DevRel Portfolio

💎 Community builder

Community building is at the core of everything I do. I want to build compassionate and welcoming communities for everyone interested in technology. I've been building communities for 20+ years, last 8 years or so professionally.

I've got practical experience from many aspects of running communities: event organizing, content creation, marketing, strategic planning and bringing people together.

• Turku ❤️ Frontend

  I run a meetup community for students, hobbyists and professionals of all levels who are interested in frontend web development. We organize monthly meetups and other events like hackathons or Code in the Dark events to promote positive developer culture. We also bring together the developers in the community to make new friends, introduce them to different companies in the area and bring in speakers to share their experiences.

• archipylago

  Archipylago is a Python community for everyone in Turku area who are interested in Python development. We host monthly events (meetups, sprints, casual social gatherings and more) to bring people together. I'm a co-founder and the community lead at the project.

• Helsinki Dev Lunch

  From 2018 to 2022 I ran a casual lunch gathering group for developers in Helsinki area. We gathered together monthly to eat lunch and chat about life inside and outside of work life. The concept sparked others to start their own communities, namely Tampere Dev Lunch and Turku Dev Lunch.

• Mozilla

  I worked at Mozilla (Aug 2022 – Jan 2023) as a senior developer advocate for Firefox add-ons. I helped extension developers learn how to build extensions, wrote documentation and blog posts, taught a class on extension building and represented the community to the product team and vice versa.

• Futurice

  I worked at Futurice (Apr 2018 – Jun 2022) as a developer advocate. I

  • ran our weekly internal tech meetup Tech Weeklies
  • kickstarted and ran developer newsletter Dev Breakfast
  • organized and hosted dozens of events each year with local developer communities
  • organized an internal Global Code Camp hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia for developers and designers from different Futurice offices around Europe
  • ran our student and university collaboration team organizing dozens of student events and workshops
  • worked to make our developers feel at home in our work community
  • was voted twice as the People Person of the Year in Helsinki by my colleagues

• Boost Turku

  I worked at Boost Turku (Sep 2015 - Sep 2017), an entrepreneurship community for students and researchers. I

  • ran award-winning, early stage, 10-week accelerator program Startup Journey
  • led two semesters of Boost Dropout Academy, our peer-learning workshop series
  • ran different co-working spaces during the time
  • organized events (keynote events, workshops, hackathons & much more)
  • organized two summer-long Boost Summer of Code programming courses
  • collaborated with local universities with their entrepreneurship programs
  • represented Boost as a board member of SHIFT
  • led recruitment process of a new Network Manager

• Koodiklinikka

  I'm an admin in Finnish IT industry community Slack community Koodiklinikka where one of my main contributions has been running our annual salary survey with 500 to nearly 1000 participants.

  I aim to make the community a fun and welcoming place to everyone, participate in discussions, root for my favorite sports teams and help developers with technical problems.

• React Finland & Future Frontend conferences

  I'm part of the team that organized React Finland and now organizes Future Frontend conferences in Helsinki. During the conferences, I especially enjoy making event participants feel welcome during the registration and helping our speakers with their needs during the event.

📝 Technical writer

I find written form a great way to communicate with a technical audience. Compared to social media or chat messages, it provides a way to capture learned lessons into a format that will be helpful to a large audience for years to come. And compared to video, it's an easier medium to browse and scan to find relevant bits, and to copy code examples from.

• Blog

  I write a weekly blog about technology, communities and life at /blog. For technical writing examples, check out

  • How to scrape a website with Python & BeautifulSoup
  • Learning Rust series
  • Compressing overlapping strings in Python

  I also document small technical snippets into /snacks like

  • Update JSON values conditionally with jq
  • Fix 'Tried to use templateContent too early' error with Eleventy

• Syntax Error

  Syntax Error is a monthly newsletter I write to help software developers become better at figuring out what to do when the computer says no. It explores different aspects of debugging, errors and other dysfunction of software across different languages and technologies.

• Stack Overflow

  I contribute in Stack Overflow, helping developers to achieve their goals and fix their problems. Some examples of my approach of explanation can be found in

  • Firefox addon popup JavaScript not working
  • AttributeError: 'dict' object has no attribute 'split'
  • I need to write a Python stub to print names of image files and whether they are blurry or not

• Mozilla Discourse

  During my time at Mozilla, I helped Firefox extension developers in Mozilla's Discourse. A great examples is How to and do i need to ensure message from my extension?.

• Kittens Everywhere

  kittens-everywhere – how to build a browser extension is a tutorial for building a browser extension for Firefox. It's based on a class I taught in university program and includes background for what extensions are and why building them is fun.

• Advent of Code explanations

  I love solving Advent of Code puzzles each December and for the past few years I've written daily explanations to my Python solutions, teaching developers Python and general programming concepts. I aim for easy-to-understand and beginner friendly both in my coding style and my writing.

👨‍🏫 Technology educator

I love sharing what I know to help others become better at software development. You can read more about my philosophy from Why I do what I do? I'm very focused on practical skills and inspiring people to build better world with technology.

• University teaching

  Over the years, I've taught software development in different forms:

  • University of Turku: as a student mentor and as a teaching assistant, 2012-2013 + 2015
  • Aalto University: lecturer, basics of Javascript, 2019-2020
  • Guest lectures here and there (for example, Åbo Akademi & Turku University of Applied Sciences)
  • The HBCU Collaborative Curriculum with Mozilla: teaching a class of building Firefox extensions and helping students with their course projects, 2022

• Non-profit workshops

  I have organized and coached in various programming workshops:

  • Rails Girls workshops in Turku, Helsinki, Salo, Jyväskylä and San Francisco between 2013 and 2015.
  • codebar workshops in Helsinki and Berlin since 2018.
  • A Django Girls workshop in Helsinki, 2017.
  • A ClojureBridge workshop in Helsinki, 2019.
  • Two Boost Summer of Code programming workshop series, summers of 2016 and 2017.
  • reacTour workshop teaching basics of React development, 2019.
  • Multiple Mimmit Koodaa workshops with Futurice.

• Blogging

  I teach people technical concepts and introduce them to different tools and techniques through my blog. You can see more examples of these from above in the Technical Writing section.

• Mentoring

  I mentor developers in various forms. 2017-2018 I ran my own structured mentoring program but more recently I've been having multiple 1-on-1 mentoring relationships with various developers, mainly ones early in their career.

👨‍💻 Software developer

I have a background in software development but these days I mostly enjoy developing as a hobby, working on open source projects and building demos for blog posts, tutorials and conference talks.

I'm experienced enough to discuss with software developers about technical concepts, teach beginners and help developers of all skill levels with their problems.

• Professional software developer

  I've worked as a professional full-stack developer at Chartio (Jan – Dec 2013), Smartly.io (Apr – Jul 2015), Futurice (Apr 2018 – Jul 2019), Mad Booster (Mar – Oct 2023) and Yleisradio (May – Sep 2024). I mostly worked with Javascript, PHP and Python in different projects.

• 235

  235 is a command-line tool built with Rust that displays NHL results of current or previous round on the terminal. It supports features like highlighting your favorite players and seeing their full stats.

• Gym Leader Challenge Decklist Validator

  GLC Decklist Validator is a tool for Pokemon TCG players of the GLC format to validate their decklists before joining tournaments to avoid awkward moments at deck check. It's built with vanilla Javascript and Netlify Functions.

• Pokemon TCG Card Viewer (Firefox extension)

  I built this Firefox extension to help Pokemon TCG players to check what cards do, based on the decklists around the Internet that show cards as set code + number combos.

• Demo example: kittens-everywhere

  kittens-everywhere is an example of a demo application built to teach how to build browser extensions.

• Advent of Code

  I love solving Advent of Code puzzles each December and for the past few years I've shared my daily Python solutions.

🎙 Public speaker

Conferences and meetups are a great way to learn new things, share experiences, teach technology and network with new people in the industry.

• Tech Conferences

  I speak about documentation, debugging and teaching & learning in various tech conferences around Europe. I've spoken in PyCon Finland, PyCon Sweden, PyCon CZ, PyCon Estonia, Working From Home Conference, Django Day Copenhagen and DevRelCon.

• Meetups

  In addition to speaking in conferences, I'm a regular speaker in various tech meetups in Finland and across Europe.

• codebase Youtube series

  During the pandemic, I hosted a series of live streams where I invited developers from different communities to talk about and showcase their favorite technologies. I believe there's a lot we all can learn from other languages and their paradigms and ecosystems.