About

Welcome! 🙂 I’m Leif, and this is my site.

In the most general sense, I'm interested in The Experience of Making Software:

• What is it like as a human being to write good code or bad code, to work together with others?
• How do we read and comprehend software, but also how do we perceive and experience messages in Slack or video calls?
• What motivates us?
• When do we thrive and why do we flounder?

The writing on my site discusses research from within this sphere of interest — some my own, some that by others.

I also host a monthly get-together called Paper Jams. These are a monthly one-hour video call where I discuss an interesting research paper with like-minded people from all over the world.

Learn more here and join if this sounds interesting to you — I'm always happy and grateful seeing new members. 🙂

I work as an Engineering Manager at Ghost, the software that this site runs on. I've previously worked at Automattic, iDoneThis, the University of Victoria, and a few other places. I’ve been a founder, a freelancer, and an employee; a developer, a researcher, a product manager, an engineering manager.

I care about language, writing, communication, and collaboration.

I play a few instruments — guitar, drums, piano —, but I'm not particularly skilled at any one of them. I do enjoy them, though. I also like photography.

Here’s a silly yet fun side project I built: Happy Commits, a Rails app that’s trying to find happiness in public GitHub commits. 

I’m always happy to chat. Send me an email! Or say hello on Bluesky.

Shy? Listen to an interview with me on the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast.

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