Staffan Malmgrens blogg

Under sommaren har det inte blivit mycket bloggat här. Jag har, fri från sommarjobb, latat mig mer än jag trodde var möjligt och har tillochmed börjat längta tillbaka något till studierna. De startade idag med en introduktionsföreläsning till statsrätt. När jag läste C1:an fick jag ett nya perspektiv på framförallt arbetsrätt — ett ämne vars praktiska tillämpning jag råkat ut för i många skepnader som anställd och småföretagare, men där jag saknat kunskap om lagarna som styr. Jag hoppas statsrätten kommer ge nya insikter kring den grundlagsmässiga aspekten av många frågeställningar.

Idag började jag även mitt nya jobb, som halvtidsanställd forskningsamanuens på IRI, vilket är det institut inom Juridicum som fokuserar på rättsinformatik, det vill säga studiet av IT från en juridisk synvinkel. Med tanke på min bakgrund är det ett jobb som passar mig nästan osannolikt bra. Jag kommer ha hand om instutionens bibliotek, websidor och i övrigt hjälpa forskare och professorer med praktiska göromål.

Kommer jag med detta ha tid att blogga och jobba på lagen.nu? Det är lite tidigt att svara på än, men det har hänt en del på ffa den senare fronten under sommaren. Imorgon blir det smygpremiär för ny funktionalitet (och jag kan lova att den är såååå 2005).

Well, it’s now been a few month’s since I took a sharp turn in what I like to call my career, in that I started law school, and, seeming as the first exams have been graded, now might be a good time to summarize the early experiences.

First and foremost, it is a luxury to be able to spend all my time learning. When you’re working, there’s always the conflict between learning (to hone your skills in order to stay competitive) and producing (to, you know, make money). The learning part is more fun, and now I can do it 100% of the time.

I got an “Ab” (that’s the top grade) on the introductory course and a point score of 30 out of 33, which is good but not spectacular. Then again, I only worked 8 hours a day. Before I started this, everyone was freaking me out with horror tales about needing to study 90 hours a week. It’s not been so bad, really. I haven’t spent much time on lagen.nu since I started, though, but that’s mostly related to the project being in maintenance mode. I should write a post about the problems of maintenance mode later.

I’m noticing some differences in the way I’m studying, compared to my colleagues. The thing I was most worried about prior to starting this was that it would be harder to learn new stuff in my age, as compared the people 10 years younger than me. The thought I was most relieved by was that my experiences would compensate for this, somewhat. Largely, both these predictions have come true. I find that I easily get a “general feel” of whatever area we’re studying, enough for me to be able to ask the right questions, but I have a harder time immersing myself in the nitty gritty details of every subject.

The thing that annoys me the most so far is this preoccupation among the students, as well as the teachers, with what areas are going to be on the exam. Also, maybe it’s just because of where I’m coming from, but I found it strange that, in a 10-week course, intellectual property law was hardly mentioned at all.

We’re taking a break from our “the tech behind lagen.nu series (1, 2, 3, 4), to bring you this information:

For those of my readers that cannot read swedish, see, or discern text in really blurry pictures, the above images tells that I am now officially qualified for law school, starting 2005-01-16. I had good reason to assume that I would qualify, but it’s still nice to have it in black on white. Especially considering that tomorrow is my last day at work. Now I can look forward to a full month of vacation without any clouds over my head.

On a side note, the picture was taken with my new toy, a Sony Ericsson P910i. This little device really is starting to grow on me. More about it in a later post, as well.

As previously reported, I’ve studied for a history exam. The examination was split in two parts, one written and one oral, and this wednesday I did the last part.

I’m happy to report that I passed the test with a “MVG” grade. That’s the highest possible grade for these kinds of test, although I don’t know how many percent achieve it. Neverthless, this was the last real obstacle in the way for a successful law school application, and so it’s a big load off my shoulders. Now I can spend way more time working on lagen.nu.

As part of my preparations, I summarized the entire history of the world in a 100+ page document. I was planning to put it up on the web under some suitable license, but it needs some polishing and some restructuring (right now it has the exact same structure as the book I read, Människan genom tiderna), which I’m not really inclined to do right now. However, if someone’s interested, drop me a mail.

As a part of my ongoing preparations to apply to law school next year, I’m currently studying the history of the world. In Sweden you can, if you find that your old school grades aren’t so good, do a general nationwide test for applying to the university – “Högskoleprovet”, and if you get a good score on that, you can use that instead of your old grades to apply for any university program.

Well, my old school grades weren’t that hot, and so I took the test some time ago, and it went really (really!) well. I might have gotten smarter in the last ten years. But then I discovered that in order to be a laywer, you need to be a history buff. Or at least, your old history grade must be at least 3, regardless of your Högskoleprov-score. Mine was a 2 (graded from 1-5, 5 is best). Oops. (This isn’t specific to law school and history, every university education can have some subjects for which applicants are required to have at least a 3 as their old school grade. This wasn’t a problem to me before since I’ve only read computer science, for which history is not considered that important.)

But there’s a second chance for people like me. We can re-read the high scool history curriculum and take a day-long test, and if we pass, then we still get to apply to law school. And so what I spend a lot of nights doing now is reading and re-reading history books at an increasingly frantic speed. The date for the test is Sept 13th, for which I have to be as historically versed as I’ll ever be (actually, there is another test the 8th of november that I can take, should I fail this, but I try to keep that possibility out of my mind for now).

Anyway, I’m finding that history is really an interesting subject, which really DOES help me to understand the present better. I wonder why I never liked it back in school? I guess it’s harder to see the use of it before getting interested in current affairs and in general seeing the world.

On another note, since I won’t be writing so much about programming anymore, I have been thinking about starting to write this blog in swedish instead, as it will be of even less interest to people outside Sweden now. Then again, if I’m going to link out to lots of people all over (and I will), it might be nice for them to know what I’m writing about. If I had put up a talkback system, all you trusty readers could weigh in with your options, but I’m a lazy lazy man.

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.