About me

Ohoi, Internet!

My name is Nils Norman Haukås, and I was born and raised in rural Tysvær, Norway. These days I’m living and working in rainy Bergen, where I’m wrangling code at my own technology studio Builder Heart.

In my coding work I make use of my academic background which includes user experience design, human computer interaction and business development. These days I work comfortably from backend to frontend, doing everything from server provisioning, to optimising SQL queries, to architecting applications, to general web development and animating with css.

Beyond just making stuff work, I think a lot about software in relation to society. Our lives are mediated by software, we live immersed in it. We’ve become the fish swimming in software, barely noticing the water around us. I believe software developers need to consider the ethical implications of the software that we write and make use of.

When I’m not pondering on software, I can be found playing capoeira, writing poetry, playing computer games or dancing salsa. Coding is a lot of fun, but there’s a lot to life worth living and doing.

Timeline #

2023 - present: Founder and programmer at Builder Heart.

2021 - 2023: Working as a Chief Technical Officer (and developer) at the design agency Netlife Bergen.

2016 - 2020: Working as a developer at the design agency Netlife Design.

2015 - 2016: Working as a developer at the Norwegian Centre for Research Data.

2013 - 2017: I founded and ran a small design agency named Thunki. In the end it didn’t pan out, but we learnt a lot and you can read more about the story here.

2011 - 2014: I completed a master’s degree in Information Science. My research focus was in Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Interaction Design and Human Computer Interaction. What was supposed to take two years, ended up almost taking three years. But I’m really proud of how my thesis finally turned out, you can read it here.

2009: I studied social entrepreneurship at the University of Oslo (six month program). Half of this program was in traditional entrepreneurship combined with topics in social entrepreneurship. For the other half we traveled to South Africa and volunteered in townships four days a week in combination with one day of weekly lectured at the University of Cape Town.

2008 - 2009: After finishing my bachelor’s degree I picked up some courses in general psychology, developmental psychology and social psychology at the University of Oslo.

2007 - 2008: For the final year of my bachelor’s degree I went abroad to study game design, 3d-modeling and animation at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

2005 - 2008: Bachelor’s degree, Multimediatechnology and Design from the University of Agder.