The evening before Frida (third project)

Tomorrow I am starting (maybe) full-time on a project for Aalborg Kommune. Since it is always a milestone to start on a new client I thought it would be a good time to write a blog post. Mainly so I can remember what I felt like at the time, because I guess no one else is reading this blog probably. Hi future Martin, hope you are doing alright!

For the last 4 months I have been taking a sabbatical. It felt like a sign from heaven that my last contract didn’t get extended right before summer, so I didn’t look for new work. It’s been great. I’ve been sleeping in every day, playing lots of badminton and climbing, playing boardgames with friends, watching videos, reading, playing games, and seeing my parents and sister. I thought I would travel more, but I hadn’t planned anything because I wanted it to be more spontaneous, so in the end I just didn’t end up going anywhere for long. Maybe I would have given enough time. But the weather was great here and I had plenty to do, so I just didn’t feel the need.

I have mixed feelings about starting to work again. The weather is still good and my finances are looking great. The apartment is almost paid off and I estimate that I can live for about 15 years at my current rate of expenditure. So why start again?

I think it’s a combination of factors. I connected with the client through a friend I play badminton with, who told me about the project. This is the dream, where you don’t even look for projects, just hear about it through your network. The project (Frida) sounds good, making a system for helping communal employees doing their job. It’s in the prototype stage, so there shouldn’t be a lot of red tape. There are already 6 developers on the project, so I get to work in a team again, which I’ve been missing. The technology (C#) is good. The work hours are flexible, I just need to be at the office one day a week. And if I want to work less, I can maybe figure it out with the client (it is not specified in the contract). Also, it’s where my mom works and she is going to use the system, so that is pretty funny.

I am firmly into coastfire territory at this point, meaning I just need to work enough to cover my living expenses, which is basically 1.5 months per year. I already worked 4 months this year, so this is just extra. That brings with it a mindset that I haven’t had before when starting clients, where I am just excited to see what they’ve got for me. And if it sucks, I’ll just quit and go back to my sabbatical. It is quite freeing. Feels like I made it, even though I still have to work a little each year, otherwise the money will run out at some point. I don’t have enough (yet?) where it should snowball by itself.

In unrelated news, I just wanted to document for posterity what a journey the stock market had for a few months here in 2025. When Trump unveiled the first version of his tariffs the markets absolutely cratered over the next couple of days. Multiple days in a row where I lost more than 100.000 kroner. At the bottom I was down about half a million from the top. But in the good news I was able to laugh about it and even buy some near the bottom. Nice to know that I can keep my head cool. Since then it has all come back, and now the markets are up about 1% for the year, so if it stays like this, people will look back and think “what a boring year”. Hell no, it wasn’t!