Posts on Victor Bodell

Where to Change

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:34:56 +0100

I had an experience the other day at work with regards to systems complexity that I wanted to reflect on more thoroughly.

A discovery was made that an end consumer was seeing a faulty value of an entity that my team is responsible for. Or in plainer terms, a web href-value was wrong that my team owned the implementation code for.

The most straightforward (pragmatic?) option could have been to simply update the value at the very fringe, closest to the user in terms of a react presentation component that translated into the site javascript and html. Luckily (?) for us, the system was slightly (or very much) more complicated than that.

Consumption

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 20:53:08 +0100

It took me a while, but I finally managed to scrap together the parts that make for a consumption page!

I don’t know why that’s what I keep referring to it as. I guess I can’t really think of a better name for it. “The media that entertains you” is probably more apt of a description. But if it’s any good it’s also digested and nourishing. Not just something that happened as you were in that same place. Too many people watch too much crap on TV nowadays. So maybe my idea is somewhat naively that whatever I watch or read I learn and progress with. Hence the burger image. Though it (hopefully) has very little to do with fast food.

TIL

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 21:51:44 +0100

I try to work on my garden everyday. Some days I neglect it and some days I try to make up for it. And some days there’s quiet work that may or may not end up visible in the hotbed at that particular moment.

Today was simply one of those days where there was too much information to sensibly put into the normal garden. So I decided to make a post out of it to perhaps trigger myself to come back to it more.

Analytical Functions

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 23:50:29 +0100

I mentioned recently that you sometimes see people programming in sql. Well, one entry to that is the analytical function. The syntax always escapes me, and the idea of them are always a little bit foggy. So now that I had an opportunity to use it I thought I’d jot it down here for future reference to myself.

You can read all about analytical (or window) functions elsewhere I know. But this is for me! A window function allows you to compute some value over a running window of your data, say a running average or running sum based off of some value. I’ve used that to have a running monthly average of some expense over a year for my expense data (where you’d partition over a year for each transaction and order the window by transaction_date). For example:

Regex Lookahead Party

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 13:23:42 +0100

There is a universe of design ideas and concepts around in computer programming that I wish I knew and understood better. Some of them I indulge in through reading, trying to apply previous experience. Others I’m exposed to in the code of peers and colleagues, and still others I look forward to making an acquaintance with. But there’s the occasional concept that I feel like I’m fairly good at. And one of them is Regex.

The Anxious Generation Author

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 21:58:59 +0100

First reflections

I’m a big fan of the following maxim:

If you’re thinking without writing, you’re not really thinking.

~ Leslie Lamport

And so these are some first, unpolished thoughts on a topic I want to become better at. While simultaneously forcing me to voice my opinion rather than having an AI try to do it for me. (Btw, I’ve only tried that once and was so frustrated with the process and lack of personality and agency in the generated text that I ended up scrapping it altogether after trying out 10+ different prompts)

New beginnings

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

New Beginnings

Wow. Four years go by faster than you’d expect.

I started this site back in good ole’ March of 2022, and I appear to have been able to update it for roughly 3 months. Let’s see if this stint can be carried any longer.

This is unfortunately going to be another one of those nonsense posts that outline “oh how could I ever discontinue my blog, and will I ever surpass my old PB and what’s even the point of this text…”. I guess it goes to show that I’m a sucker for, and have really been longing for a space to write! Sure, there’s the occasional linkedin post but it only accepts so many characters, and has to be succinct and witty and carry some sort of idea. Here I can finally just go rambling and relax as if I’m constantly in a hammock. (As if. It’s past midnight and I should really be getting some shuteye before the alarm rings). But I’m just so excited!

Bionic reading

Wed, 25 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Stumbled upon an interesting post relating to speed reading today thanks to Googler and Data Scientist Aishwarya Srinivasan. Basically the idea is simply to highlight the initial syllable of each word in a text and let the brain auto-complete the rest of the word. Essentially what speed readers do all the time.

I’m taking my speed reading cues from “guru-in-pretty-much-everything” Henrik Fexeus where the idea is even more straightforward – just have a few marks in a textblock and let the brain fill out the rest. So perhaps this part-word-highlighting is actually overkill.

Vim Magic I

Sat, 14 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

There’s so many cool things you can do with vim. Like, so many cool things. When listening to the Changelog episode on vim a couple of months ago I learned about the possibility to run command-line mode commands on your text selection. The basic idea is this:

Consider the following block of text in a vim editor:

The quick
brown
fox jumped
over
the lazy
dog

with the cursor at the first character on the first line do the following:

Google featured

Wed, 11 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recently had a great conversation with #google about our #cloud journey @ #SEB, along with some of the leaders of our journey William Milisic, Isac Andersson, Petra Alund, Nicolas Moch and Martina Wallenberg! You’ll see some great quotes from them, and some cheesy ones from yours truly.

As we all stand on shoulders of giants, it’s worth mentioning we definitely wouldn’t have made it this far without the original core team who dared the feat! Jonas Varfors, Kristina Westman, @Samuel Mörling, Tonni Hult, Jens Hörnström & Katarina Jurkovic.

Consumption

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a data guy.

I have a masters in Data Science.

My friend Hannes Elvemyr once introduced my to Toggl. An app to keep track of how you spend your time, essentially letting you timebox everything you do. I jumped on it immediately and spent the remaining 4 years of my college education timeboxing everything I did related to school and side jobs.

Since 2011 I keep manual track of all my finances. It means that I add every transaction that ever occurs in my day to day life to an app for centralized data location. In the beginning I used the iOS app Mina Utgifter/My Wallet+, a number of years ago I instead switched to My Finances.

Bye bye caps-lock

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Breaking up is never easy I know, but I have to go.

~Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Stig Anderson: Knowing Me, Knowing You (ABBA)

I fairly recently stumbled across Practical Vim by Drew Neil. Which I found via the Changelog Podcast episode on Vim. A true gem, and a genius way to introduce the more advanced concepts of vim in a practical manner. As Tim Pope (vim-guru behind legendary plugins as vim-sensible, vim-surround and vim-fugitive) mentions in the foreword, the tip setup felt a little beneath him, but it turns out it’s a cookbook to mastery!

The Goal

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

👷 This post is WIP and will update as I find time to elaborate on the components of the Thinking Process 👷

My brilliant colleague Tonni Hult has got me hooked on Business Novels. Most recently he urged me through the two-part series by Eliyahu M. Goldratt starting with The Goal, originally published in 1984, and followed 10 years later by It’s not luck.

Incredibly fascinating, they follow the life of Plant Manufacturer (turned Division Manager in the second book) Alex Rogo as he navigates devastating deadlines managing miraculous turnarouns. Using the Socratic method of asking questions to provoke critical thinking the ideas of the Theory of Constraints, and the Thinking Process (where the first is really derived from the latter) are presented. The latter involving powerful methods to disect and address virtually any conflict. In this text I want to focus on the three components of the Thinking Process:

Dark Waters

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Portraying the Hulk in the MCU, a wizard in Now You See Me and a sex addict in Thanks for Sharing. Mark Ruffalo is one of my favorite actors. And seeing him in “based on a true story-investigation movies” Spotlight and most recently Dark Waters definitely hasn’t made it worse.

⚠ SPOILER ALERT! ⚠

The last mention is actually produced by Ruffalo himself, and portrays still active lawyer Rob Bilott. Bilott gets presented with a doomed-to-fail case by a farmer from his rural hometown. The farmer is convinced that chemical industry giant DuPont has poisoned his creek through the adjacent landfill, making him loose the vast majority of his cattle and in effect livelihood. The case leads Billot on a path discovering the dark secrets of the self-regulated chemistry industry, unveiling the scandalous problems of teflon, among various other everyday products from the American innovation treasure hoard.

The Prime radiant

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What?! You made it here?? Well in that case. Welcome to my blog! This is the very first post, so I guess the welcome applies to me as well.

In this site I’ll try to update on (mostly for my own satisfaction) what I’m working on, projects and work I’ve been a part of, and what might be lurking around the corner. I’m a Swedish tech professional and freelance musician with a wife and the most beautiful daughter in the world. I currently work with cloud technology and I have a masters degree in Data Science. Hence I look forward to consolidating some of my life-data sources in here.

TODO

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you ever know you’ve gotten there?

Where is Gamora?

I’ll do you one better, who is Gamora?

I’ll do YOU one better, WHY is Gamora?

-Starlord, Iron man & Drax respectively in Avengers: Infinity war

So as a starting pointer, here are some upcoming attractions on this site in the form of content and expansions. If so inclined, think of this as my personal scrum board.