Thursday 

Room 5 

10:20 - 11:20 

(UTC+02

Talk (60 min)

I'm just trying to keep my head above water

I'm a lucky guy, and I know it! I'm a middle-aged white male with a good job, a great wife, and all of that. Life is pretty good! Or at least it should be...

People
Work Skills

The other side of the story is that I have spent most of my career struggling mentally. I've not only questioned myself professionally since day one, but I have also had to take time off work because I couldn't even get out of bed in the morning. Still, most people around me don't have a clue about my situation. When they find out, they generally go "What? You? I would never have thought that"... A response that probably indicates how well I manage to hide it from the world. But I am more and more certain that that is not the right way to handle it...

I have spent a LOT of time trying to find ways to cope with the struggles in my life. Trying to balance my private life and work. Something that is much harder than it sounds in our industry. And I think we need to talk about it.

I want to talk about some of the things I have experienced, and some of the things I have done to try and make my life…well…a life for me. I also want to explain how getting a book about living with ADHD from my parents when I was 40 became a life altering experience. Not to mention what I think we as an industry could do to make life better for the people in it.

Chris Klug

Chris Klug has been building software professionally since sometime around 2000, back when .NET was new, CSS was a suggestion, and Roy Fielding’s REST paper had just been published. Since then he has written code for everything from model agencies to online sports betting to professional sail racing, because staying in one industry sounded far too boring.

He has been a Microsoft MVP for something like 15 years (depending on when he last updated this abstract), which either means he knows a thing or two or that he just talks a lot. Possibly both, but we all know the latter is a given. These days he works at Active Solution in Stockholm, helping clients solve problems and build better systems.

When he is not writing code, Chris is usually geeking out on some form of extreme sport like skydiving, kitesurfing, snowboarding, mountain biking, or wing foiling. He loves learning new things and spends way too much time thinking about weird stuff most people never even notice.