A story about me and my health [back to index]

Hello, my name is Joakim L. Christiansen, I was born in 1986 and I’m from Norway! My passion in life is software programming, science, philosophy and the paranormal! Yes, I’m a believer in extraterrestrial life and consciousness existing independent of the brain.

I’m sad to say that my situation is at the moment a difficult one since I’m suffering from health problems hindering me from being able to program as much as I did before. To keep the story short; I have muscle and tendon pains in most parts of my body, and I’ve had this for over 14 years now (and I don’t receive any help or special treatment from my government). But I hope that with better self control (restraining myself from using the computer too much) together with exercising (being much more active) that I can keep the problems in check/at bay enough to at least be able to do a little development every week. I really don’t want to give up the biggest passion I have in life, it might sound strange; but computer programming makes me happy and I’m addicted to it!

My idea is that the more money I have left at the end of the month, the more money I can spend on things which will improve my health. Like working less in my day job (sadly I’m unemployed at the moment) and spending more time outside exercising, eating healthier and buying more ergonomic equipment, etc. Eventually enabling me to spend more time doing software development.

Before my health problems I was the sole developer of the software called “JLC’s Internet TV”, which to my surprise became very popular and had several million downloads. Even though the software was free I was able to earn enough money back then to support myself (being a 20 year old living in my family’s basement) because of the advertisement I had on my website etc. I even developed a website where people could see the same channels online instead of using my software, and I created a community around this where people could contribute to the database which I maintained. I really started seeing a bright future for myself as a successful software developer and I started getting job opportunities and possible business partners from all over the world, but I was very careful with whom I involved myself with though, so I kept them at a distance at the time (I was after all just a boy).

But when my health problems became too bad I stopped the maintenance of the software and the website and eventually took it all down so I could focus on getting better. I also didn’t finish any of my other projects (I had a lot of ideas back then, I wanted to do thousands of things and I probably started almost as many). I also went through a major depression, social anxiety and struggled with thoughts about suicide. Getting through all that was hard and it took me many years! But today I am no longer depressed (at least not that badly), I no longer have social anxiety, I have a child and a wonderful girlfriend! Yay, I survived! But my physical health never improved, so the dream of being a successful programmer is still challenged.

So I hope that you can help fund my way towards a better life by donating some money to help me back at my feet . See this page for more information about that.

Enough, talk about my health. I have by the way always been fascinated with how things work at the lowest level. Hence I often end up writing my own implementation of stuff just so I can understand it better and learn from it. And trust me; the saying “knowledge is power” is very true!

Yeah, I was into hacking for a short period of my life (as a grey hat hacker)… I was never the kind of guy who wanted to use my skills for evil, but sometimes I would have some “innocent fun” just to make the person or company aware of their bad security. Like turning a website upside down, etc. Or cheating in online contests to make my friends win stuff. I guess I should consider writing some articles about the stuff I did (since it might function as entertaining and/or interesting stories).

A really strange coincidence happened because of this though, statistically I feel that it should not be possible for it to happen. But it did, suddenly I was made aware (also by coincidence) that someone featured a chat that they had with me in Notepad on a random computer connected to the internet (which had a VNC server on it without a password, hence why I could connect to it and have a chat with another connected user through Notepad running on that computer) in two books. Apparently the other hacker who I chatted with in Notepad was also into authoring books and was so fascinated by this incidence that he featured the conversation in two books published about hacking. Which I later bought by the way, it’s a fun thing to show friends!

I have some comments on what he wrote though, I don’t feel that he was being completely honest about why he was on that computer himself. Also he tried to make it sound like he got some useful information about me which he didn’t really. What he mentions as a “picture” was just a picture of me in a balaclava, and my e-mail address was a throwaway one which didn’t contain my name. But I wasn’t even doing anything illegal by connecting to that computer since it ran VNC without a password; so I didn’t really need to hide my identity.

I was young and dareful though, I didn’t really understand that what to me was “innocent hacking” could by the government be considered a bad crime. Luckily I stopped my endeavours into this field before it caused me any trouble. Since Norway did in the later years become much more strict when it came to finding and punishing these kinds of hackers (who were not really doing anything bad). Should someone really get in trouble for changing a value in a cookie stored in their own browser (enabling them to log in as another random person because the creators of a certain website totally neglected security)?!

Anyways… These days I’m mostly thinkering with JavaScript using Node.js. I kinda settled with JavaScript after mastering both C++ and Python in my search to find the language (and development infrastructure) I enjoy the most. I know several other languages though, like PHP and PureBasic, but I don’t really consider them very useful anymore.

What makes a language useful to me is when it enables me to do great things without fighting too much with the language or its toolset. When I can rapidly prototype almost anything and have fun while doing it! JavaScript allows me to do that, I guess it can sound strange that I prefer it over C++. But when speed is not the important factor, then using C++ is just silly in my opinion. C++ doesn’t have a modern approach to anything really. You’re much better off with Rust if you want a modern language which allows the same kind of speed! I might learn Rust in the future, but for now I am having too much fun with JavaScript.

Hence my GitHub page will mostly feature the JavaScript projects that I’m working on and I guess it’s the language that I will use for most of my professional work from now on.

Thanks for reading and have a nice day! 🙂