øyvind

Hi, I’m Øyvind. I build fast, scalable and secure backend systems for startups and scaleups. I work as an independent consultant, developer and architect, and I’m based in Oslo, Norway.

I am currently looking for new projects. See Availability for the details.

What I can help you with

Are you working on building something new? Or maybe improving your existing back-end system? Is it slow? Or simply more costly than it needs to be?

Or are you worried it’s not secure enough? Maybe it was vibecoded? Or built by frontend and fullstack people whose expertise mainly lie elsewhere.

My specialty is back-end, server-side technology and architecture. I help build, scale and fix back-end systems in the cloud or on "bare metal".

Please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Just give me a call, fill out this form or message me on LinkedIn. I am very friendly and I can steer you in the right direction if I’m too busy to help, or not the right kind of developer you need. I’ve also gotten to know many other freelancers, independent contractors and designers.

For examples of what I’ve done my clients in the past, see past clients and projects.

How I prefer to work

I strongly prefer simplicity and strive for it whenever possible. Especially when working with startups, where speed of development and change is very important.

Technology

My current language of choice is Go (golang) and I build systems on the Google Cloud Platform. In 2026 there is also a lot of talk of moving away from US cloud companies. I curently run my new personal projects on in FreeBSD jails on Hetzner (a German cloud and server provider).

To be honest, I do not think choosing the "right" technology is very important. Usually, there are many that will do the trick and there are many ways to get the job done. There are, of course, exceptions. But for most projects choosing one technology over another does not give any great advantages.

It is much more important to know your tools and their strengths and weaknesses. That’s what I’m achieving by sticking with a few selected technologies. So while it’s fun to learn new things and tempting to jump on the latest fashions, it can be harmful to productivity and the goals of the business [1]. I try to counteract this by trying new things on my own time.

Other, important are things, are:

  • Finding the right balance between simplicity and sophistication in you architectures

  • Understanding the larger picture. What are we making and why?

  • Understanding the priorities of the business. Is 99.99% uptime critical? Time-to-market? Or maybe giving yourselves many chances of succeeding by saving money and taking sane shortcuts.

Having said that, there are reasons I choose to work with Go and the Google Cloud Platform. I like Go, both the simplicity of the language and the culture of pragmatism. It’s a language very well suited for building back-end servers. Google Cloud Platform also has its strengths. I’ve always been a fan of their first platform-as-a-service, App Engine, and Cloud Run They also seem to have a even stronger focus on pay-for-what-you-use than other cloud providers.

I have experience with many different technologies and programming languages. Especially on the back-end. And, of course, I also know "adjacent" tools used by modern cloud-native deployments, such as: Docker, Kubernetes, Git and CI/CD systems. I’ve worked with several databases and datastores, both the Google Cloud native ones: Datastore / Firestore, Storage and Cloud SQL. Outside of GCP I’ve used MySQL / MariaDB and PostgreSQL extensively, as well as others such as Redis, SQLite and ArangoDB.

Other past experience includes: several cloud providers and languages such as Python (w/ Django), Perl 5 (w/ Mojolicious), PHP and Ruby (w/ Rails), as well as databases etc.

Background

After finishing my MSc in Informatics in 2010 I worked as a back-end developer, and "devops" guy for almost 4 years before I started my own company in 2014. Since then I’ve taken contract work and worked on many projects for different clients.

For examples of what I’ve done for my past clients, see past clients and projects.

Availability

I’m curently stepping back from Fractional CTO work and looking for new oppertunities.

(last updated: February 2026)

Contact me

If you think I can help you, or you have any questions, please reach out.

msg

1. The customer does not care what programming language you use or if your running Istio or not. They might care how often you deploy