Joshua Bäckström

About me

I am a software developer born in 1995. Currently based in Stockholm with half a computer engineering degree and a full on computer dependency.
I remedy this vice by speed walking up small mountains and throwing empty barbells with Shi Zhiyong's gung-ho. All the while actively defending the title of world's slowest Japanese learner.
Nothing gets me more excited than the thought of being able to develop or learn how to develop software solutions that I or others find meaningful, in whatever framework is suited for it.
Click here if you want some more material for judging my character, otherwise please continue to my sappy timeline below in order to counterbalance this attempt at an affable introduction.

Shavasana is my favorite yoga pose.
KIDS SEE GHOSTS is my favorite album.
Kung Pow: Enter the Fist is underrated.
No limit Texas hold 'em is the best game ever invented that I love to hate. Riichi mahjong a close second.
I am Swedish but every exchange student I have ever talked to insisted that I am not.
I do Olympic lifts because I enjoy screaming like Shi Zhiyong even though I am terrible at them but I am tired of pretending that the tricep kickback doesn't feel the best.
The Last Airbender and Ping Pong the animation shaped my ideology more than I care to admit.
Humble Pie by Gordon Ramsey needs to be adapted by Martin Scorsese.
I live to grocery shop and I grocery shop to live.
Super Smash Bros Ultimate is a miracle that it ever got made and we don't appreciate that enough.
Masaaki Yuasa, Hayao Miyazaki, Naoko Yamada, Eiichiro Oda, Masashi Kishimoto, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hidetaka Miyazaki and Masahiro Sakurai are to blame for sparking and fostering my awe towards Japanese media. Which has never stopped, recently literature just to hammer in the guilt of not knowing the language. Ancient scripts by Miyamoto Musashi and Yagyu Munenori are crazy for even existing to begin with.
If you pass the JLPT but can't order a bento from the konbini then do you really know the language?
Every program will find a way to transpile into C or Javascript so why not just learn those first.
Carbonara has no cream and pineapple is an excellent pizza topping if paired with another salty savory topping.
I was 26 years old when I realized that I did not have multiple allergies, I just have something called pollen-food syndrome.
My million dollar idea is to make office desks built out of the same material as hard mouse pads.
My billion dollar idea is taking a Spark commonly used in northern Sweden, but on wheels that can be used in any weather.
My trillion dollar idea is shrimp farms in your kitchen with a similar usage and footprint as a pot of fresh basil.
My gorillion dollar idea is a vending machine business that is not just by train platforms in Sweden.
I uploaded videos semi regularly to YouTube in 2007 that ridiculously garnered 300k+ views. Only bribery will get you the channel name.

My Timeline

Grew up watching Xena: Warrior Princess
Born and raised in Södertälje, Sweden. After an entire elementary school worth of halo and ice-hockey I entered an upper secondary school that had a great international focus even though I had a non-existent retention of my Spanish classes. University prep is what you do. Nobody told me to go, yet I gravitated towards it and had the impression that it is what one does.
What should I do?
18 years old
Prep school is done. I'm ready for university now with all of these formulas and random languages that I do not care about. Apart from some family restaurant odd-jobs, my entire academic career at this point is basically my entire life. What is a working life even like? Well, nepotism sure is a virtue... so I quickly found myself as a traffic flagger for a construction company, which in reality also meant construction fence builder. Never in my life have I gained this much appreciation towards air-conditioning.
Why am I doing this?
University
I moved to Linköping and entered Linköping University for Computer Science. I loved using my bulky computer ever since I was a kid. This fits right in—I'm by myself now. Shared dorm life is a time that I'll never forget. But no time to digest this fact. Computer Science doesn't give a shit that you like playing computer games and that you know your differential equations. The work ethic and discipline required here swiftly knocked me to the ground. I grit my teeth through building entire operative systems in C, baby-sitting a little machine learning virtual rocket ship that needs to learn to hover by itself and often moving literal ones and zeros in order to test microchips. This was my introduction to the world of programming and computer science. It was equal parts amazingly cool and amazingly laborious. This reality in combination with an ever looming cloud of shaky motivations I eventually cracked. I dropped out with 135 out of 180 credits completed.
Who am I doing any of this for?
Flashback
University is done. I'm ready for ——— now with all of these formulas and random programming languages that I do not care about. I ended up working at the beautiful boat hostel STF af Chapman & Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm. My title being, let me see: receptionist, waiter, barista, sandwich artist uhm vomit sweeper... A super exciting job that made me meet more people in a year than I have collectively met in my entire life. I gathered plenty of valuable experiences and lessons in communications, people skills and in an overtly melancholic fashion an appreciation towards meditation. Working in the tourism sector when the COVID-19 pandemic hit was pure hell. Tested my psyche in ways I didn't know was possible. A shitstorm of an ordeal to the extent that it repeatedly forced me to sit down and learn to look into myself. Perhaps start to chip away at some questions that have always been there.
Git Committing
Emptying your mind in order to throw in some boulders in order to stir up some of that caked-on mind sediment required a lot of deliberate work. Scooping up whatever comes to the surface and analyzing it. This conscious observation of my feelings towards motivation and work has resulted in me coding and learning actively again. Programming in my mind was just another subject and in my head one and the same with computer science courses that lacked meaning to me. Coming to terms with the scarily simple reality that it's ok to make anything that you find meaningful and by your own volition is freeing. My existing coding knowledge happens to be an incredibly useful tool for acting on this. I am having fun trying to commit to git every day no matter what it is and I have been at it since early 2022.