Career Profile

Veli-Matti Koukeri

Date of Birth: 1979-06-26

Address
Kalevintie 7
63610 Tuuri

Phone & Email
+358 40 717 9331
veli-matti@koukeri.com

I'm a full stack web developer with 20+ years of experience. Because of my 16 year long career at Veljekset Keskinen, I'm quite experienced in the domains of Retail, HoReCa and Event Management.

I'm always looking forward to exchanging my thoughts with other developers and like to follow the latest endeavors in web development. I tend to take the role of team's technology scout. On other hand, I'm not afraid of choosing proven tools, when they are the best choice.

I appreciate good teammates, openness, challenges and flexible working times.

Veljekset Keskinen, located in Tuuri, Finland, is the largest singular department store in Finland and one of the largest tourist attractions in the country.

My role in the company includes:

• Programming and maintaining the POS management interface (product information, campaigns, account cards etc.), price-check stations and delivery screens used by warehouse and kitchens.
• Building reports and mining data for various purposes
• Design and administration of company's official Tuuri.fi website.
• Supporting the users of POS and Visma Nova ERP in the role of system specialist.
• JIRA and Booked administration.
• Attending to the board of supervisors.

I've occasionally billed for web designing, graphical designing and game testing. I've also been member of various amateur game development groups. Before the career at Veljekset Keskinen, this was my main income.

Astronomy Basics class for the Folk High School of Lakeudenportti.

Internet and Office Tool classes for the Folk High School of Ylöjärvi.

Javascript, HTML5, CSS

PHP

I've also used Laravel framework on a couple of small projects and like it a lot.

Other languages

React, Vue, Node.js, Webpack

Databases & Indexing

Git, SVN

Emacs

Linux

Virtualization, Cloud etc.

Crystal Reports

Adobe Photoshop

Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal,..

You may stop reading here if you're in a hurry and going through a pile of candidates. But if you got interested, this ongoing story will give you some insights to my past.

I got my first computer, Commodore C64 when I was in the second grade at school. I can't say I was instantly into programming: in addition to playing games, I remember testing out POKE commands and typing in code listings from Finnish computer hobby magazines.

Later, on Amiga 500 I played around a bit with Amiga Basic, but it wasn't until my first PC, when I truly got into programming, writing simple text adventures with Logo Writer, QBasic and finally PowerBasic. Eventually I ended up doing my first little software project for the local municipality in Visual FoxPro, for calculating housing aids. I was probably 14 at that point.

In high school I started learning C, C++ and Java, but soon changed into web development using PHP/FI and MySQL. I was following the people at Epic MegaGames (later just Epic Games) and founded The Unreal Links website (directory of Unreal community efforts) which was later on integrated into Unreal.org. Since bandwidth and system time were still expensive in the late 90s, Unreal.org used a database dynamically for an administration, but the content was rendered into static HTML. Retrospectively thinking that was an interesting approach and might make a comeback because of security and low cost.

After high school and attending to Finnish Defence Forces, I continued on web design and development, most of my clients coming from the same old Unreal community, now founding businesses of their own. One of my web templates was actually featured in Unreal Tournament's server browser app, the pinnacle of my fanboyhood. I was also doing some graphical design for web advertisement, and taught internet and basic level IT certification classes at the local folk high school.

In the beginning of new millennium I had to make a choice between education and work. Finnish educational system had no suitable combination of arts and computer science at the time (I was way too unsure of myself to apply into technical university), so I decided to go for a full time job. Despite the bursting IT bubble, web developers were still uncommon and I got employed immediately by Veljekset Keskinen Oy.

Veljekset Keskinen, located in Tuuri, is the largest singular department store in Finland, and one of the largest tourist attractions in the country. It is a family owned business led by Vesa Keskinen, employing currently about 300 full time workers (as of Spring 2018). The amount of employers doubles during the peak seasons of summer and Christmas.

The company culture at Keskinen has traditionally been very do-it-yourself oriented. Therefore, in the end of 90s company launched it's own point-of-sale system, supporting the upcoming euro currency and loyalty card system. The POS client was written in C and the administration front-end in Delphi. The admin side soon proved to be too unstable and slow.

I was initially hired in as a web development specialist to build an intranet and a price check app for floor employees. Both of these were built on LAMP platform. The price check app and intranet were soon combined and became a full administration front-end for the point-of-sale system. The old Delphi platform was retired. We now had one developer working on the POS client and two developers working on the "Intra"-project.

The project was a breeze, and soon Intra featured management for products, campaigns, customers and account cards. It also had a real time sales reporting from the very beginning, and supported printing posters and labels with on-line product information and had a simple warehouse stock system. In addition to Intra we also had a delivery screen used by kitchens and warehouse, price-check app used on store floor by both employees and customers, and hand-held app "Lempo" for making inventories.

During all this time our developers were also responsible for networking and server administration.

In 2005 the company made a decision to acquire an ERP and Visma Nova was chosen from the candidates. Our IT team was also expanded with system specialists to support the new system. Intra continued in its current role, but our own endeavors to build a full warehouse module (and eventually turn Intra into full scale ERP) came to an end.

I continued with the Intra project, but now I was also working on integration and building reports for the ERP with Crystal Reports. I also became a web admin for company's Tuuri.fi website and lifted the website onto Joomla platform.

During the following years we developed Intra without a single major rewrite or branching, adapting to new technologies and software versions on the go. We also went through some major architectural changes and eventually javascript took the major role, PHP server becoming more of an API for the client. Our focus has naturally changed from new features to making existing ones more efficient.

Our project management has always been very agile, to the degree that it was hard to understand the point of agile methods when they came to fashion. We've always been in direct contact with end-users and new versions are continuously released, as soon as a fix or feature is deemed ready for production.

In 2017 the POS and Intra were adapted by another department store, Tuurinportti. It took us only a couple of months to expand into multiple installations scenario and put the system into production use.

To be continued...