Meet Michael. He's a Tech Lead.

Codename: Greenfield

I work as a Tech Lead in a department called the Digital Accelerator. I’m responsible for setting the technical direction in a project, and ensuring that we deliver the best possible product we can from a technical point of view. It's a very interesting space to work in as you can make a direct difference for patients suffering from chronic diseases and make their lives better.

Working in a heavily regulated industry, such as ours, also forces a focus on quality and traceability, which can be a positive thing for developers, as it helps you prioritise time for testing and the overall quality of the product. 

Yihaa!

♞ My oldest daughter has been horseback riding since she was 6. She has now persuaded me to also start horseback riding once the other two kids are a bit older…

Work

Remover of repetitive processes

My time is divided between hands on product development and engaging with a wide range of subject matter experts covering security, compliance, cloud platform engineers, business stakeholders and other tech leads throughout the organisation. Working across the organisation with these stakeholders is a key part of my role, because it ensures that I can leverage their knowledge to get the best solutions for our product – and by still being in touch with the code base, I am better able to determine which directions or modifications are right for us.

A recent project I worked on was creating a Natural Language Processing model that can identify similarities and dependencies between different compliance documents, and it can visualise these graphically. Previously, end-users were required to read through a large number of documents and then manually determine which ones they think relate to the same areas. The new model essentially fully automates that cumbersome, error-prone and repetitive process. From a technical point of view, it is a very elegant solution, very scalable, and easy to manage. We run it entirely in the cloud, utilising Azure serverless components. 

Joining

The factors

To be honest, before joining, Novo Nordisk had never popped up in my head when I was thinking about new potential work places as a software developer. I was familiar with the company knowing it as a pharmaceutical company, and as such, a place for mechanical engineers, lab technicians, researchers etc, but not as a place for developers.

But there were two deciding factors that led me to joining Novo Nordisk. The first was the technological opportunities in working on greenfield software with the latest technologies available – and also joining a strong, empowered team where we are allowed to choose the solutions that fit our needs the best. This means that we work with a lot of the newest cloud offerings, for example Azure AI Services, when they make sense for the product.

The other reason was that Novo Nordisk follows the 'triple bottom line' concept, where they evaluate business decisions not solely based on finances but also on social and environmental considerations. I feel better working for a company where the direction set isn't solely profit-driven, but evaluated more holistically. 

Tech

Serving the serverless

I typically work in the Azure and .NET ecosystem for hosting and backend, and Vue3 with Typescript for the frontend. In the cloud I aim to make everything as serverless as possible to make the maintenance job easier and to increase the scalability of applications. This means I often end up using managed services such as Function Apps and CosmosDB as the backbone of the application. And when needed, I use services such as EventHub and SignalR for data delivery between services and to the end user in the browser.

We also have a significant focus on Observability and Test Automation in Novo Nordisk which means that we often leverage options like OpenTelemetry – recently, I’ve been using the Grafana stack LGTM for data collection and visualisation – for Observability and Playwright for end-to-end test automation. 

Coding path

␥ Learning my first programming language Java at DTU in 2006 ␥ Learning C# at DTU ␥ Taking my first Microsoft Certification in 2010 during my M.Sc. ␥ Developing a Smart Home simulation tool in C# as my M.Sc. thesis and publishing a paper on it ␥ Starting from scratch with native cloud services before developing a fully serverless application for production at Novo Nordisk ␥ Getting my first Microsoft Azure Certification

In private

❤ I live with my partner and our three kids in a house in Roskilde, outside Copenhagen.