Gaming as a gateway to coding

From the very beginning, years ████ to 1999

My first experience with a personal computer was some years before entering school. Unlike a lot of people of my age, it was not with the famous Commodore 64, but a more forgettable x86 PC of some kind. My computer literacy as a pre-schooler was limited to typing a few memorised commands to its UI MS DOS , most often in order to run Bubble Bobble . I played the game incessantly, so at some point my big brother blocked me from playing the game by renaming its executable. When I finally got him to tell me the "password" to start the game, I wrote it down to a note, never to be forgotten. And indeed, I still remember that aefthukn is the command to start Bubble Bobble.

Games became a major influence for me, and sparked my interest in coding. After making a racing game using Visual Basic with my cousin (in which you could make buttons move by clicking them), I spent some time learning BASIC in order to code a maze game with a friend in primary school. While the friend — a year older to me — went on building an impressive drawing program in BASIC, I mostly played with Visual Basic. At high school I decided to ask my parents to help me buy Visual Studio 6.0 and a book C++ ja olio-ohjelmointi ("C++ and object-oriented programming") in order to get into more serious game programming. While the former became just one of many tools I was getting familiar with, the latter built a solid base for my programming skills and a strong opinion about the superiority of object-oriented paradigm (to be later replaced with a all-encompassing advice "it depends").

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The Internet dream(weaver) awakens

Senior high, from 1999 to 2002

Web archive screenshot from the first commercial website I built for a local car dealer

While making games had taken its place as my ultimate goal for learning programming, I started to dabble with building things for the internet and creating my own websites. C++ turned out to be less than ideal for the web, so I quickly started looking for more suitable tools (although I later tried building an IRC bot and a simple web server with C++). After learning to use applications such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver , and getting familiar with languages like HTML and CSS, I built my first commercial website for a local car dealer. Eventually, that led to building several web-based systems for them in the coming decade. It also gave me a nudge to start learning more about the web in general, how it works, and how we can get the most out of it.

In the following years I started working occasionally for my father's company, providing technical support and doing small coding tasks for his clients such as the car dealer above. For example, combining my experience with VB and the web, I used VBA to automate data retrieval processes between Excel spreadsheets and external systems. It was probably the first times for me to build any kind of system integration. There is a certain excitement in making two systems talk to each other that is unique, I wonder if it has something to do with making existing systems work together to do more than what they were built to do. As I soon learned, integrating systems also has its unique challenges, which I have continued to learn about throughout my career.

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The University years begin

From entering university at 2002 to about 2006

When it was time to decide what to do after graduating upper secondary school, I took the easy choice of applying to a university that was in my home city Jyväskylä. The course I selected was Information Systems Science, where I could continue to learn about programming, and start to build more theoretical understanding about software engineering as a whole. For the first year, I thrived in the challenging environment and took as many classes as I possibly could. My experience in programming helped me to stay on top of the practical side of the studies, and I was extremely interested in learning about the rest, especially anything about software engineering methodologies. I started learning about Waterfall, RUP , UML – and my new sage, XP . While learning new languages like Java and Delphi was interesting, I found myself most fascinated by more theoretical parts such as object-oriented design, database design and architecture.

In the second year, however, I started to wonder if the road I had chosen would take me to my goal, which was still to be a game programmer. The university course was heavy on theory and didn't have many classes specifically for building games. When my cousin with similar goals was applying to university and chose one in Tampere that was more suitable for game programming career, I decided to apply as well. We ended up starting our course in Tampere University of Technology (now part of Tampere University ) at the same time in 2004. But during my studies there, I ended up leaning more towards methodologies and architecture instead of game-specific classes, and found topics like computer graphics challenging and not as interesting as I had anticipated. By the time we had to choose our major, I had come to a conclusion that game programming was not for me. I loved playing games more than ever, and I did contribute some code to game projects that my cousin was working on, but I had found my passion elsewhere.

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Growing into a web developer

Somewhere between 2004 and 2007

During my studies in high school and at the university, I continued learning web development in my free time, and built more and more complicated web systems, sometimes making some extra money from it. One of the most educational experiences was building my own web framework. I had learned more about frontend and backend technologies, and PHP had become my main language on the server-side (after short spurts with SSI and PERL via CGI). The first version of the framework formed naturally: I took common functionality of various websites I had built and put them in a form that can be easily re-used, and then expanded it into a template for new websites. The second version was built more purposefully, and I used the experience from previous websites to make sure it is configurable and extendable to support all the necessary use cases. After using the framework to build several websites and updating it to adapt to new needs, I began to realise the amount of work it required. That is the kind of experience that has made me appreciate the frameworks and their developers now that I'm smart enough to not build my own.

The same car dealer website in 2013

The PHP framework I adopted after moving away from my own was Yii . It served me well for a long time, and I didn't see a need to switch to something else, even after trying out popular ones like Drupal, CakePHP and Symphony. Later on, I would learn a lot more about all the different aspects of selecting a framework. Most of them are not easily visible when working by myself on websites that don't require frequent updates, but they become more evident when considering work in a team of diverse professionals, recruitment challenges, complex deployment pipelines, support and maintenance and so on.

At a later stage of my university studies, it became clear that I wanted to dedicate most of my time to work with the internet and online systems of some sort. I chose hypermedia as my major, as I was interested in the theoretical aspects of modelling networks of data as well as the applied aspect of implementing systems using hypermedia tools. I might not use RDF or OWL much nowadays, but they were an important part in building my understanding about semantic data and markup languages, as well as the W3C and various standartization processes of web technologies.

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Growing into an adult human

From world travels in 2007 until graduation at 2010

So far I had lived in a relative safety of my home country, in a relative ease of doing mostly things that I was comfortable with and relatively good at. However, my growing interest in Japan through anime was pulling me in a different direction. Before I knew it, I was taking Japanese lessons, and with a little push from my big brother, I was on a plane, on my way to Tohoku University in Sendai. Ahead of me was a full year as an exchange student, a completely new and unfamiliar environment and a completely different lifestyle. The journey began with a week of solo travelling before the start of the semester. From the second I landed in Tokyo, I felt the nervousness turn into excitement and then into a elated sense of wonder. Over a decade later, I started to understand myself enough to see the pattern: I thrive when exploring unfamiliar terrain and facing the unknown.

The year in Japan taught me many things, but most importantly for this story, it taught me to work (and live) with different people. I didn't improve much in my programming skills or gain knowledge of the latest features in languages and frameworks. Instead, I worked in a signal processing lab where I gave presentations (some in English, some in Japanese), talked daily to people from very different fields and many different countries, learned about Japanese culture with Japanese people and fellow foreigners, experienced being an outsider, and supported each other in the dorm room and class room. Because of that, I can better understand different people, and that makes me a better software engineer.

During my time in Japan, I also found kendo , a martial art based on Japanese sword fighting techniques and samurai spirit. I joined one of the university kendo clubs where my roommate practiced, and I was hooked by the friendliness of all the club members as much as kendo itself. Soon they became a group of friends unlike anything I had experienced before, and I dedicated a lot of my time and even more of my focus into kendo and the club during the exchange year. Starting kendo put me in a path of growing myself in a very different way, which I have found to be invaluable. Now after 16 years of practicing, it is an inseparable part of me. Explaining how kendo has affected me would be an essay of its own, but some of the most important things include building confidence, coaching others and respecting every encounter. These come from seeing myself improve, taking part in competitions and gradings, receiving and giving feedback, travelling to kendo events, and eventually teaching classes of both beginner and advanced kendo practioners.

After returning to Finland, the remainder of my university time consisted mostly of bigger group projects and the MSc Thesis. The group work gave me a glimpse into working on an actual project with a set goal and a team to achieve that goal, whereas the thesis required an academic approach with the associated background research and a rigorous writing process. I decided to write my thesis in English to showcase and improve my written language skill level. In summer 2010, I graduated from Tampere University of Technology with a Master of Science in Tehnology degree, a major in Hypermedia and a minor in Software Engineering.

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Start of a software professional's career

Working for University of Tampere from 2010 to 2014

After graduating from university, I wanted to deal with the general conscription, which is required for most men in Finland before they turn 30. As a pacifist, military service was out of question for me, so I applied for non-military service in University of Tampere (now part of Tampere University). I was accepted and joined the Tampere Research Center for Information and Media (TRIM) in summer 2010. I took part in several research projects, usually assisting the researchers in interviews, transcriptions and write-ups, while gradually drifting towards tasks where I could better apply my software knowledge. After co-authoring a guide for selecting a wiki tool , I moved to a project called Opeka. The work with Opeka became the main part of my responsibilities at University of Tampere, and allowed me to move from my one year of non-military service placement into a full-time job as a software engineer.

While working at University of Tampere, I had several smaller projects aside Opeka. These included for example a prototype application for viewing multiple social media streams on a multi-touch surface table SUR40, and a message wall displaying SMS and Twitter messages in a conference setting. The four years working in the research group taught me a lot about the challenges of university research, and gave me a chance to take a lot of responsibility, not just for the software I was building but also for finding and solving problems in the wider context.

The message wall service I worked on at the university kicked off a spin-off project with a company that was interested in the idea. While still working at the university for most of the time, I took a part time job at Mediamaisteri in 2012 to further develop and market it as a service called Conexting and later Conex First. I did several trips around Finland with our sales representative to demonstrate the service to various organisations, while developing it based on the discussions we had with clients. In my time at Mediamaisteri, I implemented a self-service version of the service with payment integration, and some custom deployments for bigger clients.

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Early career freelancing and personal projects

During spare time all the way from 1999 until about 2017 (and still sometimes)

Ever since I built my first website at the end of the 90s, I have done various freelance projects to build websites and other web-based systems aside my day job, university studies or school responsibilities. Some of the systems have been for paying clients, others for various personal projects, but all of them have helped me to learn more about web development.

The first car dealer website I built grew into several websites for sister companies in early 2000s, with an integration to on-premise sales system (and later to an external SaaS offering the company migrated to). Used car stock was displayed in real-time on the website, and the sales staff could use a back-office tool to enrich the online view with details that the on-premise system didn't support. In addition to the website, I also built an online calendar system in 2004 for arranging meetings, tracking holidays, booking meeting rooms and various other requirements that were discovered along the way. The calendar was in active use for over ten years, and still had some uses after 15 years since its conception, making it my second-longest living online creation. Which brings me to the one in the first place...

One of the bigger freelancing projects was kuvapankki.org, which I did for a friend of a friend who was looking for someone to implement their idea of a stock photo gallery for professional photographers. The core functionality was a photo search based on tags that the photographers could set for photos they uploaded to the service. Anyone could browse the photos online, and registered buyers could select the photos they wanted and send a purchase request through the website. The UI had to be impressive and give a streamlined experience for users, so it was designed together with the client. One of the additional technical challenges was adding a watermark to the images to discourage using them without permission.

Photo search page in kuvapankki.org

The kuvapankki.org project led to a number of smaller projects, as some of the photographers that were part of it asked me to help with their personal websites and online portfolios. These were small but interesting projects as the focus was quite different from what I was used to: instead of focusing on user experience and conveying information efficiently, photographer portfolios were intended to represent the individual characteristics and style of the photographer as accurately as possible. I set aside my idea of a "proper" website and worked on them in a very client-led way. Although I think there was nothing wrong with that approach at the time, nowadays I would probably make more effort to apply good practices from my field and dive deeper to understand the essence of what the client wants.

ITK conference website front page in 2016

Another larger freelance project was a web system for ITK, a yearly conference in Finland with over a thousand participants and hundreds of submissions to the Call For Papers (CFP). I first worked on the online conference programme as part of my job at University of Tampere, but later built a more comprehensice conference management system that included receiving CFP submissions, managing their peer review and approval process, planning and building the conference programme and an attendee tool for building a personalized conference schedule. The system was built together with the conference organizers, and was a key part in managing the conference between 2012 and 2017. It was built with PHP on top of Yii, HTML and CSS with various UI functions built with JavaScript, and a MySQL data storage.

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Changing the scenery - Moving abroad

Life in Leicester in 2013 and in Aberdeen from 2014 to 2019

In the fall of 2013, life started pulling me to a new direction as I moved "temporarily" to the UK. For some time, I continued working remotely for University of Tampere, but by the following summer, the visit to UK started to look less and less temporary. As my partner was accepted to the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, I started looking for work in Aberdeen. With my lucky choice of career, finding a job in a foreign country was not a major challenge, and I ended up landing a Software Engineer role at Codify (now Sword Codify ).

Codify was the first company where I was surrounded by other software engineers. At the time we were about 25 people in total, 20 of whom were software engineers by trade. Because of that, most of the people I talked with on daily basis had a similar way of thinking, which was convenient for smooth communication, but not ideal for diversity of viewpoints. This was mitigated by making sure (almost) every engineer was talking to the client and/or end-users. The responsibility of an engineer was much more than just implementing what was asked for. Especially after some significant managerial changes, engineers were involved in projects all the way, starting from the sales discussions and scoping of the project. For me it was a much-needed and welcome change, and I enjoyed talking to clients about their problem and discussing together how we could solve them.

I spent over five years at Codify, covering all of my time in Aberdeen. The technologies used in earlier projects were mainly WPF, WCF and ASP.NET MVC, with MSSQL being the go-to database solution. After the first couple of years I started to crave for more web-focused projects, so I considered switching companies, but the director at the time convinced me to stay by giving me responsibilities that were a better fit for my interests and goals. I started looking into a SPA framework called Aurelia , and eventually became a major force to drive the adaptation of modern web technologies by building necessary tooling and helping other developers, earning the title of Senior Software Engineer in 2017 to match the role. Our projects were also increasingly starting to utilize Azure, which was an extremely interesting set of services. My interest in modern technologies got boosted further by events and conferences I was able to attend, for example NDC in Oslo and London and Azure Dev Tour in London. Some applications I built utilized OAuth and OpenID Connect with Azure AD B2C for logging in, which allowed me to gain more specialized knowledge about authentication and authorization protocols for the web.

Several of the applications I worked on at Codify were focused on novel data visualizations. One of them was a tool that allowed visualizing and tagging a 3D environment based on a set of point cloud scenes generated from high-accuracy 360 degree photographs. I worked a bit on the main desktop application, but I was mostly focused on the web version that we started developing at the time. The browser application used WebGL-based three.js library to provide the 3D visualization using data from the API of the main application, without having to install anything on the end-user's machine. Another example of a system with a data visualization focus was an online ship route planning tool that used detailed ship schedules to animate the ships moving on a map over the globe, and detected if there was a risk of collision. The map was displayed using Leaflet and OpenStreetMap .

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Focusing on IAM in the Scottish capital

Settling in Edinburgh, from 2019 to 2022

Edinburgh Castle from the south side of the Castle Hill

The work at Codify and the direct interaction with clients was rewarding, but over the years I started to want something bigger, more challenging, more risk-taking. Moving away from Aberdeen to Edinburgh in 2019 worked for me as a trigger to look for a new opportunity. I spent a couple of months working remotely for Codify while researching local software companies and interviewing for several interesting options. Soon I landed on Condatis , an identity-focused branch of Sitekit (later separating into its own separate corporate entity), as a senior software developer. One of the main draws of the position was an opportunity to work with some cutting-edge identity technologies. The fact that it involved blockchain was not that interesting in itself, but it showed that the company portrayed itself as modern and ready to take some risks.

Little did I know what was waiting for all of us in 2020, when everyone had to suddenly switch to 100% remote working. Software companies were overall less disrupted by the pandemic, and Condatis was especially lucky as many of the processes were already remote-first. Still, the time spent on calls took a toll on everyone, especially on managers who often had to spend the whole day wearing headphones and staring at a person on screen who was never quite looking at your eyes.

For the first year at Condatis, the projects I worked on revolved around Azure AD B2C, and I spent some time learning the XML structure and syntax for configuring custom policies for B2C user journeys. The first system I spend a considerable amount of time involved several different custom policies created in the early days of AAD B2C before it was generally availabe. With added complexities such as a Salesforce integration using a proxy ASP.NET Web API and Azure DevOps pipelines that were in less than ideal state, making even small changes was either risky, time-consuming, or both. Together with another recently joined engineer we convinced the client and Condatis to dedicate some resources for making the solution a bit more robust, explaining that we would already see the benefits during the most urgent, ongoing changes.

After several projects on B2C, in fall of 2020, I got an opportunity to get involved in work that Condatis was doing around a fairly revolutionary idea called Decentralized Identity (also referred to as Self-Sovereign Identity). While the company had worked with similar techonlogy previously, it was now dedicating considerable resources to become one of the leading companies in the area. In the beginning I worked on a few prototypes, and started familiarising myself with the technology and its applications. As a very new technology, there were not many easy-to-digest resources available, so my main sources of learning were the draft W3C documents (now official recommendations Decentralised Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials Data Model ), RFCs for projects such as Hyperledger Aries , and the examples and documentation provided by some companies that offered services utilising Decentralized Identity.

Condatis started to put more and more emphasis on Decentralised Identity expertise, and as one of the most passionate developers in that area, I was keen to share my knowledge within and outside the company. I co-hosted webinars and wrote some blog posts, as much to solidify my own learning as to help others learn. In 2021 I became the Lead Developer in the team building Condatis's Decentralised Identity service and customizing it for clients. My role was more and more about planning how to implement new features, making sure they were undestood across the team, and helping with particularly tricky parts of the implementation.

As a lead developer, I was given line management responsibilities for two direct reports. The role of a line manager consisted mainly of personal support outside the day-to-day technical role and some administrative tasks. I thoroughly enjoy coaching and helping people to learn and advance in their journey as a software engineer, but I found it difficult to see how I would be the right person to offer them the people-focused support they deserve. However, I took part in the management course that was offered, and did my best to help my direct reports in my own way.

I also worked on a small project where the idea was to use Microsoft's decentralized identity stack to build a proof of concept for issuing student cards, degree transcripts and training certificates. Together with people from Microsoft and the client, we planned, designed and delivered the PoC. It was exciting to work directly with Microsoft's representatives and be part of an important project to showcase their technology.

While working at Condatis, I was very vocal about the issues I saw in the processes and ways of working, in much of the same way as I was at Codify. I had several discussions with the company leadership where I would give earnest feedback (about the system, never about individuals) and highlight what I thought were the painpoints that held back myself and the team from delivering better results. Whether the issues were engineering-related or stemmed from business priorities, I felt the need to bring them up to drive positive change.

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Academia strikes back: Freelancing to support a research project

From 2018 to 2023

While working at Codify, I started a side project supporting my partner's research at the University of Aberdeen. This lead to a development of several applications and an interesting research collaboration, as they continued on the topic as a PhD project at the University of Edinburgh.

Kindle study landing page with instructions

Related to the same PhD project, I developed another web application. It was used for collecting data from participants who agreed to donate their Amazon Kindle reading logs for the research. Once the correct log file was uploaded, the application parsed some basic details from it, combined it to and asked additional questions about the books that the participant had spend the most time with. The application was buit with Blazor WebAssembly and deployed to Azure, benefiting from services such as Blob Storage, Table Storage and Key Vault. Similarly to the e-reader, the development was done in collaboration with the researcher.

After the data collection for the projects was completed and the applications were no longer used, I set up simplified versions for demonstrating their functionality and design. The goal of these preview versions was to allow showing the application without having to set up a whole new environment each time, while keeping the running costs minimal, ideally free. I decided to use Vercel to run the front-end. I created a stub API for the e-reader using Edge Functions to allow myself to learn something new along the way.

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The end of the expat

The final years of living in the UK from 2022 to 2023

Although the technology we worked with at Condatis was exciting, I started to yearn for an environment where the organisation structure and the ways of working were continuously improved and that strived for the best possible ways of solving problems and creating solutions. Having followed the likes of Martin Fowler and Tim Ottinger , I wanted to be able to learn every day from people who are equally passionate about changing things for better. Therefore, after nearly three years at Condatis, I started to look for other opportunities. Sooner than I realised, I had gotten swept up in an interview process for a quickly growing software consultancy Infinity Works . Reading about their delivery approach and engineering culture in general got me convinced that it was a role worth pursuing. And in summer 2022, I started the job as a Senior Consultant at Infinity Works.

One of the main changes technology-wise at Infinity Works was switching the cloud platform focus from Azure to AWS. During the first couple of months, I joined an internal product team building a prototype with React and AWS services such as Lambda, S3 and Cognito. I also went through a course to prepare for AWS certification, and obtained my AWS Certified Developer Associate certificate. The work with the client allowed me to gather more practical experience with AWS, including Cloud Formation and CDK, DynamoDB, Fargate and ELB, as well Okta, Auth0, Splunk, Jenkins and my old friend Salesforce.

My role at Infinity Works was more clearly an individual contributor and I didn't have any explicit management or lead responsibilities. However, when I rolled on the client, I soon started to look outside my team responsibilities to better understand the bigger picture. After noticing several areas with some room for improvement, such as cross-team communication, which affected my team as well as the overall goals of the client, I started to put more effort in making the client aware of the issues. While focusing mainly on the day-to-day development, I tried to help to keep the momentum going with the activities aiming to improve the ways of working. Although I think I did make a difference together with the Infinity Works team that worked with the client, I started to pile up the same fatigue as I did at Condatis when I felt I was spearheading the changes that were necessary. After just about a year, in summer 2023, I left Infinity Works in favour of focusing on myself and finding out what I really want to do next.

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The next chapter

From fall 2013 until {new Date().getFullYear()}

Ever since I came across Lean Service Creation from Futurice, I have felt a pull towards Finnish companies that are in the forefront of modern software building practices. Many companies of various sizes in Finland seem to have a strong focus on sustainability in all of its aspects, from employee well-being to software maintainability to environmental sustainability, without letting it all dwindle in search for maximizing profits. Feeling that I want to be part of it and see the reality of it myself, I am ready to come back after spending a decade abroad.

The last part of my history starts when I move back to Finland, but that part is yet to be written, as it is yet to be lived. I have spent a couple of months looking into opportunities in Finland, trying to find a company that could truly be the place where I can feel that I belong, and where I can change and grow every day. The ultimate goal I have for my career is to learn, and as long as I'm learning about things that I feel passionate about, I am sure to be on the right path.

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