CV

2022-02-07

Joni Kähärä

Profile

Joni (b. 1975) is a programmer and general “DevOps” person from Helsinki, Finland. He has worked in the technology industry since 1997.

Some of the things that bring him joy in the professional context include:

Remote work. Open, preferably text-based and asynchronous communication.
Automating things that can be automated. Think Ansible, Terraform, and Kubernetes. And GitHub and GitLab workflows.
Enabling domain specialists to write testable sets of microservices that can be deployed with least effort, and changes of which can be managed controllably.
Working with services on “edge”, or in other words things that interface with the real world. Also anything with tight latency requirements.
Writing readable, robust, and performant code (and tests) in Go or Python that doesn’t waste resources. Rust and C have their special time and place, too.
Writing readable documentation (Markdown, Pandoc preferred). Also technical writing in general, and reading anything that is well-written. Well thought out diagrams always a huge plus.

11/2019 – Present Advian Oy

Technical Specialist, mostly in “Digirata positioning backend” project since Q4/2020
Day to day work consists mostly of herding AWS machinery in general and Kubernetes (EKS) machinery in particular, and coding in Go
Services’ development is supported by, and they’re deployed with GitHub Actions-based workflows. Kafka (MSK) is the backbone.

2/2018 – 11/2019 CGI Suomi Oy

9/2015 – 2/2018 Webmie Oy

4/2014 – 3/2015 Flatiron Software & Systems

An attempt to run my own software business, burning through savings and credit in the process
Key lesson learnt: don’t expect anything to happen without active sales

4/2011 – 3/2014 Visi-Systems Oy

Volumetric cargo measurement system utilizing a LIDAR and RFID tagging of bulk containers
Visitor counting system for pedestrian and vehicle traffic, utilizing “traditional” and machine vision sensors
A web/SMS-based paging system for fire personnel dispatch
A wall-climbing, (magnetic) wheeled inspection robot
Various smaller software development projects

2/2003 – 3/2011 Visi Oy

Physical access control/video surveillance system (the same project as below, company split in two)
Numerous smaller software development projects, including embedded things
Numerous hardware and software integration projects, mainly in the area of physical security and video surveillance

11/2000 – 1/2003 Visi-Systems Oy

Various web front ends for industrial data logging systems
Physical access control/video surveillance system; this evolved from Visual Basic 6 through C/GTK+ to a web-based system; actual hardware controlled included various gate control systems, video matrices and programmable logic controllers
Numerous smaller software development projects, including embedded things

2/2000 – 10/2000 Suomen Posti Oy

1/1999 – 2/2000 Civilian Service, Kotkan Opisto

Mostly general tech support in a Windows workstation environment
Plus some MS Access “development”
Demonstrated how easy it was to crack passwords on a shared Unix box without /etc/shadow but my disclosure wasn’t received that well

1/1998 – 9/1998 Cardinal Information Systems Oy (Company bankrupt)

Maintaining ActiveX (C++) code of an early micropayment system
Maintaining server-side Javascript code of a press release service (early days of SaaS)
Various web site development and maintenance assignments

1/1997 – 10/1997 Top Information

Developing software (Delphi, C) and iButton-based electronics for a physical access control system

Finnish: native

English: fluent (spoken and written)

Tinkering with electronics and radios is fun, too.