Bjørn Lindholm
🙂

Bjørn Lindholm

Designer & developer in Europe

Currently spending my time in the Basque mountains in Northern Spain with a bunch of other nomads.

A year ago

About

Developer and designer building digital products. I'm primarily interested in building creative tools.

I love building simple, accessible and beautiful interfaces.

Previously co-founded Reform and currently helping other small startups build their new products.

Projects

2023

Paperstack is a static site generator.

I built a new templating language called Stencil. Stencil is based on components instead of partials or includes known from other templating languages.

The goal of Paperstack is to create the best DX for building static sites.

2021

I was responsible for designing and building the product of the startup I co-founded. Reform is a tool for building forms and surveys.

Initially, the challenge was to find a market for our product, create a pre-launch website and build the visual identity as well as the first version of the app.

The pre-launch website was a 'dummy' version of the product with an email signup and we collected ~2000 emails in the first few days.

Next, we built a simple form builder and launched a couple of months later.
Since then we continued improving the product while keeping the initial vision of a simple, but beautiful form tool in mind.

I also did customer research, user testing, and customer support to get a better understanding of our users and their needs. Finally, I did some business development and maintained partnerships with strategic partners of Reform such as a couple of CRM's.

2020

My initial task as the 1st hire at Branch was to create a new visual identity and rebuild the existing product.

Branch is a Continous Integration platform for WordPress agencies. A lot of product work went into making sure Branch would fit into existing agencies' workflows and help them catch bugs early and deploy new code safely.

I also helped integrate Branch with all major hosting companies in the WordPress space.

2019
Husweb at Sikkerhedsstyrelsen

I was the tech-lead and full-stack developer on a new housing inspection platform for Sikkerhedsstyrelsen, a body of the Danish government.

The platform is used by inspectors when they are on-site to note down any safety- or electrical issues. At the end of an inspection, a legally binding report is generated.

The generated reports are used in every real estate transaction in Denmark.

My tasks included building out the platform, the system for generating reports, representing the agency in meetings and gathering feedback from beta testers.

2018

I was part of a team of four who created Dwarf's (at the time) new visual identity.

At the time Dwarf was known as a engineering agency who specialised in backend development and the existing identity represented that.

The new leadership wanted to change Dwarfs positioning to be a creative agency with a strong design and frontend department.

We spent several weeks separated from the rest of the company where we brainstormed, prototyped and finally created a new website for the company.

(The visual identity has recently been updated again but the current look is build on the foundation we created in 2018)

Side Projects

2023
Fundamentals (WIP)

A modern take on the built-in developer tools for Chromium based browsers. It will give developers access to all the tools they need while making websites like screenshots, colour pickers, responsive viewports on top of all the well-known features from the existing developer tools.

2023
Gitboard (WIP)

A simple Git client full of power user features for basic Git needs.

2023
Weblang (Working title & WIP)

A new programming language for the web.

It's a functional language with static types, a fast compiler and a first party framework for creating everything from static websites to large SaaS apps.

It's inspired by projects such as Elm, ReScript, Inertia.js and Remix.

2022
Wordsmith (WIP)

A new writing app for MacOS that respects the different phases of writing a piece of content.

The UI will adapt to the author's needs based on whether they are researching, outlining, writing, editing or publishing.

2022

A new HTML templating language for static site generators.

The idea was to create a language that looked like JSX so UI elements could be extracted as components instead of as partials (like in other templating languages).

The language can be used in any project that uses Node.

2020
Serve

A GUI app for managing local development environments. It initially supported environments for Laravel and JS applications.

2020
authenticationguide.dev

A website trying to describe all the elements of web security in a human-readable way.

The project started with a frustration that I felt I needed a computer science education to understand the principles of web security.

2020
Titanium

A collection of Laravel & JS starter projects.

The templates included everything needed to quickly build MVP's and new products.

2019
Iridium

A library of accessible UI elements without any styling.

The library handled all state management and accessibility for every component and let developers style the components so they fit into their apps.

Very similar to current projects such as Radix and HeadlessUI.

2019
Web Limericks

A collection of limericks I made about the web development world.

2019
Conference HQ

A directory of tech conferences around the world.

Work Experience

2022 — Now
Designer and developer at Freelance
Remote

I help early-stage startups build their first products and help established startups with re-designs, new product development, scaling and maintenance.

2021 — 2023
Remote

I was the technical co-founder of Reform and I was responsible for all product design and development.

2020 — 2021
Remote

1st hire for an IT-infrastructure startup where I re-designed and re-built the existing product and led all new product work.

2019 — 2020
Copenhagen

Working primarily as a tech-lead on a new house inspection system for the Danish government.

2017 — 2018

Worked an various client projects including an ecommerce store for a local high-end ceramic brand as well as building the agency's new visual identity.

2015 — 2018
Web developer at Freelance
London / Copenhagen

Helped small companies build business websites and larger companies build internal tools.

2017 — 2017
Junior frontend developer (Part time) at Plant
Copenhagen

Worked on various client projects such as a publishing platform and media website for a news organisation, a job board, a website for a creative award organisation and a portfolio for an architectural firm.

Volunteering

2019 — 2019
Mentor at Dwarf
Copenhagen

I was a mentor for Joachim, an intern at Dwarf. I guided him about working in a digital agency and helped get his career as a frontend developer started.

At the end of the programme he was hired at Dwarf.

Writing

2022

My thoughts on sports and politics, written around the time of the World Cup in Qatar.

2019

A guide on how to make single-page applications secure by storing authentication tokens in cookies.

2019

A few notes about how I used Airtable when building my side-project Conference HQ.

Education

2020 — 2021
Bachelor of Web Development at Copenhagen School of Design & Technology
Copenhagen
2016 — 2018
AP in Multimedia at Copenhagen School of Design & Technology
Copenhagen

Contact