Martin Flodin

I've been at SVT for quite a few years now, because I've enjoyed it a great deal, but I now feel ready for some new challenges. I joined one of the teams building SVT's news service, SVT Nyheter, just as they had moved to building the front end in React and having their CMS (content management system) return JSON rather than HTML. But because accessibility, usability, and reliability matter so much at SVT, we kept working hard on server rendering even during a period when the rest of the React world seemed to be heading towards pure client rendering. It's been fun to watch that swing back around, to the point where server rendering is now a cornerstone of all the major frameworks.

For many years SVT has built a voting advice application to help voters make informed choices in the national elections and the European Parliament election. I joined for the first time for the 2019 EU election, which was also the first time we built it with React and Next.js — both very new at the time. Since then I've become a natural part of the team developing it, taking on more and more responsibility for the project. I've helped build the Valkompass for EU 2019, 2022, EU 2024, and now for this autumn's election. Unlike many other voting advice applications, we have the parties answer the questions themselves and match those answers against the user's. Beyond the parliamentary parties, we also cover thousands of parliamentary candidates (and the equivalent for the EU election), as well as parties in every municipal and regional election. So on top of the application itself, there's an enormous amount of work in producing the questions at every level and collecting the answers from parties and candidates. We work with various survey companies on the collection, so the job also demands a good deal of adapting to external systems. We take our users' privacy seriously too: we store no user data, and all aggregation of a user's answers happens on the client.

Last year, when there was no election, I joined the SVT Verifierar team — a group of journalists whose job is to verify news stories. Although they are very technical themselves, I was on the team to bring deeper technical knowledge and to build small helper applications they could use to make their work easier.

This was a spinoff from the company with more focus on the haptic devices themselves. We saw a need of a modern high quality haptic device with modern connectors and decided to make our own. Mostly for our own needs in the Kobra oral surgery simulator, but we also sold individual units to other companies. I got to manufacture a few of the devices myself by hand, even though the long term plan was to outsource the production. It was very fun and exciting to learn a lot in a very short time about manufacturing and electronics.

I started out doing mostly back end development, but moved to primarily front end the last few years. Apart from my assignments I also acted as an instructor for our internal education in courses such as Responsive development, and Building Web Applications with JavaScript, and as the lead for the internal front end guild. I was also one of the people in charge of arranging the annual HiQ Music Festival where around ten different bands (all from HiQ) performed.

After my time as an employee I remained on the board and became a shareholder, and did some work on the projects in my spare time. We sold to universities in Latvia, Germany and Taiwan and I was part of the team assembling the simulators and delivering and installing them on site. The equipment was also used in Karolinska Institutet education, but on loan from us as part of the development of the simulator itself.

Enkrona was an online auction site where I was responsible for daily operations and development of the site and the back office site. I also co developed a customized warehouse management system and integrated it with a TA system for communication with logistics companies. During the last four months I took over as lead developer when the previous lead left the company.

After finishing my thesis at Forsslund Systems in collaboration with HiQ, I started working there. Forsslund Systems was a small startup focusing on haptic feedback simulations, but we also did some other assignments to finance the main goals.

The main project was developing a simulator for wisdom tooth surgery for use in the training of dentists. The project uses advanced 3D graphics, OpenGL and volume rendering and haptics, force feedback, in the form of a robotic arm aka haptic device. During the prototyping stage the simulator was used at the Karolinska Institute in a research project to see how simulators could help students learn better. As a part of the development of the final product I built a web interface for the main GUI of the simulator, which we then displayed on a tablet attached to the simulator. This allowed us to separate the main simulation application development from the user interface work.

I also led and participated in the development of a speaker administration system for Grön Ungdom for use during their national annual meeting. The development was user centered with a lot of contact and ongoing evaluation with the customer. The application was built with Java and was later adapted for Djurens Rätt as well.