Seven months ago I wrote about quitting my job at 40 with no plan and one job interview on the calendar. Since then, life has been busy rearranging itself. The relationship ended. The horses moved to a family four hours north. I moved back to Alvesta, the town I grew up in. The apartment is in the same neighborhood where I learned to ride a bike. I live on unemployment benefits now, and my SaaS product still doesn't make me any money.
This is not a comeback story. It's a status report. Written from a town that remembers me at fourteen, by a man the unemployment office knows by name.
The short version
In November 2025 I walked out of a ten-year career as lead technician with six months of paid leave and a vague sense that anything would be better than treading water forever. I spent the leave the way you'd expect if you've read this blog: built features for Horsemate, shipped GitHero, released Better-IPTV, wrote about all of it, and went to a grand total of three job interviews.
Then May 2026 happened.
Paid leave ended, A-kassa took over, a five-year relationship ended, an apartment got found, boxes got packed, a truck got loaded, and Grimslöv got left behind. All of it inside the same few weeks, like life was clearing its backlog before a deadline.
I don't recommend scheduling your life this way. Nobody asks you to, and yet here we are.
Life happens
Let me handle this one carefully. It deserves that.
Me and Nicole are not together anymore. Five years. No scandal, no villain, no dramatic scene worth retelling. Somewhere along the way the relationship turned into something that looked more like friendship than love, and we both knew it long before either of us said it out loud. If I'm being honest - and this entire blog is apparently a legally binding honesty contract - I think I took her for granted. Not dramatically. Not on purpose. The way you take running water for granted: it was always just there, doing its thing, and I never once thought about what my days would look like without it.
Nicole still lives on the farm in Grimslöv, which means Roberto the three-legged dog, the cat, the eighty-year-old tortoise and her own horse are all exactly where they were. The zoo stays intact. It just doesn't include me anymore.
That's all I'm going to say about that. Some things belong to two people, not to a blog.
Loading the trailer
The horses were the part I dreaded writing about, which is presumably why I've been writing about them in my head ever since May.
Olius and Niter were mine - co-owned, technically, which in practice meant I paid for half the hay and all of the worry. Olius is the Swedish Ardennes built like a small tank. Niter is the Gotland pony with more personality than body mass. They've been inseparable since they were foals, so selling them was always going to be a package deal.
The market disagreed. We had plenty of interested buyers, and a surprising number of them took one look at Niter and decided they only wanted the Ardennes. One horse, please. The big useful one. Not the small one with opinions. Reading message after message where my pony got politely excluded did something to me I wasn't prepared for. He's a pony. He can't read. And still I felt like I had to defend him in every negotiation.
Eventually a family further north in Sweden showed up wanting exactly what we had: both of them. They took Olius and were genuinely happy to take Niter along. Which is the only acceptable outcome when the alternative is splitting up two animals who have spent their entire lives believing they are one animal.
I was there when the truck came. Helped load them, gave each of them a last scratch in their favorite spots, and stood in the driveway watching the trailer disappear down the road. Then I cried a bit, which surprised absolutely nobody except the version of me who insists he doesn't do that.
They're doing well, we're welcome to visit, and the drive takes four hours. I keep catching myself calculating whether a visit is "worth it." Four hours there, four hours back, for an afternoon of a pony ignoring me while I feed him carrots. The math keeps coming out wrong and I suspect I'll make the trip anyway.
A foreign home
Alvesta, then. Population: smaller than you think. Fame: known locally for having a railway junction, which tells you everything about the local bar for excitement.
I grew up here. Four years ago I left, first for Växjö, where Nicole and I spent two years and two apartments, one year in each, because apparently our lease-signing rhythm was set to annual. We'd already been together about a year by then, just without sharing an address. Then came the farm in Grimslöv for the final two years of the relationship. Now I live in the same neighborhood I grew up in, walking streets my feet could navigate blindfolded, past houses I have forty-year-old opinions about.
Here's the strange part: the meadow I played on as a kid is a road now. A full road, lined with houses, with people living in them who have no idea there was ever a meadow. I stand there and I see both versions overlaid - the grass and the games, and the asphalt and the driveways - and neither one will agree to become the other.
That's the feeling I've settled on calling "främmande hem." A foreign home. Everything is familiar and almost nothing matches. You assume small towns stay frozen in place while cities change, but that's wrong. Alvesta changed plenty in four years. It just did it quietly, without telling me, which feels rude given our history.
I've started noticing the same double exposure everywhere else, now that I have a name for it. A relationship that still looked like a relationship. Two horses who were one animal until a trailer said otherwise. A CV that says lead technician and a bank statement that says something else entirely. Everything familiar, almost nothing matching.
My son lives with me here full-time now. Seventeen years old, from an earlier relationship, and currently experiencing the novelty of a dad-in-an-apartment setup. That's all you get about that too. He's a teenager, and teenagers have not consented to being blog material.
The math doesn't math
Now for the least fun section to write: money.
The timing deserves its own paragraph, because whoever orchestrated my spring had a sense of humor. The paid leave ended in May. A-kassa kicked in the same month. The move happened the same month. So the moment the salary disappeared was precisely the moment I needed a new apartment, moving trucks, and the emotional bandwidth of someone recently out of a five-year relationship. I got none of the above in surplus.
Going from a lead technician salary to unemployment benefits is not a pay cut, it's a personality change. I used to not look at prices. Now every purchase gets reviewed by a committee I never elected, and the committee is my own brain, and it rarely approves anything.
The strangest part isn't the reduced income. It's the reduced identity. I worked since I was a teenager. There has always been a paycheck attached to my existence, and its size roughly tracked how seriously society pretended to take me. Now the state sends me an amount calculated to keep me fed and housed, and I spend my days applying for jobs and coding for free, and the committee in my head has opinions about all of it.
Horsemate keeps galloping
Through the breakup, the move and the benefit applications, Horsemate just kept running. Quietly. Without needing anything from me beyond the hosting bill.
Which leaves me somewhere I still haven't entirely processed. I built Horsemate because we had horses and I was tired of spreadsheets. The horses left in May. The app did not. It is still out there tracking farrier visits and vaccination dates and feeding plans, for animals that belong to other people, and it will go on doing that long after I stop being someone who owns a horse. The software outlived the reason for the software.
Current status: stable. The user count hovers around the same level month to month, drifting plus or minus twenty depending on the season. People sign up, people use it, people stay. After the year I've had, "boringly stable" reads like a compliment. It's also the only stable I have left.
Revenue: technically not zero. Horsemate runs on monthly subscriptions and people actually pay them, which I still find faintly unbelievable. What comes in goes straight back out again on app hosting, database hosting and the other unglamorous line items. What survives to the end of the month is close enough to nothing that Horsemate has reached profitability parity with a lemonade stand run by a generous child.
Part of that is my own fault, in a way worth confessing. Early on I optimized hard for the free tiers on Vercel and Supabase. Query counts, row limits, function invocations - I bent the architecture to fit inside limits that were never meant to hold a real product. It worked great until it didn't, and then the bill for my own cleverness arrived. Now a paying product runs every month on an architecture I designed to be free. Lesson filed under "free tiers are a loan, not a gift."
And then there's the competitor. A product that launched after Horsemate, doing much of what Horsemate does, with several ideas that look suspiciously like ideas I shipped first. My honest reaction is split down the middle.
Half of me is flattered. Someone independently looked at the same space and reached the same conclusion: horse owners need this and will use it. That's validation you can't buy, mostly because nobody would sell it to you.
The other half of me has seen their marketing site. It includes a comparison page with both our names in the title, lovingly listing pros and cons with themselves winning most rows. And look - I understand it. Comparison pages are SEO gold. I get the play completely. But it feels cheap in a way I can't fully articulate, and I'll tell you the pettiest part: I have deliberately never built one. I'm also not going to name them here. Some hills are pointless. This one is mine.
Interviews that don't feel fake
The job search continues. Two more interviews since January, and for once they were interviews I actually looked forward to.
One was for a cost estimator role in manufacturing, kalkylator in Swedish: owning the cost calculations behind quotes and invoices, effectively responsible for the company making money on the final line of every product that leaves the building. Sounds dry. It isn't. It's the exact kind of puzzle work I turn out to be unreasonably good at: systems, margins, and consequences.
I'd like it on record that I noticed the joke. Two sections ago I was explaining that my own numbers stopped adding up. Here I am, interviewing for the job of guaranteeing that somebody else's do.
The other was a product owner position in the vehicle industry, at one of Sweden's oldest vehicle software companies. Walking into that interview, part of my brain kept whispering that these people have been shipping software since before I was born, which is either intimidating or reassuring depending on which part of my brain wins the argument that day.
And then there was the SCCM role from January, the interview this whole chapter opened with. Enterprise device management, a world where I have fifteen years of receipts. The safe one.
All three said no. That's the entire scoreboard update: three interviews I genuinely wanted, three declines, and a growing familiarity with the specific paragraph structure Swedish companies use to deliver one.
And underneath all of it, seven months later, the real scoreboard remains unchanged: zero developer positions applied for. Not one. The man who runs a SaaS with actual paying users, who ships open source apps in Rust, who writes a blog about software - that man still cannot bring himself to type "developer" into an application form.
In January I gave it a name: the voice. Status update seven months later - the voice still clocks in every morning. Somebody around here has to.
About those open DMs
Speaking of the voice: the January post ended with a line I nearly deleted - my DMs on X are always open. It felt like the kind of thing you write to end a vulnerable post gracefully without committing to anything. A fire exit for the feelings.
Someone used it anyway. A reader who recognized himself in the imposter syndrome sections messaged me, and we ended up talking about what it looks like for each of us: how it shows up, when it gets loud, what it costs on a normal Tuesday. We solved nothing. That's not how this thing works. But describing something you find difficult to a stranger and getting back "same, exactly the same" removes a surprising amount of weight. Support doesn't require a solution. Apparently it just requires another person in the room.
He hasn't released anything "serious" yet. Those quotation marks are his, not mine, and they deserve to be challenged: what he showed me was actually a pretty cool project. If the useful thing I did in that conversation was tell him that what he built counts, consider it delivered. Easiest validation I've ever handed out. Partly because I remember exactly how badly I wanted someone to say that to me. Partly because I'm still waiting for someone to say it to me.
New pond, same water
At the end of the January post I wrote that maybe I'd still be treading water, just in a different pond.
I want credit for accidentally writing an accurate forecast. The pond is different. It's the pond I grew up beside, in a town that changed its meadows into roads without consulting me. The water is the same though: still job hunting, still building things nobody asked for, still unable to call myself a developer, still financially supported by the Swedish welfare system's patient belief that I will eventually contribute again.
New life, old town. The new life is still under construction. So is the road where my meadow used to be. Give them both six more months and check back.
Written from an apartment in Alvesta, which is exactly as small as you're imagining. Horsemate lives at horsemate.se and is paid for by the people using it, every krona of which continues straight on to Vercel and Supabase without stopping to say hello. The horses are fine. I checked.