I've been holding this back.
Not the site — the work. For fifteen years I've been the person colleagues quietly came to with their problems. The one with the documentation habit. The one who'd write things down so that someone walking in off the street could follow them and do the job. KISS, as a posture, not a slogan. The "no, I'll just explain how it works" reflex.
I never published any of it.
Some of that was the work environment. In corporate IT, the people who figured something out had a habit of keeping it to themselves. The same people, often, were quick to hijack credit for someone else's solve. I learned that one the hard way more than once. The unwritten rule in that world is: knowledge is a moat, and moats are how you keep your job.
I always thought that was backwards.
I think it now too, with more conviction. The IT version of knowledge-hoarding and the Norwegian version of "don't think you can teach us anything" are the same disease wearing different clothes. Both come from a fear of being passed. Both dress that fear up as humility, or as professionalism. Janteloven and the senior engineer who won't document his runbook are running the same play.
I'm not interested in either one anymore. Janteloven can be on the other side of the fence.
So this is what kenove.no is going to be.
Two posts a week. One Monday digest pulling out what actually mattered from the previous week in AI — not "10 game-changing tools you need" but the small number of things that genuinely shifted how the work feels. One Tuesday walkthrough — a thing I built or fixed, with the prompts I used and the parts that didn't work, written so you could follow it without me. Shorter notes when something is worth saying but isn't a full piece.
I'll be honest about what this is. It is, in part, a repackaging exercise. A lot of what I'll publish in the early months will be ideas you can find scattered across documentation, Twitter threads, and the better corners of the AI-builder internet. The difference I'm aiming for is in nuance, caveat, and pace — not in the hustle frame where everything is "you're missing out on AI" and everyone is shipping a SaaS in a weekend.
You can build an app in a weekend. You probably can't build one with proper data isolation, least-privilege access, and a defensible security posture in a weekend. Softr handles a lot of that quietly, which is why I use it for real work. Most of the weekend-app content skips that question entirely. I'd like us not to skip it.
The reader I have in mind is two people. One is the professional who's tired of the loud takes and wants a slower, more careful perspective. The other is someone just starting out and has no idea where to begin. Fair warning: some of this will be technical. Some won't. We'll figure out the right level as we go. These are rabbit holes, and we're going down them together.
Credit where it's due — Jake Van Clief at Clief Notes and Sabrina Ramonov have been doing this kind of work in a way I respect. I'm not trying to be either of them. I'm bringing fifteen years of IT depth and a slightly more European, slightly slower temperament to the same problem they're working on.
What changed for me, recently, was small.
I decided I don't owe anyone anything. Not the people who taught me Janteloven, not the workplace cultures that rewarded silence, not the version of myself that kept saying "wait." My wife kept pushing. I needed pushing. And I have a daughter now, who's going to grow up watching how I do this. I'd rather she watch me publish than watch me hold back.
The site rebuild that got me here — moving from a Star Trek-themed CV (yes, really) to this — is its own story, and I'll write that one as walkthrough number two. The rebuild was the easy part. This piece, the one you're reading, was the hard one.
If you want the work that follows: subscribe at the bottom. One short note most weeks. No spam.