Niklas Siltakorpi
Hello! My name is Niklas Siltakorpi and I work as a DevOps Specialist at NorthCode. I find the title a bit strange, as I can have so many different tasks at the same time, meaning my title could also be Full Stack Developer or Test Automation Engineer. The concept is so comprehensive that it is hard to find the correct title, but the "Industry Standard" seems to be DevOps Engineer. As a DevOps Specialist I work under customer´s mandate and our customers can be from any fields of industry. At this moment I work for a big Finnish logistics company.
When I made the career move to work for NorthCode, nothing much changed in my daily routines. I have been a Consultant for about 7 years and quite frankly, there is nothing to reinvent here. However, there was one thing that made me realize I have come to the right place, and that was when I noticed the true senior professionals around me and that the promises I was given have been kept. In my past, often times I have been having a so-called honeymoon phase in a new company and later have realized that some of the promises contained certain conditions. I am very happy to say that is not the case at NorthCode.
To me the best days are the ones when projects are ready for production. That is the moment to check if the preparation has been adequate and whether I have been able to take all needed issues into consideration. DevOps work is very extensive and the product environment for services is often very complex. The more you are able to foresee possible problems, the bigger success experience you get. I like to see people face-to-face and hybrid working period has highlighted me the importance of it. Luckily, NorthCode organises events for us to meet and those days are just great. NorthCode is a unique company in many ways. In our business model the consultant is sort of between the entrepreneur and employee combining the best parts of both. In practice this means that we can together affect the company path. We share the risks together, such as potential longer sick leaves or unsuccessful projects (that we luckily did not have so far). All this is something that I did not see elsewhere.
Right now I work for a customer, whose services are being used by every Finnish person on a daily basis. It is very motivating to me to be developing the service stability and information security further. When some of those significant improvements we have made will be out in the open, one can be very proud.
I have loved technique all my life, basically since I got hold of my very first computer so it is not a real surprise that I like technical things also in my free time. I am building our home to become a real smart home. I try to build things that no one else has yet and combine some different technologies that one could imagine being real only in movies. With my wife we have a common hobby, computer games.
With this being said, there must also be other things in life than technique and most of my attention is definitely given to our under 2-year-old daughter. When she is giving me a break I like to practice languages. Currently I am studying German by reading books and watching TV-series in German without subtitles. I also speak some Russian. I try to maintain an active sports routine by bicycling (yes, I admit I did buy the most advanced electric bike...) and going to the gym.