Staffan Malmgrens blogg

Well, about that blog writing hiatus. Since all you loyal readers have so obviously been waiting for new posts, I feel I should tell you why I was gone, what I’ve been doing, and where I’m going. Or something.

I’ve decided to quit programming, and working with computers in general. At least as a way to make my living. I’ve been working as a programmer for eight years now, but for some time now I’ve begun to feel that the challenges that this profession offers don’t interest me the way they used to. Therefore, after some heavy consideration, I came to the conclusion that maybe I should stop doing it.

But what to do instead? Since I’m only (well…) 28, I feel I have plenty of time to try to learn something substantially different. Which is why I’ll go to law school starting next year (can’t start this autumn, my employment contract says I should work til the end of December). I took a introductory course in law about ten years ago, when I was studying CS, and found it pretty interesting. There are a lot of paralells to be drawn between the legal system and any computer system, mainly in that they are both really complex sets of rules, intendet to describe of how we would like things to work, but since the people writing the descriptions are fallable, the resulting system has idiosyncraties, holes and other bugs.

I think the general mindset and methods that I’ve deveopled as I’ve been designing, developing and debugging computer software systems can be very useful for most kinds of intellectual works, but particularly law. Also, I guess it can be very useful to have a solid understanding of technology in general, and software development in particular, when working as a laywer, paralegal or whatever I’ll end up as.

But before that, I have 4 1/2 years of studies to complete. It’s going to be interesting to see if I’m better or worse at studying than I was ten years ago.