Henrik Busch Rasmussen

In 1997, Tele Danmark — likely the biggest telecom company in Denmark at the time — hired me to build a VB6/Access application supporting a large voluntary termination program: roughly 500 employees were being let go, and the company wanted to make it an appealing exit through generous termination agreements rather than layoffs. My software handled the generation and processing of those termination agreement letters. I stayed on the project for almost a year.

When I joined Carl Bro Group in 1998 to take over CB-Master — a Word-based document management system (DMS)/reporting tool the previous developer had left half-finished, built mostly from textbook code samples — I rewrote it from the ground up in my own style. CB-Master was the client side of a client/server system, with Microsoft SQL Server running the back end; beyond generating the documents, it made sure each one was automatically saved with the correct file name in the correct project folder. I also built an early self-monitoring system: any runtime error would email me the debug details directly, so I could ship a fixed executable the same day. It went on to become the standard tool the whole engineering staff used to produce consistent client and project documentation. After handing CB-Master over to the next developer, Carl Bro Group offered me a posting in Brussels, Belgium, working on the EU Commission's TAIEX project — a technical assistance instrument helping candidate and partner countries align with EU legislation. I spent about six months there before homesickness got the better of me and I headed back to Denmark. A good experience nonetheless.

In 2002 I started my own one-man company after striking a deal with Ipos to build the software running their information kiosks. I developed the kiosk software in Visual Basic 6, packaging it as a single dependency-free executable — a modern approach at the time, using a specialized tool most developers weren't using yet. Alongside that contract, I also worked as a subcontractor for MW Data, building a Microsoft Access/VBA database application for Arla Foods that handled test results from their cheese production — one of several rapid-development mockup applications I've built in Access over the years, quick, functional tools that let me test an idea or solve a problem fast without the overhead of a full production build. The Ipos partnership ended a few years later when Ipos wanted to move their client off Windows onto a free Linux client and asked me to port the software over — something I couldn't do at the time, so I terminated the contract. I never found another client for that kind of work and closed the business.

In 2004, with the company closed and no development work about, I took a job at a three-person firm selling custom stone worktops. They needed someone to draw them in AutoCAD; I had never opened it. We agreed to try each other out. Within a year I was doing all the drawing, signing off every order to our two Italian factories and handling most of the contact with them — along with unloading the trucks and carrying worktops into customers' kitchens. Then Microsoft ended support for Visual Basic 6. I looked at .NET and it didn't win me over; VB6 work dried up, and I gradually stopped looking for it. Apart from the odd Access/VBA job I let the development side go, and spent the following years as an IT technician and support engineer instead — still writing the occasional Access tool, including an internal application for the Danish Home Guard.

In 2022, Diebold Nixdorf brought me onto a five-person IT technician team tasked with modernizing every point-of-sale station across Salling Group's warehouses and stores in Jutland and on Funen. Over the course of a year we replaced payment terminals, upgraded PCs, and swapped out cables, printers, and barcode scanners — bringing every sales station up to date on both hardware and Linux-based sales software. Half the job was technical, half was coordination: staying in sync with teammates, the project lead, software specialists, and the staff in each shop and warehouse meant good communication was just as important as the hands-on work.

In 2023, Onitio (formerly Infocare) hired me as an IT technician to support one of their customers — a nationwide fuel station chain — starting with a full router, switch, and access point upgrade across every fuel station in Jutland and Funen. That led to a second project for the same customer: installing a LoRa-based monitoring system that alerted staff through a gateway and server whenever a cooler or freezer's temperature started to rise. When that work slowed down, I moved on to servicing many of Onitio's other customers, including Lenovo — doing on-site warranty repairs on desktops and laptops, fixing other equipment, and setting up new workstations for incoming employees. I liked the variety: no two days looked the same, and there was always something new to learn. Eventually, the original customer's planned projects kept getting delayed, and with too little work to go around, Onitio had to let me go.

Then twinBASIC turned up — a modern successor to Visual Basic 6 that made the language I knew a living thing again. I started building with it: a Windows utility that fixes a taskbar bug I'd been living with, which meant reverse-engineering the undocumented registry format behind it and going straight at the Win32 API. Alongside that I built this site — plain PHP, no framework, no build step, written by hand and deployed by hand. It began as somewhere to keep my CV and became the place I try things out: a bilingual front end, a set of admin tools I built to run and monitor it, and a habit of writing down every change as I go. The running history is on the changelog page.