The complete archive of essays, keynote presentations, and engineering stories by Niclas Bjuväng, unified from bjuvang.com under niclas.ai.
Two days ago I received this email: Wow! Someone reached out to me regarding a Quake tournament that took place 25 years ago. I felt excited. I loved Quake. I loved being part of that community. You can read more about…
Access the original SE4 website experiment (seen in the screenshot above) here. I love experimenting and staying up-to-date. Background: In Sweden, we have a long-running debate on energy prices. Briefly, the country is…
From early experiments on a Commodore 64 and university studies in Lund and Malmö to leading global engineering and platform organizations at Sony Ericsson, StepStone Group, IKEA Group, Bjuväng Consulting AB, and Inter IKEA Group.
On my son’s last day in school before the summer holidays, he was given a list of 99 activities he could do during the summer. I looked at the list and thought it was a great idea. At least in our home, it’s a daily…
Heads up! Apple Developer Conference WWDC yesterday was, as usual, a whirlwind of announcements, ranging from the arrival of the calculator app on the iPad to claims about integrating AI into everyday life. What caught…
Following up on my session at the ReDI School AI Hub with a hands-on workshop on practical AI and data literacy for the International Women’s Association in Malmö.
It was a pleasure meeting so many interested and engaged people at the ReDI School of Digital Integration Malmö AI Hub last week! I did a session on AI Fundamentals and how this can help empower non-profits. During my…
Get ready for the AI-assistants: My view on the future of AI interaction and beyond Today, we see a clear trajectory of AI growth, driven mainly by large language models (LLMs). The hype cycle focuses on these LLMs, but…
It’s that time of the year again, the time for big tech conferences! And Google I/O never fails to deliver. What always gets me excited is not just the unveiling of new tech, but seeing how these innovations are…
I came across ReDI School Malmö while leading the StepStone Tech Hub here in Sweden. We partnered on several engagements, the highlight being when we hosted students in our office to try out some of our innovations,…
A small family weekend project with a Biltema wooden birdhouse and an indoor Wi-Fi camera that turned into a live nest monitor for a Great tit (Talgoxe) family.
Today I wrote a short rant on LinkedIn about why AI won’t replace software engineers anytime soon. LinkedIn’s format favors brevity, which is why I started this blog – that, and I didn’t want to force readers into a…
I remember when I lead teams working with computer vision with object detection and tracking 4-5 years ago. We didn’t want to mention AI and the training we did – we thought people would doubt the value. Times are…
When I was a kid me and my friends wanted to be the classical professions when we grew up, you know, police officer, firefighter, hairdresser etc. Turns our our daughter, Maja (10), told her class she wants to be an…
I know you are in a hurry. Cutting corners. A couple of challenges you are dealing with: * Multiple LLMs, Multiple use-cases: Fragmented development where developers write use-case-specific code for each LLM.* API…
Whew! What a busy week it’s been, filled with meetings with fantastic people and companies. There’s a lot of AI news this week. While the new text-to-video models look great, I want to highlight the news about Gemini…
Whoop! My favourite coffee mug in an Apple Vision Pro app? You bet! Using RealityComposer in my iPhone, Xcode and Reality Composer pro on my Mac with the built in Vision Pro simulator. So what does all of this mean? For…
Looking back at how we kept engineering teams connected during the pandemic at IKEA, and why grounding digital transformation in company heritage actually matters.
I have spent many years in different leading architecture roles and many years leading innovation organizations. What has come to mind is how similar these two functions are. So, what do I mean by that? Isn’t…
Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the GESHDO annual customer event. I decided to ask LinkedIn what I should speak about, and there was a clear emphasis on looking back at real learnings, rather than…
TLDR: Looking at these huge numbers, which does not even include inference, every company needs to evaluate their usage of LLM and how they use them going forward. I’ve been conducting some research on large language…
Even though it wasn’t my first job in software, I usually say my work life boot camp was at Sony Ericsson (SEMC). I spent five years in this great company, from January 2008 until November 2012, first as a contractor…
What happens when e-commerce merchants hook up LLM publishing APIs without output validation, spotted live on Amazon’s Swedish marketplace.
Recently, I attended the Google Cloud Nordic conference, where Ted Schönbeck shared some eye-opening insights into the environmental footprint of LLMs. He mentioned that ChatGPT consumes roughly 40x more computational…
You are about to read a story about an event that occurred 10 years ago. Our software deployment ended up on national TV and in news articles as a ‘healthcare breakdown.’ Patients had to stay longer in hospitals during…
Back in 2003 I was part of the national radio show “Pussel i P3”. One episode was “I’m a loser baby” and I was in the panel talking with people calling in. We discussed how we sometimes paint a picture of ourselves as…
In software engineering, we sometimes talk about abstraction layers. These layers are often created to hide complexity, making something more manageable or understandable. In architecture, we can sometimes refer to APIs…
In recent discussions, I have mentioned that I never want to work with innovation again. Truth be told, I said the exact same thing 4 years ago. And then kept on doing it for an additional 4 years… so why is that? We…
I’ve recruited hundreds of people across multiple companies. Here are my top tips on staying relevant. Your CV might be an opener, but I need more. Remember, a recruiting manager has tons of work to do. Recruitment is…
I think we need to be very careful. It’s important for our shaping as humans and our mental health. We need to reconsider how we look back at what we are proud of, and how we celebrate. I have been thinking about our…
Remember that the fear of doing something wrong results in indecisiveness, analyses, project groups and endless discussions. Keep it simple! Complicated systems and rules are a form of paralysis. “ In my last post, I…
This week, I’ll share a few throwback stories from my time at Edge Engineering: CHECKA! When remote work became the norm, many lacked proper equipment. E-commerce was booming, and the pressure was intense. Meanwhile,…
10+ million IKEA QR scans later, I am happy we walked across that street those years ago. We loved to work with the stores. So, when we had an idea, we would often first talk with our colleagues in the store, to simply…
Long ago, I was brought in as a consultant to review the code of a custom solution that wasn’t performing as expected. At that time, I was deeply involved in analyzing performance, caching strategies, code optimization,…
During a recent speaking engagement, I highlighted the pitfalls of viewing AI as a “catch all”, a one-size-fits-all solution to every problem. While AI holds transformative potential across numerous sectors, it doesn’t…
A passage from the book 'Only Those Who Are Asleep Make No Mistakes – Fifteen Crises That Shaped IKEA' that captures the bias for action over endless slides and steering committees.
Although it wasn’t my first job, I often say I did my tech bootcamp at Sony Ericsson (SEMC), later Sony Mobile, where I spent 5 years in various positions. Looking back, I realize what an awesome workplace it was,…
How our emerging technology team explored multi-agent LLM orchestration via structured JSON queries in jobtech, and the challenge of translating early R&D prototypes into clear business value.
Before summer, probably back in April/May, I had a lengthy discussion with a C-level executive around new products and migration. Remember, I have a wide network so don’t try to identify this individual 🙂 Anyway, the…
Returning to Malmö University, where both my own studies and my mother’s academic career took place, to serve on the industry advisory group for the Media Technology program.
Reflections on traveling regularly to China between 2009 and 2012 during the Sony Ericsson years, and what it taught me about leading distributed teams across time zones and cultures.
How a summer job flipping burgers at Kämpinge tennis café in 1998 turned into late-night Perl and CGI coding to put the National Junior Tennis Championships online for the first time.
Looking back at bringing the IKEA engineering booth to Google Cloud Next at Moscone Center in San Francisco, visiting Mountain View, and meeting leadership at Microsoft in Redmond.
Supposed to hammer through some vue.js tutorials to keep brain working, but got stuck in the way back machine when I got a renewal email for one of my oldest domain registered in 1998. Back then I was playing QuakeWorld…