Meet Magnus Udbjørg

I build useful software, and the teams that build it. I've been at it for two decades, since 2023 as CTO at TestaViva in Copenhagen.

I studied computer science and social science at the same time, which turned out to be the point. Software is a technical problem and a human one, usually at once, and I find both halves equally interesting. Later I added an Executive Master's in IT Management, with a thesis on what DevOps actually means once you take it out of the conference talk and into a real IT department.

This site is where I keep what I learn: 233 posts since 2015, most of them curated links, some of them longer thoughts on leading engineers. I write things down because that is how I understand them, and I publish them so others can move faster than I did.

TestaViva makes legal security something ordinary people can actually handle. Wills, prenuptial agreements, powers of attorney, house purchases, company formation, estate administration: the documents that decide what happens to the people and things you care about, and that most of us put off for years because the process feels built for lawyers.

We turn that around. You answer plain questions, the platform drafts the document, a jurist is on hand when you need one, and you sign with MitID. Several of Denmark's largest banks partner with us to offer it to their customers.

My job is to keep the product reliable, the roadmap honest, and the team in a position to do its best work. Some days that is architecture and product decisions. Some days it is hiring, or a one-to-one at a whiteboard. Now and then it is a pull request of my own, which the team reviews with exactly the scrutiny it deserves.

Lately a lot of my attention goes to how engineering teams adopt AI without drowning in workslop. I gave a talk on it at the Engineering Managers Meetup in Copenhagen; the long version lives here on the blog.

1. Trust first. Everything good in a team is downstream of people feeling safe to say "I don't know", "I disagree" and "I broke it". I try to build that before anything else, and I judge myself on it.
2. I serve the team, not the other way round. My job is to set context, clear obstacles and get out of the way. Bright people don't need a boss. They need a clear problem and the room to solve it.
3. Transparency, starting with myself. Decisions get explained. Mistakes get named, mine first. I have opinions and I hold them loudly, but I would much rather be proven wrong than be right and learn nothing.
4. Shipping over showmanship. A working thing in a customer's hands beats a perfect thing on a slide. Clean architecture matters because it lets you keep shipping, not because it is pretty.
5. Keep learning, and pass it on. Curiosity is the only career plan I have ever had. What I learn goes on this site, into a talk, or into a mentoring session, because it is more useful outside my head than in it.
6. Tools amplify what is already there. That goes for AI, agile, DevOps and every other silver bullet I have watched come and go. Fix the team and its practices, and the tools do a lot. Skip that step, and they do a lot of damage, faster.

I'm married to Line, and we have two kids, Frej and Liv. They are the reason the laptop closes in the evening, and the best argument I know for building companies where that is normal. Most of what I understand about patience, feedback and explaining things simply, I learned at home rather than at work.

When there is time left over, I tinker. New languages, new tools, small side projects, and this site, which has been rebuilt more times than it strictly needed to be.