My name is Casper Helenius.

I was born in Roskilde, Denmark, in 1975, and I grew up in a typical 70’ies nuclear family with my 6 year older brother, Jacob, and my mom, Sonja and my dad, Torben.

Around the age of 6, my dad won a Sinclair ZX-81 with an extended memory module. This was a real eye-opener. I understood nothing, and yet I could do almost anything. The two-color, giant pixel screen with the dark, blinking cursor in the lower left corner still is imprinted in my mind. A few years later, my dad brought home the first PC, an 8086-based gigantic computer with a massive harddrive of 20Megs capacity.

At this point, I was determined: I would be working with computers!

And so it came to pass. Despite my moms insistence that I would not give up my dancing lessons, and my dads insistence that I would keep playing in Roskilde Garden – the local marching band – it was always the computer I turned to when I got home. Oh, I did keep on dancing and I did keep on playing, and eventually, I turned out really good at all three things in my life.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons – the pen-and-paper-kind – at the age of around 13. We were a handfuld of guys playing together, and we spent most of our teenage years together with AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, Werewolf, Warhammer and other such games. We also did a lot of computer related stuff, and at the age of about 15, I ventured off into LAN-party-land, a regularly returning event that would bring us and out individual friends quite close together over the years.

I skated through gymnasium (the danish equivalent to high school) without anyone ever noticing that I was tech savvy. I was the loner, yet not the outsider, who did not follow the group but trod down my own path. I played a bunch of music, did the yearly musical and otherwise stayed off the drugs and booze my class mates felt and talked so highly about. No, I did not ace it, so you could say that I might as well just have partied along, since I got mostly below average grades anyway.

Almost immediately after graduation, I started working in the IT business, as a data entry assistant and verifier, as an unskilled technician and later, after I finished my education as a computer mechanic, I started working as a java developer within the medical industry. I have worked as a developer ever since, with a single years break were I sharpened my Linux Administrative skills.

Back on the development track, I picked up Java again, and spent years working in telekom and then banking, working in the credit area.

As of 2020, the Year of Big Changes, I decided to finally take a step away from development, and picked up a role as scrum master – along with the title of senior software developer, as I am still slinging my technical knowledge around while wrangling cats and developers in fintech. This is still the case in late 2024 🙂

When not doing computers, I roll dice and I write.

I currently live close to my hometown, Roskilde, Denmark, with my wife, Sara. The kids have grown, some have moved out, others are studying across the country. Life sure passes by in a flash 🙂 However, these 5 people are still the most precious to me.