Hello dev.to, here’s one more dev too 👋

I joined the dev.to community already in the summer. Although I have been thinking about writing my experiences and learnings in tech for a while, I haven’t had the chance to start my author's career at dev until now. I got the final motivational boost to get posts out from the inspirational members of the LevelUp Koodarit community.

If you are a woman or member of the gender minorities and seeking a Finnish coding community, I highly recommend you to join LUK 😊. It is an excellent place to share information, receive, and provide help.

This literacy journey starts by introducing me. My name is Laura, and I am living in Tampere (work partially in Helsinki), Finland. I started coding when I was in my twenties. At that time I began to study at the university and chose computer studies for my major even though I had not messed around with computers much before. I was not sure what I would want to be “when growing up” and IT seemed to be a suitable choice since it was easy to get in. And of course, we had this company called Nokia that employed all available coders in its years of success.

The start of my studies was bumpy: I just was not able to get my head round C++. It was the language they used for teaching all newbies back then, at the start of the millennium. Fortunately, I did not give up, and when Java and a teacher with a more pedagogic approach came along, I did not only get the hang of it, but fell in love with solving problems through code.

I have made my living in coding for 15 years now. It has been an exciting journey filled with a bunch of different technologies, projects, teams, and companies. I have written code for embedded systems as well as extensive web services, from C code to Javascript. And I do like being a rolling stone in this sense, learning new is one of the best things in this job.

Roughly 1,5 years ago I landed my dream job: I am currently researching emerging technologies in the largest bank and insurance company in Finland. One of my focus areas is self-sovereign identity and technologies enabling trust-over-IP. It is super exciting to design and build better ways to construct the digital society of the future.

I try to be technology agnostic, have a pragmatic approach, and choose the best tool for the job. Thus I do not have strict favorites when it comes to programming languages or platforms. That is also why I tend to acquire skills as I need them: depending on the project phase and requirements, I may be writing code related to infra scripts, database queries, API interfaces, or user interfaces. Recently I have been playing around mostly with web services built with Golang, AWS, and React.

Coding is part of my free time as well. I often get goofy ideas of little apps or services that ease my other hobbies or everyday life. Hopefully, I can present those projects in my future posts in more detail. Sometimes I also study new programming languages or other tech related topics. For example, this fall I have been trying to learn a little bit of Haskell.

Otherwise, my free time fills up with music and nature. I love to sing: together with my choir, with my friends in karaoke bars, and of course, alone in the sauna. I also love wandering in nature, and I try to do it as often as I can. My yearly highlight is a regular summer vacation trip to the Finnish Lapland to ride with my mountain bike.

I am glad if you had the time to read this far. I hope I can share more of my experiences and thoughts of my projects in the future with you. It is great to be part of this community!

P.S. The cover image is from my laptop. What do you think, is the laptop stickers a window to the developer's soul? 😀