Polar Squad is the first company that has values I fully agree with
We are Polar Squad. In this blog series, we introduce the people of our amazing company. It’s Jaakko’s turn! Let’s get to know him!
Tell us a bit about yourself and your background?
I'm an SRE / DevOps consultant from Rovaniemi with a background in software development and a master's degree in IT from the University of Jyväskylä. I've been tinkering with computers on both the hardware and software side since primary school.
What was the path that led you into becoming a DevOps consultant for Polar Squad?
I've been working in the industry since 2012 when I started as a web developer trainee in Jyväskylä. During my studies, I also worked full-time as a full-stack developer using Scala and Java in local software companies.
After receiving my master's degree in 2015, I moved to Manchester to work as a software developer to develop distributed systems on the cloud. In Manchester, I advanced to a lead developer position, where I lead a team of developers and ops engineers in various client projects.
In early 2017, I made a career move towards cloud automation to get a more holistic understanding of modern software development instead of just focusing on the code. Since then, I've been mostly working with DevOps and SRE. I still do programming in client projects and my hobby projects, but I usually develop tools for infrastructure rather than customer-facing apps.
I found Polar Squad when I was planning to move back to Finland in Spring 2018, and joined in at the same time as I moved back. What caught my attention was the early version of the company website that included a page-wide shot of the black metal logo as the first thing.
Polar Squad black metal logo
What tools do you really like to use in your work?
I'm a Linux guy, and my favorite flavor of Linux is Fedora. It provides a modern, consistent Linux experience without having to spend much time getting it set up. For work and hobby programming, I spend a lot of time in code editors and the command line. For writing code, I mostly use Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEA these days. I tend to use Vim for the occasional small edits in the shell.
On the infrastructure side, I mostly use AWS, but I’m always open to new opportunities to work with different platforms. Usually, the rest of the tools vary between projects and platforms I’m working on, but I try my best to build them with reproducibility in mind (i.e. using whatever “infrastructure as code” tool is available for the platform).
What sets Polar Squad apart from other companies you've worked at?
Polar Squad is the first company that has values I fully agree with. There’s a great amount of focus on the well-being of the employees, and we have a lot of autonomy in what we do. I feel like I can focus better on delivering the best work I can at Polar Squad than at any earlier companies.
What kind of technical challenges do you meet at your work?
Finding a good balance when choosing the tools to work with can be challenging. Choose an advanced tool, and not many want to learn it or learn how to use/maintain it properly. Choose a too simple tool, and it doesn’t cover enough of the use-cases you want it to cover.
Time is a huge challenge as well. Even if I were capable of solving all the problems, a lot of times I lack the time to produce a full solution. More often than not, I have to choose carefully what I get myself into.
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 are very supportive and open to each other. I think that also reflects how we appear in the client projects as well. We not only do good work, but we also leave a positive feeling for our customers.
There are a few ways we maintain the culture. We get together in the office on Fridays (we typically work in the client premises otherwise), we’re encouraged to help each other out even though we don’t work in the same projects, and we make sure we grow at a reasonable pace as a company. We also organise a lot of different activities outside office hours that everyone’s free to join in. Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Counter-Strike with my co-workers. Together, we’ve played in the company league, Kanaliiga.
Tell us about your day to day routines?
My daily routines mostly consist of reviewing solutions, setting up cloud infrastructure, communicating with neighboring teams, coding, and lots and lots of writing. The ratios between these vary between projects. In between projects, I do product development on Site Reliability Engineering and occasionally write content for the company blog.
To keep me from not falling apart physically, I usually do a small exercise routine in the morning before work and head out for a walk/jog right after I get out of work. After work (and walk), I enjoy dinner with my girlfriend and spend the rest of the evening with whatever hobbies I’m into at the time.
How does it feel to work with developer teams? Do we have a common ground?
Having a developer background myself, I'm comfortable working with developers. I can understand a lot of the work they do and even contribute to some of it myself. I find that I get their concerns quite well and that I can provide solutions the developers can pick up easily. There’s a lot to learn from each other on both the development and operations side, and I hope I can do great things in bridging the gap between them.