Resume

At OP, about 100 people and 10 teams from several organisational units build the credit decision management system. My team and another team in the same organisational unit are responsible for developing the system from the SME perspective. A separate team owns the infrastructure, so we can focus on new features. The team has a PO, 5 developers (me and 4 others), 2 testers, and 2 solution analysts. I have been the lead for about two years and on the assignment for four years in total.

The team used to focus on collateral, and we built an integration to the collateral system that other units now use as well. The work is broader now. The next large piece is a rewrite of credit change handling: the old implementation is legacy code that gets in the way of new features, so it is being rebuilt. I am primarily responsible for the design. I spent a long time dealing with production issues until I was recently taken off them, so I can spend as much time as possible on this.

For credit changes we follow earlier implementations from other units where possible. There is also a set of questions nobody has an answer to yet. My job is to identify those questions early enough. If a significant question that affects the architecture is missed during design, fixing it later can easily cost a hundred times more.

• I started as a developer. When the more experienced people left, I became the lead. The system has millions of lines of code, much of it legacy. A new developer usually takes six months to get up to speed; it took me four.
• I go to the Oulu office because things go best when I work in the same room as the stakeholders. I do my own work, they do theirs. There is enough overlap that it is easier for them to ask for my view on the spot. On-site work usually means working with your own team; I also work on-site with stakeholders.
• I write code, review code, and sort out the technical side of epics and stories before the rest of the team. Legacy code, unclear tasks, and less familiar parts of the codebase usually come to me.
• GitHub Copilot Enterprise and my own agents, when AI is allowed. I always consider whether the implementation makes sense and whether it solves the right problem. Production logs and customer data are not sent to AI.

Key technologies: TypeScript, React, Node.js, SQL Server, T-SQL, AWS, CloudWatch, OpenAPI, GitHub Copilot Enterprise

Jukka took charge of a new area of work as the team’s lead developer and agile master. He kept the threads in hand in a complex project while the role grew and the more experienced people left for other work.

Jukka works through production issues and takes the hardest tasks himself. He also helps the rest of the team.

Ohjelmistofriikit (opens in a new tab) is a network of software freelancers that I founded together with others in 2023. The cooperative is owned by its freelancers — not by the founders as in a startup, and not by a consultancy as in the other networks in this field.

At the start we had no money, so I built much of it myself — WordPress, Slack, n8n, Google Forms, and Sheets. Now that there is some revenue, others have started to help, and I can focus more on leading and setting the direction.

• I took the network from an informal group to a working cooperative and grew it into a community of more than 900 professionals.
• I figure out what GDPR, the AI Act, and other rules require of us, and turn them into practical requirements. I would rather make a decision and take responsibility for it than freeze up.
• I talk about freelancer ownership in public, mainly on social media.

Jukka has done especially well at growing the Ohjelmistofriikit network and keeping the Slack community active. He takes responsibility and solves problems himself.

Jukka is honest and matter-of-fact, and he does not dodge difficult things. He has built the cooperative from nothing.

The team had a PO and 4 developers. We maintained five smaller applications in DVV’s suomi.fi services. The main work was rewriting the user interface of one application in React and Next.js, which I did mostly together with the team’s junior developer.

The junior did the simpler tasks, such as new views and forms. I helped, finished things off, fixed the hard bugs, and looked after quality. Before I left, I documented everything I knew.

Key technologies: TypeScript, React, Next.js, styled-components

Jukka works well independently, but he is also a good team player. He is constantly thinking about how things could be developed, and he also understands the customer’s needs.

I started as a junior developer. Over the years I worked as a scrum master and helped customer support. I was the lead for just under a year before I left. When the original team grew too large, it was split in two: the more experienced people left to build something new, and I stayed with the juniors to keep developing the company’s main source of revenue.

• I built an integration to the Procountor invoicing application so that invoicing data goes out automatically. Before that it was a manual job that cost 25,000 euros a year.
• I built a feature that let the user bypass automatic payroll calculation. Payroll specialists used it to fix a huge number of problems and unexpected situations.
• As lead I planned the work carefully and gave the juniors room to grow as developers.
• I built a GDPR data export that let a user download their own data. It was done in a hurry, because someone had already asked for their own data.

Key technologies: JavaScript, React, PHP, Symfony, MySQL

Jukka handles technical details, the business, the user’s needs, and the big picture exceptionally well. He doesn’t make things unnecessarily complicated, but looks for the most straightforward solution to the problem.