Big pine trees covered in snow sway softly. You can only hear the sound of snow crunching under heavy winter boots as a friendly-looking man walks by. He stops, looks up for a second, and then continues his walk buried deep in his thoughts.
Teemu Niiranen seems like the average joe next door, but little do people know that he is actually a hero maker. He is a man on a mission to make the smartest and the bravest CTO’s the heroes of cloud, DevOps, and serverless principles. This is an introduction of a hero maker on a mission; this is an introduction of Teemu Niiranen.
Who is Teemu?
Teemu describes himself as an easy-going personality who gets along with different people. He lives in Siilinjärvi together with his wife, daughter, and cat. Besides his long-term keen interest in computers and technology, Teemu is a man of many interests, from music to sports and from board games to history, literature, and great food. He also grows his own chilies.
“I have found the time to do all sorts of things in my life and have always found it hard NOT to do anything. I think this also applies to my eagerness to learn new things and develop myself as an IT-professional constantly.”
From eCommerce to the world of IoT to making heroes of cloud
The first half of Teemu’s career focused mainly on eCommerce solutions. His experience covers pretty much all the biggest and most significant B2C retailers in Finland. After a while, he jumped to the other side of eCommerce to the world of the Internet of Things. The jump also meant a technology swift from IBM-based eCommerce tools to cloud services and, in particular, Amazon Web Services.
During his career, Teemu has been working in multiple roles. As a developer, he quickly moved on to being an architect and taking on customer facing responsibilities, turning business requirements into technology solutions.
In January 2021, Teemu joined the NordHero team. He says he is excited to build something new almost from scratch as NordHero is a startup still in its early stages. He also values NordHero’s scope on the cloud.
“NordHero focuses on a reasonably narrow domain of cloud technology and, in particular serverless architectures and DevOps-principles. This allows me to deepen my expertise in something that I also find personally really interesting and releases the true potential of cloud computing.”
How would you define a hero-maker?
Teemu has been working on the cloud throughout the short history of serverless computing. He believes that his experience gives him the competence to help companies turn business requirements into technical solutions and mentor development teams in their work.
“It’s our mission as hero-makers to bring the latest insights and the best practices available to our customers so that they can be the heroes of the story.”
What is your mission?
Teemu says that joining NordHero also serves a bigger purpose.
“The best possible combination is that I get to work on solutions and technology that help build a better future for us all. To me, working with companies that want to use technology to increase well-being or reduce carbon emissions is the perfect match.”
What about Pekka and Janne?
Teemu has respect for his colleagues.
“These guys have been around longer than I have. There is so much I can learn from them in terms of technology as well as business. This is a very comfortable position to be in and develop myself even further alongside Janne and Pekka.”
–