My name is Hans Fjällemark. I am a freelancing developer & designer from Sweden.
About Me
My name is Hans Fjällemark, a husband of one and father of three, living in Gothenburg, Sweden. I am a developer, designer and mentor with a passion for crafting beautiful user interfaces and writing clean code. I started building and designing web sites at an age of 8 and have since then worked my way through various roles ranging from self-employed developer to VP Engineering and startup CTO.
A large portion of my professional career has been focused on .NET backend/UI and web development using various JavaScript frameworks. More recently, after enjoying what React and TypeScript brought to the front end ecosystem, I have found myself slowly transitioning towards Svelte, which is a delight to work with and build awesome web applications with. On the backend my currently preferred stack is Elixir, Phoenix and Postgres -- a rock solid trio of proven and reliable tech.
Professional Experience
Signal Insights
Co-Founder / CTO
2019 - Ongoing
I was asked to join a New York based startup and develop a competitive intelligence platform. Development started in January and we launched the product for the first customer in April. As CTO/single developer I built out the entire product and infrastructure. I worked closely with our CEO and sales team to shape and evolve the product.
Self-Employed
Freelancing Developer & Designer
2018 - Ongoing
After leaving my employment at Cignium Technologies I have been working as a consultant specializing on web development. I am often brought in to help teams with application architecture, provide foundations for component libraries and assist with training of various technologies.
Cignium Technologies
Vice President - Product Engineering
2014 - 2018
As VP of Product Engineering at Cignium Technologies I was responsible for the two primary products that powered an end-to-end customer acquisition business with over 700 licensed sales agents across the United States. I grew and managed a team of developers distributed over three continents as well as launching and managing a new branch office in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Self-Employed
Freelancing Developer & Designer
2007 - 2014
After leaving my employment at Hogia PA-system I worked as a consultant specializing on UI development; primarily web but also Silverlight and WPF. I was normally brought in to bootstrap and provide an initial design and architecture that other team members could maintain and evolve. I regularly trained employees in new web technologies through workshops and presentations.
Hogia PA-system
Full Stack Developer & Designer
2005 - 2007
During my employment with Hogia PA-system I was primarily doing web development for Hogia's web user interfaces. I designed and implemented UI frameworks using ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC that were used by multiple Hogia companies to build their next generation web applications. As the specialist and primary responsible developer for all web development efforts within the company I also trained other team members on best practices and technologies as legacy Windows applications were transitioned over to the web.
Self-Employed
Freelancing Web Developer
2001 - 2005
In high school I launched my own freelance web development consultancy business focused on web site design and content management solutions based on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Classic ASP and ASP.NET. During this time I built my own content management system that several customers were using to maintain their own web sites.
Recent Projects
Ongoing
Signal Insights
CTO/Co-founder
At Signal Insights I developed a competitive intelligence platform. Work started in January and we launched the product for the first customer in April. Since time to market was critical we chose Elixir/Phoenix hosted on Heroku as the tech stack. Features included an interactive dashboard, daily e-mail digests, a machine learning/NLP powered data collection pipeline, various background workers that scraped social media sites and company websites.
Norconsult needed help to migrate their old Knockout codebase to something more modern. I recommended Svelte since it is uses similar concepts as Knockout yet has a very modern take on what a frontend framework should look like today with great tooling to make development a delight and would also ease the transitioning path for their development team. After a small POC we established that the best way forward was to integrate the new Svelte app into their existing legacy codebase using custom elements. This allowed us to migrate piece by piece and not end up with The Grand Rewrite™ (an often doomed approach!). This worked out very well and as soon as we had a couple initial views implemented the rest of the team was brought in slowly as we got everybody up to speed on Svelte and best practices for modern frondend development.
I was called in to help a team regain control over a runaway e-commerce project that suffered from a bad application architecture and unfortunate technology choices. We replaced the overly complex Angular SPA application with a simple server side rendered NodeJS application. With a more straightforward tech stack we were able to turn around the project and reclaim development speed. I helped document the tech stack and the reasoning behind the choices as well as educating the team.
As a UI/React specialist I helped the Nemo team at Stena Line structure and design a React/GraphQL application to optimize cruise ferry schedules and capacity planning. I introduced TypeScript and created a modular architecture that made it easier for the team to maintain and extend the application over time. I also implemented a component library based on the design system that the UX team had implemented.
Our first project at Anylabs was a web application for drone imagery analytics. Data and imagery recorded by drones is uploaded and made available to constructors, planners and other stake holders in a simple and intuitive web interface where construction sites can be visually analyzed, measured and compared over time as projects progresses.
With freedom of choice on tech stack and hosting infrastructure we went with Elm for a robust and performant UI, backend was powered by a GraphQL api using PostGraphile and PostgreSQL. Image processing heavy lifting was done with a worker written in Go. Hosting platform was a no-brainer; Heroku and its delightful Heroku Flow allowed us to focus 100% on building the app without spending time on configuring CI servers and setting up staging/production environments. The customer was able to test new features within seconds after pushing commits and the instant feedback loop enabled quick iterations that allowed us to build the right features from start even though the customer did not have all the requirements nailed down.
SAPO (Sales, Applications, Policies, Offers) was a back-office application we built for the case management team who supported the sales agents in converting sales into policies. As we replaced their existing workflow using spreadsheets and manual data entry, we decided to work closely with the case management team to learn their process and how to automate and make trivial, repetitive tasks more efficient. The end-result was a performant user interface heavily optimized for usability and efficiency as well as a backend that integrated and automated importing and exporting data from and to insurance carriers.
As the deadline was very short we decided to use technology and patterns we knew well; backend in .NET Core, front-end in React and hosting using Azure PaaS services. Heavily leveraging Hypermedia for access control and dynamic JSON forms to control similar views and forms solely from the backend and avoid repetitive front-end code.
Lifecycle Management was a low-code development platform that me and my former CEO envisioned for enabling business users to build and configure enterprise apps and workflows. This platform was in particular geared towards orchestrating complex sales and fullfilment workflows for the insurance industry. As VP of Product Engineering I was responsible for the overall design and architecture as well as building and leading a team of developers distributed over the United States, Europe and South America.
We started out with a small team and I was heavily involved in the early design and architecture work. Most of the team were full-stack developers and collectively shared the responsibilities involved with developing a product. While some focused more on the DevOps side, managing the continouous integration and delivery lifecycle using Bitbucket and Bamboo, others were more deep in the front-end side, building a React SPA application. Everybody worked on the backend, where the bulk of the work was, which consisted mainly of a REST API powered by ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework. We heavily leveraged Azure PaaS services such as Azure Web Apps, Azure SQL, Azure Service Bus and Azure Storage to minimize infrastructure work such as managing VM:s and configuring networking.
This is by no means a full list of skills but should give an idea my past experience and what technologies I am curious about. If you want a more comprehensive list, or if you have questions about specific technologies and frameworks, let's talk!
