There is a particular kind of comfort in systems that behave exactly as they should. You write an instruction, the machine executes it, and the result is either correct or it isn't—no ambiguity, no negotiation, no politics. For someone who spent years wandering through philosophy, law, economics, and whatever else caught his attention, this predictability feels almost like relief. The computer, I sometimes think, is one of the most important members of our family. It sounds strange, but it isn't. In a world where so much depends on interpretation, on power, on who gets to define the rules, there is something profoundly grounding about a system that simply does what you tell it to do. You give it time, it gives you capability. You ask it questions, it answers honestly. It doesn't care about your background, your credentials, your history. If you learn something, you've learned it. That kind of fairness is rare among humans.
I didn't arrive here by any direct path. Before and during university, I read philosophy, studied legal theory, dabbled in economics and finance—the kind of intellectual wandering that doesn't look like a career plan because it wasn't one. In my freshman year, I wrote a paper for a competition about anti-corruption mechanisms—how market-based approaches and game theory might address problems that traditional enforcement cannot solve. It was dense, theoretical, and looking back, probably too ambitious for what I knew at the time. But it remains a snapshot of how I was already thinking: the most interesting problems are almost never about the surface-level rules. They're about the incentive structures underneath, the second-order effects, the places where rational actors behaving rationally still produce collective failure.
That way of thinking never left me, even as I moved toward building things. Now I work in blockchain, which is really just another arena for the same questions. Why do some protocols survive and others collapse? Why do decentralized systems so often recentralize? Why is the gap between a whitepaper's promises and a protocol's reality always so vast? The technology changes, but the underlying puzzles remain. Incentives, constraints, coordination failures, the eternal tension between what individuals want and what systems need—these are the threads I keep pulling on, whether I'm reading legal theory or studying how a consensus algorithm achieves finality.
There's a pattern I keep noticing across domains: systems designed to solve problems often create new misalignments. Education is supposed to cultivate capable people, but schools aren't rewarded for student outcomes—they're rewarded for enrollment and prestige. Research is supposed to advance knowledge, but researchers are incentivized to publish quantity over quality. Governance is supposed to serve the public, but the incentives of those in power rarely align with the interests of those they govern. Different fields, same underlying structure. I'm drawn to these gaps not because I think I can fix them all, but because understanding why they persist feels like understanding something fundamental about how human systems work—and fail.
This is what I find myself drawn to, again and again: the gap between how things should work and how they actually do. In law, that gap is called the difference between law on the books and law in action. In software, it's the distance between specification and implementation. In economics, it's the space where models break down because humans aren't the rational agents the equations assume. Different vocabularies, same fundamental tension. I suspect this is why I keep moving between fields—not because I can't commit, but because the same questions keep appearing in different clothes, and each domain offers a different angle of attack.
I should say something about the name of this site. Lilhammer—it comes from my child. I'm married, I have kids, and whatever else I do or build or write about, that's the foundation underneath. There's a version of the tech world that celebrates obsession, that treats family and relationships as obstacles to productivity, that valorizes the founder who sleeps under their desk. I don't believe in that version. The stability I have now—the ability to think clearly, to work on hard problems without falling apart—comes precisely from having a life outside of work. It wasn't always this way. I went through difficult years, health problems that derailed my education, periods where stability felt impossible. Getting to a place where I can focus on building things, where I can ask abstract questions about systems and incentives without my own life being in crisis—that took time, and it took the people around me.
So what will you find here? Honestly, I'm not entirely sure yet. Writing, for me, has always been a way of thinking—a method for forcing half-formed ideas into shapes clear enough that I can see their flaws. Some of what I write will probably be technical: notes on programming languages, observations about blockchain architecture, attempts to understand why certain designs work and others don't. Some will be more philosophical: thoughts on institutions, on how systems shape behavior, on the strange loops between rules and the people who live under them. And some, I suspect, will be personal—not in the confessional sense, but in the sense of trying to articulate why certain problems feel urgent, why certain questions won't leave me alone.
I'm not interested in inspirational content. I'm skeptical of the genre of tech writing that promises transformation, that treats every new framework or protocol as a revolution waiting to happen. Most things fail. Most ideas are wrong. The interesting question is usually not "how do we change the world" but "why do things stay the same even when everyone agrees they should change." That's a harder question, and it doesn't lend itself to neat conclusions or calls to action. But it's the question I keep coming back to.
If you've read this far, you're probably the kind of person who doesn't mind long sentences, who finds some pleasure in following an argument through its turns, who maybe asks "why" more often than is strictly practical. If so, welcome. I hope you find something here that's worth your time. And if not—if you clicked expecting something more polished, more optimized, more conventionally useful—I understand. The internet is vast, and there are plenty of places better suited to quick answers and actionable takeaways. This is not one of them. This is just a place where I think out loud, and you're welcome to listen.