A successful project for us is a project where we become obsolete

We are Polar Squad. In this blog series, we introduce the people of our amazing company. Time for Erno! Let’s get to know him!

Tell us a bit about yourself and your background?

I’m Erno Aapa, one of the founders, CTO, and consultant in Polar Squad. I started as a developer almost 15 years ago, but I have always been interested in infrastructure and understanding systems. At the beginning of 2013, founded DevOpsFinland community to have a place to meet people who are excited about the same things and talk without any competition.

What was the path the led you into becoming a DevOps consultant for Polar Squad?

About eight years ago, I was a developer in a project where (like in quite many Scrum projects back in the days) we had “release day” every two weeks. I was super frustrated with the repeating manual work that we did and end up looking for a better way of doing things (which I’m still doing). Around the same time heard about DevOps and fell in love with the culture and community right away. Because there were no many people who knew about it, I decided to create a meetup group to Helsinki.

What tools do you really like to use in your work?

I try to avoid standing heavily on some specific technology because technologies die surprisingly fast. I know that because I used to be a Flash developer (smiling icon). It depends per customer because usually there’s already some tech selected, and probably changing it doesn’t bring any value. But of course, I have my preferences at the moment; Terraform and Kubernetes, to name few.  I enjoy coding Golang and React, so it’s not just about infrastructure.

What sets Polar Squad apart from other companies you worked at?

The passion for the DevOps. Quite often, DevOps is just a side thing next to the core business, and that’s why get less attention. But here I know that everyone is excited about the same thing, and that unites us.

How would you describe the culture in PS? How can you maintain a company-wide culture when most employees work in different clients? Would you like to give us detailed examples of what the culture is about in Polar Squad?

We understand that knowledge sharing across projects is one of the key things and the most significant challenges we need to solve. That’s the only way we can make sure that we’re the best now and best in the future. That’s why we have weekly sessions, project retrospectives, get together events, and culture where you can ask any question, and your colleagues will support you (you might have seen this in our Instagram posts). And we continuously look at new ways of sharing knowledge even more. But not share just cross the projects and customers but also to our customers. Not only solve problems they have but also teach customers so that they learn and get to the next level! A successful project for us is a project where we become obsolete. Some people might say that it’s bad business; for us, it’s a successful project.

Tell us about your day to day routines?

Wake up around 5:00 before the family wakes up. Drink a few cups of coffee,  read the latest tech news, or test out some new technology, and often I start working for the project because there’s some exciting challenge to solve. After breakfast, check the calendar, and it depends on the day, start a video meeting, or work with the project. I often use lunchtime to meet people, interviews, or other meetings. The afternoon is for Polar Squad related work before I head home to spend the evening with my family.

What kind of technical challenges do you meet at your work?

If we scope this to technical challenges only, not talking about company culture, structure, and process challenges that I see super interesting, I have been deeply dived to Kubernetes past years. How to build it from scratch, scale it, upgrade it smoothly, and make it developer-friendly.

How does it feel to work with developer teams? Do we have a common ground?

I have a developer background, and I’m still coding daily; it’s relatively easy for me to understand the developer's needs. I believe that the software that development teams build to produce the value, and my job is to make sure that they can do their work as easily, fastly, and safely as possible with minimal stress.