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My one year journey at Bitfactor

What kind of colleagues do I have at Bitfactor aka Bifa and why should you join our cool gang in Oulu or Helsinki?

What type of person would Bitfactor be?


A team player, always ready to help. Not afraid of challenges, always trying to find the best decision for the customer. Can find the correct bits and pieces even from vague project plans and descriptions. Doesn’t overthink or overdo but focuses on the essentials. As a hard worker Bifa is willing to put in some extra hours when needed to reach a goal.

Working at Bifa is like work, only more fun. For example, going to the gym at 3 pm to think about how I would solve some line of code. After the thinking session, I return as an Einstein who is able to fix everything. To me, that sounds like an excellent place to work! Right?

Anyhow, let’s first talk a little bit about me.

My name is Lauri Saarelainen, and I am a Cloud Engineer at Bitfactor Helsinki office. I graduated in 2015 from Haaga-Helia University of sciences, where I studied software development.

Currently, I’m working on a customer project, where we are building a data lake into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. I have roughly 5+ years of experience with AWS and other public cloud providers as well. 


So how did I end up at Bitfactor?


I already worked as a consultant in (various) customer projects, but Bifa provided me with a challenge to take it to the next level. This meant learning more and more about public clouds and how to develop with them. The interview for my position was pretty straightforward: two guys asked me technical questions and how I thought public clouds could be utilized for different kinds of customers and their challenges.

Bifa proved to be a suitable workplace for me with the following:

  • A mature environment where employees are heard
  • Interesting projects
  • A possibility to prove myself, that I am able to develop with public clouds independently
  • And mostly: Feeling that I belong with these people. Before I started at a new project, I had a small meeting with a Bifa colleague who was also part of my new team. He gave me a small information package to read during the weekend. So by this point, I was convinced that my colleagues at Bifa were ready to go that extra mile to make me feel welcome.

 

New(ish) technologies


Well, you might have figured out by now that we are an IT consultancy company, based in Oulu and Helsinki. We work in multiple fields: finance, healthcare, logistics etc.

Usually, we have the freedom to choose what kind of development kit to use, as long as it fits the customer project. We might choose the development kit based on our own experiences or our interests to try out new things. It may contain AWS Lambda’s, data lake, EMR, AWS networking, Azure Functions, DNS, Python, Java, Kotlin, you name it. For example, right now I am developing with AWS Lambda’s with Python and Terraform. Before that, I was doing infra deployment for Kafka with Cloudformation.

When you’re developing infra and code with the DevOps attitude, you eventually need to touch some parts of the code, infra, and deployment around it. This has happened to me multiple times during my projects which means that I get to learn continuously and I am able to deliver customers the best results.

This, however, does not mean that we would not know about WLAN configurations at the office or how to create great customer experience for a website. For example, when we moved to our new Helsinki office, people were doing voluntary work: assembling desks and chairs and putting things into place to get things rolling. This is yet another example of how dedicated people are to make Bifa a better place to work.

Pictures from our Helsinki office.

Did this blog post resonate with you?


We’re always looking for new talented workmates. Drop us a line at rekry@bitfactor.fi or check out our open positions.

Interested in hearing more about me or Bifa? Contact me on LinkedIn.

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