Saving the 1998 Swedish Junior Tennis Championships with a bit of Perl magic

In the summer of 1998, when I was 16, I split my days between working as a parking attendant down by Kämpinge beach and flipping burgers at the adjacent tennis club café. As much as I enjoyed the summer job, my real interest was already in software and the early web.

One afternoon in the café, the club director, Rikard Anderberg, was in the middle of a tense discussion. Our club was hosting the Swedish National Junior Tennis Championships (Svenska Juniormästerskapen, JSM), and for the very first time in the tournament’s history, all match results were supposed to be published live on the internet instead of people calling in or driving to the club to check the draw sheets.

There was just one problem: posters with the club’s website URL had already been printed and mailed out to tennis clubs across all of Sweden, and nobody at the club actually knew how to build a system to publish the results online.

Overhearing the conversation, I volunteered to take a shot at it. After finishing my evening shifts at the grill, I spent the next few nights coding a custom publishing system in Perl (the classic /cgi-bin/ era) that let the tournament desk upload match scores and metadata and automatically regenerated the static HTML tournament pages.

When championship week arrived, the system ran without a hitch. Watching players, coaches, and parents across Sweden check the draws online in real time, while Google was still being put together in a Menlo Park garage, was one of the moments that cemented my path into software engineering.