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Personal info

Mikko looking pretty

Do you know the type of people who aren't truly happy unless they drown themselves in activities, hobbies or different kind of projects? I am pretty sure that I am one of them :)

Whenever I am not working with some new and exciting web2.0 project I am most likely either planning one or trying to get new ideas for one. I've always done small personal projects in the evenings to satisfy my desire to create something new and beautiful from the scratch.

Luckily I've found a career path to partially satisfy the need to create. The fast-paced internet driven world in the network is a perfect playground to the likes of me.

Personal details

Work history

Chief Operating Officer - Brain Alliance ltd, Helsinki

2009 - Present

Brain Alliance logo

As the COO of Brain Alliance my primary responsibility is to serve both, our customers and our employees in the best possible way. I spend the most of the day keeping in touch with the clients and employees, organizing new deals and trying continuously to improve our internal processes.

Luckily our employees are in general quite independent professionals and proud of what they do, so the management doesn't have to spend too much time babysitting, but can concentrate on more significant things.

Consultant / Project manager - Brain Alliance Solutions ltd, Helsinki

2007 - 2009 (2 years)

Brain Alliance logo

In my work at Brain Alliance Solutions I got to wear many hats. I did pre-sales, consulting, training (mainly Zend's PHP courses) and of course also a lot of PHP programming.

I was positioned at the Finnish real estate agency Igglo Oy from the beginning of my career at BA until late 2008 and worked there as a consultant. I feel that during this time I had the honor of working with the best and most innovative web2.0 team in Finland.

My tasks at Igglo included software developing and designing, scrum mastering the team and working as a project manager.

In late 2008 I was repositioned to our office to work as a lead designer and a project manager for the asunnot.fi project we did for Lemminkäinen Oyj. The service presents Lemminkäinen Talo Oy's new building production in a visual and modern way. The service was published on time in the beginning of the year 2009.

Software developer - eMedia Company Finland ltd, Helsinki

2005 - 2007 (2 years 1 month)

eMedia logo

At eMedia my main responsibilities were to develop and maintain the company products, which include the eMedia CMS (which is a content management software) and eMember (which is used in managing and billing memberships for different associations). Used technologies included PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, MSSQL and PostgreSQL.

In addition to my regular work as a developer I did pre-sales and training for all the products the company was offering.

Software developer - EVTEK - University of Applied Sciences / NETPRO - project, Espoo

2003 - 2004 (9 months)

EVTEK logo

My main task was to develop a WebDAV (Delta-V and ACL) library with PHP to connect a versioning document storage (Jakarta Slide) for the NetPro learning platform.

Education

EVTEK - University of Applied Sciences, BSc

2000 - 2004 (4 years)

  • Degree Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology
  • Main subject Software development
  • Minor subjects Web technologies , Information security
  • Avg. grading 4 (1-5)
  • Thesis A Web application: Virtuaali-Pohjanmaa (co-author: Kalle Salminen)
  • Thesis grade 4

The purpose of the engineering thesis was to design and implement a conter for estimating and comparing living expences between the region of Central Ostrobothnia and the rest of Finland. The application was developed for Chydenius Institute which operates under the auspices of the universities of Jyväsylä and Oulu.

The most important reason for the assignment was the constantly increasing migration numbers off the region. The application was hoped to lure potential inhabitants to consider Central Ostrobothnia as a tempting option for a new place of residence. The application focuses on adcvertising material and immaterial benefits and also on providing facts on different services within the region.

As a result we developed a "Jones in the Fast Lane" -like boardgame, where the player can personally experience the advantages of living in the region by exploring the virtual city and its services.

The application was developed using PHP and JavaScript languages and it uses XML files for storing information (all of the information is static gameboard data).

Virtuaalipohjanmaa Virtuaalipohjanmaa Virtuaalipohjanmaa Virtuaalipohjanmaa Virtuaalipohjanmaa

Certifications

NameCompanyDate
Zend PHP 5 Certification Zend Technologies Ltd. 2007/09
Certified Scrum Master Scrum Alliance Inc. 2008/08
Zend Framework Certification Zend Technologies Ltd. 2008/09

Courses and trainings

NameCompanyDescriptionDate
Zend product training Zend Technologies Ltd. / Tel Aviv - Israel Three day course to Zend's products and services. 2008/05
Train the trainer, Zend Framework course Zend Technologies Ltd. / WebEx Short Web course to prepare students for teaching Zend classes. 2008/06
Facebook application development Zipipop Oy / Helsinki - Finland Half-day introductionary course to developing applications to facebook. 2008/07
Train the trainer, PHP I (PHP basics) Zend Technologies Ltd. / WebEx Short Web course to prepare students for teaching Zend classes. 2008/09
Train the trainer, PHP 5 Certification Zend Technologies Ltd. / WebEx Short Web course to prepare students for teaching Zend classes. 2008/09

Projects I've been involved in

Emerald-CMS screenshot

Emerald-CMS (2008) is (yet another) content management system build with PHP and Zend Framework. The project involved me, Mikko Forsström and Petri Heinonen. Together we set up a company named Foolabs to offer quality web solutions for those in need.

I and Mikko F were responsible for coding and updating the software, Petri was responsible for the hardware and system management.

cv_proj_emerald_layout_screenst

Emerald layout (2008) was designed as a demo layout for the Emerald-CMS. The layout was designed only using open source software: Incscape's Vector Illustrator was used for vector graphics and Gimp was used for post processing and to add those flares ;)

FFF screenshot

Finnish Fight Finder - FFF (2007) was a hobby software project I made for Suomen Vapaaotteluliitto. It is used to keep track of the fighters, events and the fights of course :)

The software is vaguely based on the earlier version of the FFF (not developed by me), but in practice everything was re-coded: the separate php files were replaced with a single file, a library of classes was created to support the application and the database (MySQL) was restructured. And of course a ton of new features was added!

mjuCMS screenshot

uCMS (2008) was a result from an experiment of trying to write a simple and small content management software (bending the word to the extreme).

Containing the very minimum features required from a tool designed to update web pages, uCMS boasts with features including: Updating existing pages, WYSIWYG editor and a form emailer. Page structure is maintained with flat files - actually everything is, since uCMS doesn't trust in databases.

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