about
Jonatan Jansson
Software Engineer, Product Systems
journey
// origin
I got a CD from a Swedish PC magazine when I was eight. It had a copy of Game Maker on it, and that was enough to pull me in. By twelve I was building websites for friends and family. By sixteen I was running Linux because I wanted to understand the machine properly. In 2007 I touched WordPress for the first time, and around the same period I built a community site on a customized PHPBB installation for a youth startup competition. It earned a silver medal, but mostly I remember the feeling of making something real on my own.
// early career
I co-founded a small web bureau with three friends. We could build, but we had a lot to learn about explaining the value of what we built. A restaurant platform we were proud of, priced far below what it probably should have been, still got turned down as too expensive. That stayed with me. Good work needs communication around it, otherwise it does not travel very far. At Nordic Goods I got to stretch both sides of that. I set up the servers, built the storefronts, handled the early marketing, and helped bring in the first paying customers for an international e-commerce push. Around that time I reached out to my old web design teacher hoping there might be a role. There was not much room to grow the operation at first, but I was offered a traineeship at the sister company, Ember, doing IT support. I liked the atmosphere immediately: working in the same office as the Duva developers while solving server-side issues, RDP connections, Active Directory, PowerShell automation, and whatever else landed on the desk. When that period ended, Duva offered me a position.
// pigeon years
Duva was the period where the hobby fully became a trade. For a little over five years I worked directly with clients, usually from the first conversation through delivery, hosting, maintenance, and invoicing. The client work started with low-code WordPress solutions and grew into more structured builds with Roots tooling, theme architecture, Composer workflows, staging routines, security hardening, GDPR, accessibility, payment integrations, SEO, and the day-to-day maintenance that keeps enterprise WordPress sites healthy. In those years I went from PHP 5.6 to PHP 8, and from small pieces of vanilla JavaScript to fuller solutions with React and Express before TypeScript made the larger systems feel clearer to work in, while Tailwind made CSS feel faster to shape and easier to keep consistent. Toward the end I also built a Python middleware service that pulled geospatial data from several third-party APIs, cleaned it up, and made it usable elsewhere. From 2017 to 2019 I also founded Lidkoping Makerspace in my spare time, helping run the local NGO chapter while aiding the national organisation with web development and planning. The lasting lesson was ownership: communicating clearly, setting expectations, making tradeoffs visible, and staying with the work after it had left my editor.
// international
Moving to Portugal widened the scale of the work. At IPTOR I worked as a Senior Developer, building enterprise plugins and helping maintain a portfolio of web properties. At Block Labs the pace changed again. I was Team Lead for two colleagues on coinpoker.com, a real-time poker platform with a lot of people depending on it and a hefty time-zone spread inside the team. The technical parts mattered, of course, but the harder part was learning how to keep priorities clear when deadlines, stakeholders, and production pressure were all in the room at once.
// today
At Nordhealth, the first problem was simple: content managers could not publish to their own sites without developer help. That became the thread I followed. I built GitHub Actions pipelines, moved legacy properties onto a more shared foundation, added Playwright checks, and helped turn scattered site work into something easier to repeat and maintain. Some of that now includes Claude Code and MCP-based workflows for generating WordPress blocks, but the goal is still practical: remove the boring friction so people can publish safely. These days my work also touches GDPR, Core Web Vitals, A/B testing, analytics, HubSpot, and the general care of production web environments across WordPress, Eleventy, and Astro.
stack
languages
frameworks & cms
infrastructure & data
tools & analytics
practices
outside the editor
I'm Jonatan Jansson, born and raised in the small town of Lidköping in Sweden. I have played bass guitar since I was fifteen, and I have a soft spot for books, podcasts, trekking, cooking, and the kind of film that leaves the room feeling a little different afterwards. I met Margarida on the internet while discussing music, she flew from Portugal to Sweden to be with me, and we have been together ever since. Since 2023 I live with her in Portugal, finding my way through another side of Europe, the language, and all the small cultural details that come with it. This site is where I write findings and musings about software, the industry, Linux, digital anthropology, and the very human desire to automate the boring stuff, including what that desire does to us.