People of Tammerforce: Antti

Name: Antti
Position: Tech Lead
Education: BBA, some studies in Computer Science
Joined Tammerforce in summer 2018

Growth from free online coding courses to Tech Lead role

Antti didn’t give coding a try until the end of his business studies, after a recommendation from a friend. By this time there were plenty of helpful free online resources such as Codecademy and MOOCs, and soon he found himself hooked.

After completing his BBA with a pure business focus, Antti enrolled into the University of Tampere to study Computer Science, but never finished those studies before getting pulled into working full time.

Start-up world or consultancy business?

After two semesters of Computer Science studies, lots of personal development projects, a summer job as a software consultant, and an active role in the Tampere area startup community, Antti had competing job offers from Futurice and a few local startups.

In the end, Futurice’s values, ways of working and tools – like Lean Service Creation – convinced him and assured that working there was about solving real problems with technology as the tool, and not the other way around. As a larger company, Futurice also offered lots of opportunities for growth, career development and international projects.

“In a startup you can be bound quite tightly to a certain technology stack. In a consultancy, especially a larger one, you are surrounded by several different technologies and ways of doing things, with the opportunity to change teams and try something different,” Antti says.

Typical day

At Futurice, Antti has been mainly working on several different projects for one client. His role was initially more frontend-focused, but it soon expanded into full-stack development, and eventually into DevOps and a project lead role as well.

Antti currently works as the tech lead for the client account, helping them move their business applications to the cloud. His typical work day can include lots of meetings and client communication, longer-term technical planning and software architecture design, advising the client in technical decisions, workload estimation and so on. But the majority of working hours still go into designing and implementing software, and operating said software – think code editor, terminal, GitHub, AWS Console and ticketing software.

“We have a small agile client team where no one is strictly tied to a certain silo of frontend, backend or operations. Instead, everyone is able to work on all parts of the software. In terms of hierarchy, we are very flath, and the tech lead role simply implies certain responsibilities within the team and account,” Antti says.

Learnings at Futurice

Antti quickly learned that writing software is very different when working in a consultancy compared to doing it on your own.

“I used to think that software consultancies write software from scratch, hand it over to the client, and move on to the next project, without much ownership of the finished product. I wanted to be involved in the full lifecycle, and see the systems I build in action, and luckily that’s exactly what working at Futurice turned out to be.”

Client work at Futurice has enabled Antti to take ownership of the full lifecycle of the code. He has learned his most important lessons when migrating existing applications and infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud with minimal downtime and impact to the users, as well as building tooling and processes that enable a more agile DevOps way of deploying and monitoring software.

“I’ve found new opportunities when I have accepted the challenges I was facing without fear and succeeded in solving them,” Antti summarizes.

Why Tammerforce

“Working at Tammerforce hits the sweet spot of the stability and opportunities provided by a larger international company, and the agility and coziness of a smaller, rather independent office where you can know everyone by name.”

One of Antti’s favorite examples of these international opportunities is his Futuhike to the Munich office – a company-provided trip to visit the German colleagues and learn with them.

“My favorite part is the people I work with, and the experiences I’ve shared with them – both at work and in my free time,” Antti sums up when asked why he enjoys being part of Tammerforce.

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