I’m Jani Haapala and I work as a Quality Consultant and DevOps evangelist. I’m very fortunate since I do not get to do these things only during my working hours but I can use all my knowledge and learnings in my free time when I am coding my own megalomanic home automation project.
Gofore is an extremely warm and employee-focused company. Gofore makes a great deal of effort to make employees happy and satisfied with the work. There is a huge number of different groups that you can join to do things that you feel interested in. You can affect a lot that what kind of work you want to do. Gofore has also lots of opportunities and possibilities for self-development.
Tell us about your career and study background?
I have a background of being an electrician who got super-interested in technology and went to polytechnic to study telecom networks and coding. During the studies, I got an internship place from Ericsson and as a bonus, got a possibility to do my thesis work for them also. My thesis subject was selected to be “An automation solution for testing team needs”. That was the moment when testing and automation flies bit me… hard. From that moment on I have been extremely interested in testing, test automation, and lately infrastructure automation and automating software development processes. I stayed on Ericsson for about three years and switched to a company called Espotel to be a consultant, more specifically, test automation consultant. My first assignment was with Nokia Siemens Networks. That was the time that got me interested in consultant work since it is a profession whose role is to help others to succeed with your expertise. I stayed on Espotel for about three years until I found Qentinel.
Qentinel was focused on testing and test automation so it felt like a natural move, so I joined them. I have been now in Qentinel/Gofore as a Quality Consultant for a bit over ten years and I am still loving my company every day. My career has taken me from a manual tester into becoming a Lean and DevOps evangelist with a flavor of software development process automation specialist. I also feel that I am very fortunate since I do not get to do these things only during my working hours, but I can use all my knowledge and learnings in my free time when I am coding my own megalomanic home automation project.
What makes Gofore a great company for you?
Gofore is an extremely warm and employee-focused company. Gofore makes a great deal of effort to make employees happy and satisfied with the work. There is a huge number of different groups that you can join to do things that you feel interested in. You can affect a lot that what kind of work you want to do. Gofore has also lots of opportunities and possibilities for self-development.
I appreciate that the employer offers training opportunities such as Udemy online courses as well as libraries. Another important point is the opportunity to attend conferences to get new ideas. All of these have been things keeping my passion alive and made it possible that I have got to try new learnings in customer projects and also my perspective have evolved. And once you have learned and tried things enough and been able to use them in many contexts, it is natural to start helping colleagues as well.
What are the things you most likely tell your close circle about Gofore?
About all the enthusiastic people that Gofore has and all the things that these people do daily to make work fun and inspirational. Also, all the possibilities that you have to develop yourself.
What is the best Gofore memory?
There are lots of warm memories with all the lovely customers that I have been able to work but the Gofore memory, I have to say some of the many gatherings that we have had. For example, our Coding days where we have been together, coding with Legos and RasperryPi’s. Competing on various wacky coding challenges together and won some cool prizes too.
What is your favorite internal Slack channel at Gofore?
I am a huge photography fan and was so amazed to see that there is an own channel for us, so it has to be the #photograpy-gerho. ?
What are the technologies and tools you mostly work with?
I mostly work nowadays with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), DevOps, and CI/CD pipelines so the tooling and technologies come around that. Some of the key tools and technologies are AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Python, RobotFramework, GithubActions, Linux.
How does your typical day look like? What excites you most in your daily work?
My calendar tends to get quite fast full of meetings. Meetings with various customers, sales support meetings, and team meetings. I do nowadays lots of designing, documenting, and coaching work also but I always try to reserve some time for the pure coding, experimenting, and building work. The most exciting and rewarding moments in my work are the situations where I manage to help somebody else to be happier on their work. That can be through coaching, solution design, or solution building that helps somebody else to be more efficient, do things more easily or enjoy one’s work more. And maybe learn something new also.
What would you like to do in the future at Gofore?
I would like to take the DevOps concept further on our company and make it more understandable for everybody. I would also like to help to create opportunities for everybody to have a good career path, to evolve and gain new skills. Especially in the areas of DevOps and Test Automation.
What kind of digital world do you want to build with others?
The digital world and digitisation are all about the speed and fast phase of ideas, competencies, and concepts that are filling our daily life. It is not enough anymore to study a profession and do that until you get retired. Nowadays there needs to be a humane and ethical way to deal with this digitisation fuzz and help people to stay ahead of it. This means that we need to create enthusiasm, opportunities, and learning paths for people to constantly learn new things and develop their skills. Having needed skills makes people feel needed and part of something greater, and that brings happiness.
For me example, I do not feel that I am working, I feel that I have a passion for the things that I do and as a bonus I get also paid to do those. I live and breathe the things that I do and the technologies that I use. I want that everybody can also feel this passion and get the same feeling and opportunity to be passionate. Everybody needs the possibility to be good at their passion.
It’s often said that digitalisation has changed every part of human life – how we live, how we work and how we interact with the world around us. But when you think about it, digitalisation alone can’t change anything. Without people, it’s all just hardware and code. That is why we want you to get to know our people, Goforeans. Read Our Gofore stories! ?
Are you interested in job opportunities at Gofore, read more about us, and check out the open positions gofore.com/en/join-the-crew/
