About

Born.

My mother encouraged me to study hard and my dad taught me to work hard. Extremely valuable guidelines for life!

Had the opportunity to start using computers at my elementary school. Windows NT & 95 PCs with no restrictions. Great for learning stuff.

Got my first own PC; Played a lot of NHL 97, Age of Empires 1 and Action Quake 2. Also tinkered a lot with the OS so I had to format C:\ quite many times…

Won a Corel Draw 9 graphic software license from a raffle organized by a Finnish computer magazine Mikrobitti (which funnily is part of Alma Media where I now work); That software blew my mind and got me started with graphic design.

Built my first website with Netscape Composer for my elementary school during 6th grade with my classmate.

Junior High School. Hated it.

Lot of miscellaneous web development & graphic design work (both print & digital).

Started using IRC.

High School. Loved it!

Built my first “dynamic” personal website - with “advanced stuff” like dynamic nested subsections and a guestbook a visitor could write on. Coded by hand. Big thanks to Finnish PHP-guide Mureakuha.

Built my first brand new PC from components myself, dual boot with Windows & Gentoo Linux; After breaking the Gentoo installation too many times, I switched between Suse & Fedora and few years later settled on Ubuntu. You can find the specs on my old 2004 website. For my early-age Linux hobby, a big thanks goes to raja-antura.org and later kapsi.fi websites.

Acted as “village PC support”, making few bucks here and there: Basically fixing virus-infected & broken Windows installations and correcting invalid TSV/CSV-data that farmers used to upload to some weird proprietary web app to later receive EU agricultural subsidy money or something like that.

Turned 18 and got my driving license which helped at attending LAN parties! I also organized multiple LAN parties myself with ~40 attendees.

Worked as a techical support person (PC/Windows) for Finnish Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners.

DJing in High School discos.

Worked in a Newspaper Printing House. During the years I basically worked throughout the web offset printing process: From pre-press computer-to-plate, to newspaper printing itself with Solna G150 and post-press tasks.

Nine month Conscript Military Service in Finnish Defence Forces, served as Graphic Designer in Finnish National Defense University. Discharged as Lance Corporal.

Built my first JS+PHP+WordPress powered website. Since then I've built dozens of those. Nowadays I try to heavily avoid PHP.

Media Technology bachelor's studies in Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. Never really graduated, but definitely the best part of the school was getting great friends and being able to go to student exchange!

Erasmus Student Exchange period in Fachhochschule Salzburg (Austria). There I studied Multimedia Art & Technology. It was my first time abroad and flying to a new country for a 7 month stay even without having an apartment there taught me things tend to work themselves out (if you let them and stay positive)!

After ~6 years of running PCs with Linux operating systems, I started to “Think Different” (switched to mainly Macs).

Started working at Iltalehti (Alma Media) as a Frontend Developer for Telkku.com which at the time was 10th biggest website in Finland. Later I heard that some of the main reasons I was chosen instead of other candidates was that I had put up a properly working portfolio website online and for the recruitment interview I made a single button with CSS, one that used the latest and greatest CSS3 features at the time, but one that also - with various dirty hacks - worked great with the worst browsers such as IE 6, Nokia Symbian browsers and really old Samsung flip phones. Cool beans.

Since the rest of the Telkku team developed with Linux-machines and my development machine was a Mac, one of my initial tasks was to “wrap” the development enviroment into virtual machine using VirtualBox, Vagrant and Puppet; I still feel this was one of the main reasons I later on started with infrastructure as code.

Started to regularly attend to HelsinkiJS meetups. HelsinkiJS was the biggest monthly developer meetup in Finland. By attending these events I learned a massive amount about web development from my peers and also made some friends!

Working with some of the biggest websites in Finland, I got a lot of experience in short time and with it a lot more responsibilities. Job role transitioned from Frontend Developer to Fullstack Developer and finally to Senior Developer within Alma Media

First time I myself launched an AWS EC2 instance. I had no idea what I was doing, but anyway.

Started working with AWS EC2 and Beanstalk with Ansible & CloudFormation.

Jumped into ReactJS bandwagon early on by rewriting Telkku.com frontend with ReactJS v0.13 and universal/isomorphic rendering on top of ExpressJS/NodeJS.

Held my first public meetup talk in HelsinkiJS meetup and I was super nervous! I am still nervous always before a talk, but it gets easier with experience. For anyone looking to improve in public speaking I can warmly recommend this book.

Applied and was chosen to Solution Architect position at Alma Media. This was a big step up for me personally as it required a lot of effort and growth to be able to fill that role. For example, I spent countless evenings and nights studying AWS tools (focusing especially on CloudFormation, CloudFront, S3, Beanstalk and Lambda).

Multiple conference & meetup talks.

We started the annual “Alma Developer” -program at Alma, where we recruit developer trainees (which we hire as full-time employees after the 9 month trainee period). We have hired over 50 new employees via Alma Developer -program since then and almost all of them are still working at Alma! I have been heading marketing, program content and the intensive training for the program.

I deployed my first serverless API into production at scale, receiving hundreds of millions requests per month. It was just few NodeJS-based Lambda functions behind an API Gateway defined with AWS SAM, but at the time it was a big step up for me.

Built couple AWS projects with Terraform.

Attended AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Oh boy, that was something else!

Completed my first AWS associate certification. This was a huge goal for me personally, since I've always felt like an impostor working with cloud & backends since I have a background in frontend development.

I've always been actively sharing stuff in Slack and face-to-face, but around this time I started more actively sharing best practises and useful resources internally within Alma. One could call it “in-house developer advocacy”.

Started using AWS CDK in production.

Built systems with almost billion requests a month in total on top of AWS cloud with serverless technologies and infrastructure as code (with CDK).

Had completed all AWS associate and professional certifications, with one AWS specialty certificate and one GCP associate certificate.

Got to visit Amazon Web Services offices in Seattle, USA. Had some great discussions with many AWS specialists and product teams.

AWS released “The Journey to Serverless-First: Enterprise Stories” -whitepaper which features Alma Media as one of the customers alongside iRobot and Fender. I was part of the creation process on behalf of Alma.

Definitely one of the highlights of the year was having the opportunity to speak at AWS Community Day Nordics 2020 at Stockholm. After that talk, there was almost 2 year gap until next in-person event due to Covid-19.

The 2020 Stockholm Community Day holds a special place in my heart as it was the largest event so far where I got to speak and more importantly there I got to know a lot of fantastic people like Anahit Pogosova & Anurag Kale!

Promoted to Lead Technologist in Alma Media.

Recognized by AWS as a Community Builder in the Dev Tools category!

Extra bragging rights due to being part of the first invite-only group of people!

At AWS re:Invent again! And this time as an AWS Community Builder!

I was selected to be part of “Future Leaders” -program: Twenty-or-so of us participants learned about being a better leader from the fantastic trainers Ester & Martin, Alma Media corporation's top executives, and of course from each others. Besides the top notch training, the opportunity to bond with others during 11 intensive days spent in Helsinki, Bratislava and Prague made the experience unforgettable.

Started working with a large Cloud Migration project with our Alma Career organization around Eastern Central Europe. Spent total 3 months in Prague, Czechia, just in 2023.