Career path – Peter
Scroll down and discover what a Software Developer does at Pinja!
Professional and comfortable workplace
I’m Peter, a Software Developer working on the Timber by Pinja ERP system for sawmills and wood processing plants. My job is fixing bugs and adding new features to the software. Originally English I was recently granted Finnish citizenship so I am now proud to hold dual citizenship.
I like the challenge in my job – there’s always something new to do. It’s really cool to add new features to a piece of software and to be building something new. I also enjoy fixing things – being able to add value somewhere. Tasks which have a finish point are great.
It’s also nice to have a mixture of small things you can fix quickly and these bigger projects that you can work on for a longer period of time. My work is basically full-stack development. In the same hour you’re working front end, back end, doing something with the database, doing something with the UI. There’s variety and it’s cool.
I think Pinja’s work culture is professional and comfortable. My coworkers are a lot of fun and have a good sense of humor. They’re friendly, warm and very knowledgeable, always willing to help. You can get an answer from a real human being rather than just Google, which is a really important feature. There’s also diversity at the office, which is nice.
The best thing about my workplace is: The social aspect of it! I like people, so having many different team building and socializing events, like Pinja’s Summer Party, is fun.
My career path
Professional musician
My professional roots are in music. I studied classical guitar performance at the Royal Conservatoire in Scotland and graduated in 2009. After University, I worked for small music schools mainly as a freelance teacher. They were private schools, like after school clubs. Taught in a couple of schools as a music teacher but not as a classroom teacher but as an instrument teacher.
Then I started my own music school, which led to me writing books. After I met my wife I moved to Finland and studied Finnish for two years.
Teaching computer science in London
We moved to London in 2015 and I retrained as a Computer Science teacher. I had mainly worked as a music teacher privately and wanted to see if I could have a “real job”. The want to be employed rather than self-employed was the driving factor.
I studied Computer Science teaching and got my post-graduate certificate in Education and Computer Science teaching. I taught in inner-city London schools briefly before moving back to Finland again. We taught Python there because it’s easy to get into. It’s also a powerful language but the syntax is palatable.
Entrepreneur in Finland
I ran a small music school in Oulu for the last 5 years, working as an entrepreneur. On the side I’ve written books and done some YouTube and coding. I built my own audio player in Python before you could slow down YouTube videos. You could slow the recordings down and remove the guitars or vocals. It was a companion for my music books.
I’m passionate about music theory and enjoy the crossover with software development. If you understand music theory well, you kind of understand all music. The rules of music theory haven’t really changed in the last three hundred years whereas the digital era is still relatively young. The number of changes and developments we’ve had, and all the technologies that have come aboard is mind blowing.
Junior Software Developer at Pinja
A friend, who works here, knew I was looking for work as a Software Developer, so he recommended Pinja to me. The process was great – easy instructions, communication worked and I knew where I stood at every point. People were really nice to me. It felt comfortable and easy.
My first week was very memorable. Seeing the sheer size of the codebase was intimidating. “Oh dear”, was my first thought when I saw it. It is very exciting to be able to work with something so massive. From the beginning, I wasn’t given baby tasks but serious, real life, no training wheels kind of things. But I’m comfortable being uncomfortable, which I think is important. I was treated like a professional from the start.
Learning every day
Every day is a learning day. I don’t think there’s been a day when I’ve gone home and not learned anything new, which I think is magnificent. I’ve gotten a bit better at something. But there have been some significant moments, like understanding the architecture better.
I had a great week with one of the developers helping me with a task and that really opened up the architecture of the software. Understanding the sub-structures and seeing the patterns better. That was one of the biggest weeks for me.
Moments of success – promoted to Software Developer
I recently got promoted to Software Developer. Debugging is important and one of the many methods I’ve learned about so much from my colleagues and working on Timber. Senior Developers on my team have a sixth sense they’ve acquired with time and experience. With some problems there is no substitute for experience and it's exciting to see the gears turning when a senior developer works out the solution to a problem. It’s still early days for me but I’m on the path for that.
Recently we’ve been working on package cards a company sticks to big pallets of wood. Designing the package cards and getting the printer layout to work has been a challenge. But when you get it to work and you get the right size, the right format and everything’s laid out nicely and looks good – you feel like you’ve improved the design. It’s a really nice feeling to actually see your work on the screen.
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Pinja is good to their employees!
What does being a datalover mean to me?
Data is a huge part of the modern world and being a datalover, to me, means respecting everyone's digital fingerprint.