Howdy, I'm Juhani

picture of the author

I am a Software Developer based in Helsinki, Finland. Currently I am working at publicly listed Finnish digital service business and media company, Alma Media.

I have been a professional programmer for ten years, building on my Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and my prior experience as a hobbyist programmer. However, I believe that my commitment to continuous learning has been the key to developing a deep understanding of programming, web development concepts and processes, and the related business aspects.

This site is my weekend long project to create a mini-CV in cyberspace.

This PDF document is printed from my personal website.

Experience #

Tech Lead

Alma Media Oyj
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I work strongly between business and technology. I have a clear business focus - developing business entities to which I bring a technology perspective. Making sure that the technical implementation meets the needs of the business and that the work is prioritized appropriately is one of my key responsibilities.

I have been involved in several acquisitions doing technical due diligence and long-term integration planning, with familiarity in buy vs. build decisions. I have conducted technical interviews, successfully been part of building multiple teams, and managed multiple concurrent software projects, coordinating the efforts of several teams.

As a Tech Lead, I am responsible for the overall architecture, technology solutions, technical backlog and working methods together with my team. I remain "hands-on", actively contributing to all parts of the software development and deployment lifecycle, programming on a daily basis. See Projects section.

My role requires a combination of excellent hands-on technical skills, understanding of the big picture, business-oriented thinking with a focus on value and strong communication.

Software Developer

Alma Media Oyj
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Designed, developed and maintained dozens of browser-based B2B applications and infrastructure around them running on AWS and on-prem, including code reviews, documentation, mentoring team members and internal support.

The work involved client-side programming with JavaScript/TypeScript, and React, as well as server-side development using Java, Spring, TypeScript, Node.js and Python. Databases such as PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and others were used.

Experienced in a variety of operational tasks such as Bash scripting, Docker, CI/CD, IaC, creating test plans, monitoring and alerts, troubleshooting network problems, and utilizing HAProxy and Nginx, among other operational necessities.

Leveraged a wide range of AWS technologies - including CloudFormation, CloudFront, IAM, serverless solutions, ECS, EC2, ELB, RDS, VPC, and more - to design and build secure, high-availability IT systems.

Software Developer

Solita Oy

Designed and developed new features across various types of applications.

Tech: React, JavaScript, Java, Spring, SQL.

Projects #

This section highlights a few overlapping projects from recent years, representing only a portion of my work during this time.

Map Product

Alma Media Oyj

I worked as a Tech Lead on a front-end map project, where I designed and programmed geospatial solutions using OGC standards like WMS, WFS, and WMTS. I handled both vector and raster data, implemented geospatial indexing, or geohashing, and caching to optimize performance of front-end user experience. I also utilized spatial databases for efficient querying, and used tools like Python, GeoPandas and ETL jobs for data processing. All of this was implemented in AWS.

Front-End Product

Alma Media Oyj
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I worked as a Tech Lead on a project where our team integrated an externally developed product, built on Azure with C# and MSSQL, and refactored it to AWS using Java, Spring Boot and PostgreSQL. The nearly handmade infrastructure was replaced with a reproducible IaC approach. Authentication, and most third-party services, such as geocoding were also re-implemented by me.

One of the new features of the refactored application was the ability to embed part of it into a customer’s site with the lowest possible effort from our side, similar to a micro frontend approach. I was leading the change, while doing the backend and AWS infrastructure stuff, such as ECS, ELB, CloudFront, Route 53 and RDS.

API Product

Alma Media Oyj
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I worked as a Tech Lead on a customer-facing greenfield API product with a very high SLA requirement, which demanded additional measures such as extensive alerting to 24/7 emergency duty and slightly more automated testing than usual. AWS serverless infrastructure was used to support the project, along with TypeScript and Java. I was designing and programming all of the above, including JWT authentication.

Front-End Product

Alma Media Oyj
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I worked as a Tech Lead on one of your key products where we re-wrote the application from AngularJS, JSP, and a monolithic backend to React and microservices designed to be used by multiple teams. The complex network of background services was streamlined, with several services also being re-wrote or deprecated. I was responsible for architecting the change, ensuring everything was done in the right order, while also programming and taking care of the needed AWS infrastructure changes.

Contact #

Feel free to contact me at [email protected].