Management

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Executive Summary

I am looking for a new position at the moment, if you know a company interested in the experienced engineer or project, please, refer them to this page

Few things worth highlighting:

– All things cross-platform, mobile, and mobile-web. Especially Qt/QML related

– I love developing software, but also practice managing projects and technical products. My last and first successfully shipped large product had an estimated business effect of some 100-500 MEur

– One of my private apps has 40K+ downloads and another one stays in the biz apps top sellers for months already. That is supposed to illustrate that even in small projects I know what mobile users actually love and I am able to focus on shipping just the relevant bits with the high quality

– Naturally all things agile, both soft and hard parts of it up to the point of organizing conferences and speaking on test-driven development in particular environments

Location doesn’t matter much as long as it is a European city large enough for an English-speaking life (for example, Helsinki, Paris, Berlin, Madrid)

Further links:

My resume (pdf)
My LinkedIn profile – please, feel absolutely free to ask for more information from anybody who recommended me there

Lyrics, details and some stats

History of this blog and my involvement in it

I started this blog one years ago while I was an engineer working for Finnish Nokia and learning my way into Agile and software quality. At first it was a place for my to learn better by sharing the experience.

Over the years the blog was changing. After the initial “solo blogger” period I changed the concept into a group blog and was trying to differentiate from the other blogs on Agile by gathering a real diverse set of authors. We were lucky to have a maker of an agile tool , some coaches , some developers, a manager and so forth. Many of them continue having a successful Agile-related public life with the most prominent case probably being Jurgen Appelo a trainer, popular blogger and author of the best selling Management 3.0 whose essays I was fortunate to publish a few years ago. At the high point we were getting something like 50K page views a month. While brining lots of fun running and editing such a website was, however, taking lots of time from my life.

Product management, Qt and startup experience

At some point I’ve got more involved into product management and later as you may have noticed into Qt-based cross-platform development. Agile became just one of the important tools I was using in the work life, even my public talks are nowadays more on, for example, test-driving QML rather than on soft topics such as facilitating the problem solving. Without the continuous editorial effort the external contributors started leaving the blog yet daily readership and surprisingly stay high. So when I found myself looking for a job now, I figured I could try using this blog as an ad platform. Especially since the exact work location doesn’t matter much to me.

Lately I was deeply involved in a Helsinki based startup caring after making the video calls so simple and easy to use that even grandma would use it for calling the grandchildren. Unfortunately as it happens with startups, sometimes you find yourself looking for a new position earlier than expected. I am in such a situation right now.

Looking for a new position now

There are three things I know how to do well:
– Product management for the technical products. Less about the marketing side, more about the listening to market side, playing a Product Owner and shipping things (global rollouts included).
– Agile Project management – pretty much a simplified version of the above
– Mobile, mobile-web and cross-platform software development, especially all things Qt

Ideally I am looking for not a huge project where you just have to combine the things above, but specializing in any of them is fine as well.
Location doesn’t really matter as long as the city is large enough for the English-speaking life. Say, Helsinki, Berlin or London would fit perfectly.

Some highlights about my ability to build and ship what customer really wants

My biggest achievements stay with the companies, but there are a few private things worth highlighting. I created a number of private apps for mobiles during the last year. One of them got over 40K downloads by now (and that’s pure Nokia N9 app while there are not many of N9’s sold in the world), another one stays on the business apps top seller page for several months already and is the first known to me case of a real application running Symbian, MeeGo and Android from the same source code.

So if you happen to know a company in a large European city (Helsinki, Berlin, Paris, whatever) that needs an experienced engineer who also knows how to manage projects and ship products, please, refer them to this page and/or forward my CV (pdf). The closer to mobile, mobile-web or cross-platformness, the better

On May 16, 2011 I was taking part in the Helsinki Qt meetup . I was talking there about how you can test-drive your QML projects using a semi-official qtest-qml library.

Here are the slides and the example code.

This presentation has only minor changes from a year old Tampere version.

Direct Nokia Store link – http://store.ovi.com/content/214273

I’ve released the free Daily Wallpaper for Nokia N9 a couple of months ago. Since that time it enjoyed nearly nine thousands of downloads (quite a number for this platform) and was keeping me personally entertained. Once an hour (or once a day or once a month) it is downloading the fresh cool wallpaper from flickr and every time I unlock the phone I can enjoy a new interesting photo.

Since the moment of release, the most popular request (sometimes even causing the low rating in the Nokia Store) was not to rotate the too wide images, but to cut the central part out of it. I do love the rotation, but my opinion is totally irrelevant compared to the customers. So since yesterday, version 1.1 knows how to do both rotation and cutting. Cutting is the default mode. Enjoy and, please, submit more requests or vote on the existing ones.

For those too busy to read the whole post: from now and until the end of winter you can get Easy Discount Calculator for Symbian and Nokia N9 for 50% cheaper (1 euro in most of the countries) from Nokia Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/186742

I am a big fan of small utilities tuned for the very concrete purpose. And I don’t enjoy messing with the lots of discount calculations. You know, when one headset for my phone was 49 euro and now it it is 33% cheaper, but then there is the other one that used to be 69 euro and now it is 40% cheaper. How much do they actually cost?

Simple, elegant, slick, fast!

That was exactly the reason a group of friends (Artem Marchenko, Jarmo Parkkinen, Tuukka Lindoos and Ekaterina Kuts) decided to solve and created Easy Discount Calculator, the first ever real app that runs on Symbian devices, MeeGo Harmattan devices (Nokia N9) and Android devices from the same source code. OK, Android support was a bit of an experiment, so on some phones it works flawlessly, on others it doesn’t, so we offer it for free.

 

Top ranked and top rated after a couple of months in sales

 

From the sales start in September, this Discount Calculator was steadily climbing up the best seller list and is right now is the top rated and second top seller business app for Nokia N9 and just below the top page of Symbian business apps top seller list. So we figured if people like the clean UX and find the app useful, why don’t we give it out cheaper for after-Christmas sales and maybe we manage to climb to the very top seller position for the business apps.

Winter discounts! Get it for just one euro or even cheaper

So from now and until the end of February 2012, Easy Discount Calculator is available for the cheapest possible price for Symbian phones and Nokia N9! That is 50% reduction of what it used to cost. Exact price is determined by Nokia store, I believe for most of the European and American countries it should be around 1 euro or 1 dollar.

You can get the Symbian and N9 versions from Nokia Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/186742 and Android beta is available for free at http://bit.ly/discountcalculator

If you happen to have a minute for comments, we would also love to reply to your comments and proposals at our support web-site http://discussions.zoho.com/easydiscountcalculator

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N9 is a wonderful Nokia device totally unlike the smarphones it was doing earlier. To the date it gathered a number of extremely positive reviews and is arguably the first phone able to compete the iPhone in the user experience area and in how beautiful it looks. It got a beautiful AMOLED screen that just begs to be used for pictures, new and interesting pictures. Yet finding great wallpapers and setting them manually is tedious. Well, no more. Meet Daily Wallpaper, one of the top downloads for N9 in the photos & videos category enoying several thousands downloads a month (quite a number for a device released just a month or two ago in a small number of markets).

Daily Wallpaper is a small app that every hour, every day, week or month gets to flickr, downloads a fresh photo from a group focused on gathering great wallpapers and sets it as a device wallpaper that you can see on the device lock screen. Certainly you can set choose the wallpaper yourself at any moment as well.

The app is evolving actively, new features and improvements get released sometimes once a week and while I am still working on the fresh features, I am keeping the app available for free until at least Christmas 2011, possibly longer. Later the app will become a paid one, but once you downloaded a free version, you should be able to get updates for free forever (that is if I’ve git the Nokia store rules correctly).

 

Have a look, give it a try and let me know which features you are missing the most. Go vote for your favorite features or submt a new idea to the Daily Wapaper’s uservoice portal.

Enjoy!

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