Hello! It's Henry!

Language is magic to me. Loved it as long as I can remember. For me the whole software thing has always been an extension of that rather than a passion in its own right. Code is like if you took a human language and gave it a gun and an energy drink. In a good way.

Even my accessibility work comes back to that. It’s like a way to share that love of language. Particularly screen readers. A designer spends a day in Figma and then an engineer turns that into a React component, and neither of them think of what they’re doing as a form of language until you show them how a screen reader announces what they’ve made. Then sometimes you get to see the look in their eyes as the realization dawns that every UI element, regardless of its layout and color, is also a sentence.

When MixRadio shut down, back in 2016, I knew immediately it was my last job in the UK. After a few interviews the decision came down to a job in Barcelona and a job in Stockholm. Language was a factor then too. I already spoke Spanish, so learning Swedish was a more exciting challenge than Catalan.

Sweden’s full of futuristic sci-fi words unheard of in the UK, like “bike lane” and “paid parental leave”. The place has really grown on me, especially since moving from Stockholm to Malmö. Over half the population of Malmö has at least one parent born abroad. Nowhere's ever felt more like home.