Hello world!

This is my first own blog post ever. I have written a couple of blog posts as a part of my previous jobs, but those have always been written in the voice of my employer. My goal is to write stuff about things like web technologies, games, sports, etc. Things that I find interesting!

Today, I work as a web developer at a large(ish) Digital Agency in Finland. Let's start the blog with a little bit of backstory about how I got here.

First time I got interested about programming was in the elective computer class in elementary school. For the first half of the semester, we learned touch typing using all 10 fingers, which wasn't too exciting. But for the final project, we got to create a web site with plain HTML and CSS. In the end, I managed to hack together a web site for an Xbox Live clan I had with a few friends of mine.

The site had a Header banner with a Gears of War background picture, a navigation on the left side with some fancy styled buttons, and a completely unreadable font. The sites color scheme was blue/orange because I root for Tappara (A hockey team from Tampere). Background was black, just like it is on this site. Black never goes out of style.

Fast forward 15 years. I had selected Industrial Engineering as my field of study when starting at Tampere University of Technology. I had not selected programming as my major, or even my first minor (that was Energy Production), but luckily I had selected it as my second minor. I had worked as an intern at an IT company but not in a technical role. That experience had made me think that maybe this management thing was not for me, at least not yet.

I had worked in a great research team at Tampere University, studying circular economy business for around five years. During that time I had the privilege of publishing a few research papers with some of the brightest people I've ever met. I had finished writing my doctoral dissertation and it was time to decide what to do next.

I came to realize that now or never would be the time to take a shot at actually becoming a software developer. While waiting for permission to defend my dissertation, I looked at the options and selected a few companies where I really wanted to work at. To my surprise, I got an offer, and landed a job at one of these firms. And now I am a web developer. I'm yet to regret my leap of faith into another field for one second.

Let's see how this blog evolves. At least I enjoyed writing this one!