About Me

Well hello there; I’m Mark!

What do I do for a living?

I love working at iPaper A/S as the CTO with responsibilities ranging from cleaning the floors to racking up servers, team management, tuning databases and converting Red Bull & caffeine to code.

How did I get here?

The earliest tools I remember using are QBasic and Netscape Composer. Searching online, the earliest online post by me seems to be this mail from the Realbasic mailing list, back in April 2001. Looking back, it suddenly feels as if it was yesterday.

I quickly threw myself at web development, first ASP, shortly succeeded by ASP.NET with interspersed bits of Java) and PHP.

After a couple of years working with web development at Webdanmark, I turned independent and spent the next four-or-so years doing various consulting work – most of it web & database related. During this, I had the pleasure of being the first developer at Trustpilot. While helping get Trustpilot under way I’d also been the helping start up iPaper A/S and had come to a crossroad – I only had so many hours a week, and I needed to focus. And thus I ended up where I’m at today; after working full time freelance on iPaper for a number of years, I finally joined the company officially in 2008 as the Technical Lead.

What is it about you and SQL Server?

While I’m a developer at heart, I have a thing for deterministic behavior and data, and what’s more deterministic and full of data than a classic RDBMS? I’ve always been using SQL Server as part of my jobs, but seeing as I constantly wanted to know more, I jumped into the rabbit hole that is internals. As part of my quest to know more than books could tell me, I ended up developing an open source parser for SQL Server data files, also known as OrcaMDF. Creating OrcaMDF gave me an immense amount of experience and unique knowledge, experience I’ve later used extensively to present at user groups and conferences.

How do I combat my stage fright?

I used to suffer from a severe case of stage fright, being practically unable to stand at the blackboard during classes. Since the school days I’ve forced myself to start presenting, and lo and behold, I started liking it. While building up confidence on the stage, I’ve had the pleasure of presenting at a multitude of conferences, including places like SQLBits, PASS, DevConnections, NT Konferenca and NDC Oslo, just to name a few.

At a more personal level…

I love driving my motorcycle through the Alps of Europe. Always carrying my camera, whether I’m using a GoPro mounted to my bike, or a my DSLR mounted to a tripod for those exciting long-exposure shots. Last but not least, when in need of relaxation, you’ll find me either on the golf course or in a nearby river, looking to hook a monster grayling).