Holding great responsibility

Johanna Kaihlavirta works as a Developer in Nordcloud's Managed Cloud Applications team in Jyväskylä and is active in a local group of women in ICT field.

You can read her inspiring views and experiences in the article Stereotypes That Still Prevent Women from Pursuing IT and writing about the NiceICT event at Jyväskylä office in our blog.

Here's her story.

1. Where are you from and how did you end up at Nordcloud?

I’m from Jyväskylä, Finland. I ended up at Nordcloud nearly three years ago, when I was looking for new challenges to grow professionally. Small cloud company sounded like it would have tasks I had never done before, and so it has. There are still new challenges for me to pursue at Nordcloud.

2. What is your core competence?

JavaScript and AWS. On soft side, working with people, and communicating clearly and effectively.

3. What sets you on fire?

I love writing beautiful code to create useful software for customers to help them meet their business goals. I enjoy all aspects that are included in that process: collaborating with customers, pondering the best structure of code, making production deployments and helping colleagues with their problems, to name a few.

4. What do you like the most about working at Nordcloud?

I like the diversity of my work, responsibility and team spirit.

I’m working in a team which supports over ten software products for several clients. I’m responsible directly to clients, and that gives me great motivation.

Having so many products to look after, my work is very diverse. I work with many technologies and cloud platforms. I have different problems to solve regarding the product. The tasks I do vary from requirements engineering to making deployments, and of course all the diverse development activities in between. 

This makes my job really interesting.

We use automation a lot and write infrastructure as code, and document anything important along the way. This helps us make sure that all team members have the necessary information to continue seamless work with the product. Great team spirit is one aspect I love at Nordcloud.

5. What is the most useful thing you have learned at Nordcloud?

I have learned more courage to pursue things by myself, without asking for permission.

6. What do you do outside work?

I act as an organiser for a local group of women in ICT field. Most of my free time is happily spent with my family, but when I have time for myself, I read books from sci-fi to historical fiction.

7. Best Nordcloudian memory?

I had just started working at Nordcloud, when one colleague advertised a machine learning online course. I had a streak of online courses in my recent past, so I grabbed the difficult topic with enthusiasm. Discussion on the channel for course’s current and past participants was encouraging and we celebrated passed exams with various emojis.

After I finished the course, I received a small surprise gift from the company, initiated by the person who advertised the course and helped me along the way. I couldn’t have been happier!

Johanna's Managed cloud Applications team is looking for new team members. Check here the job advertisement we wrote together with Johanna and the team!