About

The story so far

In the context of my tech interests & career… in somewhat chronological order:

1987	Born
1987+	My mother encouraged me to study hard and my dad taught me to work hard. Extremely valuable guidelines for life!
1996	Had the opportunity to start using computers at my elementary school. Windows NT & 95 PCs with no restrictions. Great for learning stuff.
1997	Got my first own PC; Played a lot of NHL 97, Age of Empires 1 and Action Quake 2. Also tinkered a lot with the OS so I had to “format C:\” quite many times…
1999	Won a Corel Draw 9 graphic software license from a raffle organized by a Finnish computer magazine Mikrobitti (which funnily is part of Alma Media where I now work); That software blew my mind and got me started with graphic design.
2000	Built my first website with Netscape Composer for my elementary school during 6th grade with my classmate.
2001 - 2019	Lot of miscellaneous web development & graphic design work (both print & digital).
2001 - 2004	Junior High School. Hated it.
~2002	Started using IRC.
2004 - 2007	High School. Loved it!
2006 - 2007	DJing in High School discos.
2004 - 2006	Acted as “village PC support”, making few bucks here and there: Basically fixing virus-infected & broken Windows installations and correcting invalid TSV/CSV-data that farmers used to upload to some weird proprietary web app to later receive EU agricultural subsidy money or something like that.
2004	Built my first “dynamic” personal website - with “advanced stuff” like dynamic nested subsections and a guestbook a visitor could write on. Coded by hand. Big thanks to Finnish PHP-guide Mureakuha.
2004	Built my first brand new PC from components myself, dual boot with Windows & Gentoo Linux; After breaking the Gentoo installation too many times, I switched between Suse & Fedora and few years later settled on Ubuntu. You can find the specs on my old 2004 website. For my early-age Linux hobby, a big thanks goes to raja-antura.org and later kapsi.fi websites.
2005	Turned 18 and got my driving license which helped at attending LAN parties! I also organized multiple LAN parties myself with ~40 attendees.
2006	Worked as a techical support person (PC/Windows) for Finnish Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners.
2006 - 2010	Worked in a Newspaper Printing House. During the years I basically worked throughout the web offset printing process: From pre-press computer-to-plate, to newspaper printing itself with Solna G150 and post-press tasks.
2007	Nine month Conscript Military Service in Finnish Defence Forces, served as Graphic Designer in Finnish National Defense University. Discharged as Lance Corporal.
~2008	Built my first JS+PHP+WordPress powered website. Since then I've built dozens of those. Nowadays I try to heavily avoid PHP.
2008 - 2013	Media Technology bachelor's studies in Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. Never really graduated, but definitely the best part of the school was getting great friends and being able to go to student exchange!
2010	Erasmus Student Exchange period in Fachhochschule Salzburg (Austria). There I studied Multimedia Art & Technology. It was my first time abroad and flying to a new country for a 7 month stay even without having an apartment there taught me things tend to work themselves out (if you let them and stay positive)!
2010	After ~6 years of running PCs with Linux operating systems, I started to “Think Different” (switched to mainly Macs).
2011	Started working at Iltalehti (Alma Media) as a Frontend Developer for Telkku.com which at the time was 10th biggest website in Finland. Later I heard that some of the main reasons I was chosen instead of other candidates was that I had put up a properly working portfolio website online and for the recruitment interview I made a single button with CSS, one that used the latest and greatest CSS3 features at the time, but one that also - with various dirty hacks - worked great with the worst browsers such as IE 6, Nokia Symbian browsers and really old Samsung flip phones. Cool beans.
2011+	Since the rest of the Telkku team developed with Linux-machines and my development machine was a Mac, one of my initial tasks was to “wrap” the development enviroment into virtual machine using VirtualBox, Vagrant and Puppet; I still feel this was one of the main reasons I later on started with infrastructure as code.
2012	Started to regularly attend to HelsinkiJS meetups. HelsinkiJS was the biggest monthly developer meetup in Finland. By attending these events I learned a massive amount about web development from my peers and also made some friends!
2012 - 2015	Working with some of the biggest websites in Finland, I got a lot of experience in short time and with it a lot more responsibilities. Job role transitioned from Frontend Developer to Fullstack Developer and finally to Senior Developer within Alma Media
2014	First time I myself launched an AWS EC2 instance. I had no idea what I was doing, but anyway.
2015	Started working with AWS EC2 and Beanstalk with Ansible & CloudFormation.
2015	Jumped into ReactJS bandwagon early on by rewriting Telkku.com frontend with ReactJS v0.13 and universal/isomorphic rendering on top of ExpressJS/NodeJS.
2015	Held my first public meetup talk in HelsinkiJS meetup and I was super nervous! I am still nervous always before a talk, but it gets easier with experience. For anyone looking to improve in public speaking I can warmly recommend this book.
2016	Applied and was chosen to Solution Architect position at Alma Media. This was a big step up for me personally as it required a lot of effort and growth to be able to fill that role. For example, I spent countless evenings and nights studying AWS tools (focusing especially on CloudFormation, CloudFront, S3, Beanstalk and Lambda).
2016 - 2020	Multiple conference & meetup talks.
2017+	We started the annual “Alma Developer” -program at Alma, where we recruit developer trainees (which we hire as full-time employees after the 9 month trainee period). We have hired over 50 new employees via Alma Developer -program since then and almost all of them are still working at Alma! I have been heading marketing, program content and the intensive training for the program.
2017	I deployed my first serverless API into production at scale, receiving hundreds of millions requests per month. It was just few NodeJS-based Lambda functions behind an API Gateway defined with AWS SAM, but at the time it was a big step up for me.
2017	Built couple AWS projects with Terraform.
2017	Attended AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Oh boy, that was something else!
2018	Completed my first AWS associate certification. This was a huge goal for me personally, since I've always felt like an impostor working with cloud & backends since I have a background in frontend development.
2018+	I've always been actively sharing stuff in Slack and face-to-face, but around this time I started more actively sharing best practises and useful resources internally within Alma. One could call it “in-house developer advocacy”.
2018	Started using AWS CDK in production.
2018 - 2020	Built systems with almost billion requests a month in total on top of AWS cloud with serverless technologies and infrastructure as code (with CDK).
2019	Had completed all AWS associate and professional certifications, with one AWS specialty certificate and one GCP associate certificate.
2020	AWS released “The Journey to Serverless-First: Enterprise Stories” -whitepaper which features Alma Media as one of the customers alongside iRobot and Fender. I was part of the creation process on behalf of Alma.
2020	Promoted to Lead Technologist in Alma Media.
2020	Recognized by AWS as a Community Builder.
2020+	To Be Continued. Let's see what we build next at Alma!

I'm 30-something geek and music lover from Finland. Quite easy-going and sociable, although I like to spend most of my time in the peace & quiet of Finnish countryside.

I mainly live in Kokkola Kälviä, located in the west coast of Finland, but I also spend a lot of time in the capital city Helsinki - due to work, friends and live music. Due to work I also travel a lot in Tampere & Oulu and sometimes internationally.

I could summarize myself as a visual techie/geek: I have a background in graphic design & UX, but I've been rather at home with computers all my life which resulted in a career in web development: Starting from frontend development, to being fullstack developer and finally to working with cloud infrastructure. Nowadays I happily work as a Lead Technologist at Alma Media, focusing on cloud-native development - especially with AWS.

If you're a fellow cloud/serverless/tech/etc enthusiast, feel free to connect with me in LinkedIn and to follow me on Twitter.

Ari on front of lighthouse in his home town — Here's me, in summer of 2020, in front of a lighthouse on “Tankar”-island in my home town. Btw, Lighthouse score 100+100+100+100 on mobile for those frontend developers reading this 😎

My remote workspace featuring 16" Apple Macbook Pro and couple of 27" Thunderbolt displays.

Ari on front of meeting room named “Lambda” — Photo taken in front of a meeting room aptly named “Lambda” during my visit to AWS in Seattle, USA.

Lakeview — To quote my favourite Jamiroquai song: *“This corner of the earth is like me in many ways”*. Photo taken from a lake where I swim often.

PC computer — I mostly work with macOS & GNU/Linux based systems, but I do still have one Windows PC for mostly gaming (and for sometimes testing websites with the awful Internet Explorer).

Photo from a train with a laptop on a table — I'm quite used to traveling by train within Finland. Been doing it since I was a kid and nowadays I travel a lot because of work.

Ari speaking to audience — Speaking at AWS Community Day Nordics 2020 at Stockholm, Sweden.

Ari Palo

Let's get personal!