything!

When we came back to the office, I immediately started working.

First I had to keep track of the TAP3 format.

TAP3 is a binary format so it was a challenge to read. Luckily I found an RFC.

It would take some time, a lot of writing, a lot of macro work.

After a few days I took stock.

I was about 1/10 through the RFC. In addition, we had to create a CRM, network integration, a website with a self-service portal and a lot of other small things.

I could not achieve this on my own. Our deadline was in 3 months.

Fortunately, I knew Henrik, a great developer I had worked with at Midtvest Bredbånd.

I spoke to him, he was ready, my new boss gave the green light, and then we were rolling.

After 3 months of hard work and long evenings we were ready.

We had built our own platforms to provide new SIM cards and link them to phone numbers.

In our platform we could manage everything, we handled the TAP3 billing information ourselves, and we could display usage data to the end user. The project was a huge success!

A wild journey that would never have succeeded without Henrik.

Sometimes you need help, sometimes two people are worth more than twice as much as one.

Midtvest Bredbånd was a special place.

A passion project in the heart of West Jutland.

A group of dedicated technical people with very different backgrounds, who worked hard to bring fiber out to homes in Jutland.

This was long before fiber was the default and the need existed in private homes.

The pioneers behind the project were far-seeing and saw an emerging requirement for the future-proofing of western Jutland.

Here you could find everything from developers, electricians, physicists, HR to marketers and accountants.

A huge business on a small scale.

The advantage was that everyone was an important part of the machine, and everyone felt the sense of unity.

One late night we were assembled for a "distribution evening".

We had made a great update that included new features in our set-top boxes and our network.

As always, the atmosphere was good and concentrated.

One person debugged a set-top box locally, while another worked on a cisco router.

A number of small problems had arisen, and we we were working in parallel to fix them.

I was working to optimize an update script that took too long to execute.

My manager came in to the office, found everything was running as it should, and quickly left again.

We looked at each other and my oldest colleague smiled and said, "just wait!"

We continued working and after a few minutes the boss came back.

In his arms he was carrying a coffee machine, two bags of bakery products, hot dog bread, a pack of red sausages and ketchup.

"You just carry on working, boys."

Against the backdrop of keyboard clicks, the scrawling of pencils against paper and concentrated looks a scent of homely comfort began to spread.

Our manager used the coffee machine to heat the red sausages while the bread was being heated on tinfoil on a radiator.

In the bag was cake he had bought for the coffee he had made before the coffee machine was turned into a hot dog stand.

It was a magical night where everything ended well.

Here I learned the importance of interplay and that everyone has something to contribute with, you just have to discover and cultivate their talent.

And the importance of enjoying and cultivate the moment.

I had not worked with PLC before.

Michael was a qualified electrician, but he had found a niche in biogas plants in Eastern Europe.

I helped him develop a number of tools to manage Siemens' systems.

Within a few months we had jointly built a smaller suite of tools that streamlined his work routines.

I learned a lot by working with his talented team of engineers and electronics mechanics.

I got an understanding of the importance of stability and safety. This would prove to be very important in the coming years.

In a patrician villa in the heart of Holstebro something happened at the dawn of the new millennium.

A handful of young men wanted to try their hand at the potential of information technology.

They wanted to ride on the wave they saw crashing against all the existing industries.

A wave that would tear down old giants while making room for new players.

Many wanted to work for them, and they had become local celebrities.

One day in December they received an application sent by email. Attached was an exe-file and a description.

They did not dare to open it. It could be a virus. Who would send an exe file as an application. It was all very suspicious.

After a few days their curiosity won. They opened the application and saw a program written in their development environment, a mix of video, images and text in two languages.

"I am a young man of 22 who lives in a small town called Sevel with my lovely wife and two cats. I have programmed all my life in everything from Visual Basic, C, C++, C#, Java, Perl ... in other words everything I have been able to get close to!"

He picked up the phone and called me.

Two days later the job was mine.

Sometimes you have to dare standing out. You may lose, but you can also win big!

The first day on the job, newly trained and ready to make a difference. I stood outside in the cold and waited in excitement an early morning in January. I blew hot air into my cold hands while jumping on the spot.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man walking by. "You must be Philip," said the tall smiling man with glasses and a stubble. "Come inside!". He unlocked the door and led me to my desk.

On the desk were fresh flowers and a computer was turned on. Before I had a chance to thank my new co-worker, an energetic bald man came sweeping into the room. "Have you worked with an iPAQ before?".

I looked at him and answered, "I've worked with phones before." "Great! We need an extract from the machine database, which we must be able to show on AGROMEK on Thursday. Can you fix it?"

"Of course," I answered without hesitation. Although my mind was full of questions and my heart rate was over 100.

The bald man was my new boss, a great person I came to care greatly about. He quickly drew a outline of what he needed and I got to work.

"What database do you use?" I asked my new smiling co-worker with the glasses.

"MySQL. I'll just get you a login. No even better you can just check out this project in SVN so you can see how we do it."

I checked it out and took a scared look at the files that popped up. .plx, it's the Pearl shit. I had made a project in Pearl 2 years previously. Or mostly a "Hello, world".

Oh well, it reminded me a lot of c, so naively I thought it would be okay.

I looked up at the bookshelf and spotted the "Dromedary". SNAP!

Immediately I went to war, comparing the book with sample code. I got something onto the screen very quickly. This might work.

I was thinking that sequence programming has the advantage of being straightforward with very few tricks, just code.

Time flew by as a feeling of being part of a movie montage filled me. My fingers flew over the keys

"Hi? Not going for lunch?" The smiling man with the glasses waited for an answer.

"One moment, I just have to ..."

He left the room laughing.

Before I knew it, I had something that seemed to work. I quickly transferred it to the iPAQ and ran in proudly to my new boss.

In his office, he was sitting with a headset in his ears and drummed merrily on his desk. His right finger indicated that I had to wait a second.

"Well, let's say so! Yes."

"Are you done?" he asked teasingly.

"I certainly have something for you to see!"

He smiled sincerely and reached out to take the iPAQ.

"Let me see. You can ... And then you should be able to see ... That's it. OK."

I was full of hope and awe. It felt more real than any exam I had taken. At the same time, less frightening, but much more important.

"Oh, don't think you're done, we need to have the designer in on this. But the functionality hits the mark. Very impressive."

I was all smiles and seemed several feet taller that they.

When I went home, I borrowed the "Dromedary" for a while, spending the whole week reviewing it from end to end.

One year later, when I gave my notice, I told the bald boss that I had almost no experience with Pearl. He laughed and said he hadn't noticed anything.

Sometimes, a can-do spirit can make up for a lack of experience. This was one of those times!