Time stands still on top of a hill. A determined man breathes heavily as he climbs up a steep slope on a mountain bike. He reaches the top, takes his helmet off, looks at the sky and fills his lungs with crisp August air. He can sense the approaching fall, he knows this is the beginning of something new.
Ville Kärkkäinen seems like the average joe next door, but little do people know that he is actually a hero-maker. He is the man standing right behind the bravest and smartest CTO’s helping companies reach the full potential of Cloud. This is an introduction of a hero maker on a quest for cloud excellence, this is an introduction of Ville Kärkkäinen.
The man with the guitar
Ville defines himself as a basic finnish male who lives with his wife, three boys and a middle-sized schnauzer. Just like his NordHero colleagues, Ville is an IT enthusiast who likes to play around with the computer also outside the office hours.
When he is not busy coding, he goes for a run, takes his bike for a ride or absorbs himself into music. He sings, plays the piano, makes electronic music and is the official man with the guitar who is called to perform at family events and small gatherings.
“Music has been a part of my life ever since I was a teenager. I could never be a professional musician but music is a good hobby to hold on to in the background.”
Narrowing it down to cloud
During his career, Ville has journeyed from hands-on development / architect roles to managerial positions and back again.
The first half of his roughly 20+ year career, Ville worked for the telecommunications giant Nokia. He participated in various mobile development projects first as a software developer, then an architect and then taking the jump into project management.
He continued on the project/product management track after the mobile phone business came to its end at Nokia and took on challenging managerial roles and positions at Digia. He e.g set up an office in China, worked to improve Digia’s internal quality systems and participated in various other systems development projects as a product owner/manager.
Approximately 5 years ago Ville decided it was time to get back to hands-on development. With that decision, came also the decision to focus and narrow his attention more and more on the cloud.
“I had a feeling that it was time to switch from the rather abstract and highflying product/process management tasks and get back to coding again. At the time Cloud had become more and more relevant and I decided that it would be THE thing that I wanted to focus on.“
Ville went back to his roots and worked in lead developer and architect roles in various customer projects at Digia and later on in Etteplan. During those years he spent his time on tasks such as building data platforms on AWS and Azure, AWS infrastructure maintenance and development, automatization, serverless, API development and machine learning to name a few.
Now in 2021, Ville is still on the same focused cloud track as he joins the NordHero team of Cloud, DevOps and Serveless professionals.
What are your interests and what motivates you?
Ville’s expertise and interests are in microservice architectures, analytics, data integration, databases and of course AWS as a whole. He also admits being a hard-core serverless fan who likes to work with Python. He has been an active member of the global Python community where he likes to keep track of what is going on by reading articles, listening to podcasts etc. As a proper DIY guy, Ville also enjoys building everything from scratch be it a house or a solution on AWS. He says that the best thing about cloud is that it allows companies to operate in an agile, dynamic and fast manner.
“The cloud suits me, because you can pretty much do everything on your own. These days you only need 2-3 persons to build something on cloud when only a couple of years ago 20 people were needed to do the same job. The cloud enables companies to build solutions with a small group of people without the need for specialised expertise in data centres and servers. ”
Throughout his career Ville has always done his best to achieve the best possible results for his customers. He admits that his quest for excellence has occasionally made him delve into issues a bit too much.
“It might sound like a cliche, but I truly believe that my job is to make customers as satisfied as possible with the work I do. I always want to do my absolute best.”
Why did you choose NordHero?
Ville’s leap from big tech companies to the (still small) NordHero team was based on professional interests and future colleagues.
“The jump to NordHero was actually a logical continuation for my career. The scope of NordHero is a perfect match with what I want to do. Obviously choosing where you work also has a lot to do with the people you get to work with. The first time I was in a meeting with Janne and Pekka, I got the feeling that these guys are just the type of people I’d like to work with.”
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