Tag Archives: Place

[ad_1] Tämä kirjoitus on luettavissa myös suomeksi. Here is Timi reading his own story aloud. From a young age, I’ve been interested in computers. That probably comes from our family tree, as my grandad was a home appliance repairer and father has had a career related to the Internet since the early 2000s dot-com boom. I remember looking at schematics of different household appliances at our grandad’s repair shop. Thinking how on earth the television game shows, where you could send a text message to “throw” a ball towards the goal on the virtual background behind the host, do work. Spending time at the computer, going thru different websites and being impressed by those. Father being head of e-commerce for a hairdressing industry chain and seeing the growth of e-commerce during the mid-2000s. At that time I was in primary school and didn’t understand much of what all that was about. And surely wouldn’t have even guessed that someday I would have a career in IT. Getting familiar with the Internet Sure, back in the days, you had MySpace, virtual horse stables, guestbooks, IRC-Galleria, and different “website builders”… everyone explored the possibilities of these tools and technologies. You almost weren’t cool if you didn’t. So of course I built a few websites mainly just for fun, like almost everyone else of my age at that time. I also purchased my first domains and made a few sites public. One of those, for a scout group, was “coded” with excel. That’s how I started learning HTML and CSS. When secondary school started, I did get really interested in sewing, and light-and-audio equipment for live productions. And politics. Copyright, patent law, freedom of information and net neutrality were hot topics around that time in Finland. I felt that the Internet I had grown with, was threatened. The Pirate Party movement had just landed in Finland and they were defending everything I believed in: open access to information and people’s online rights. Despite my young age, they welcomed me, so I got involved with registering the party for elections and in general. They used IRC for all the communications, and soon I became frustrated because of missed conversations due to shutting off the computer and thus signing off from IRC as well. That led me to assemble, install and run my first home server so I would always have IRC on. Of course, the new server intrigued me and almost invited to try out hosting the websites myself. That way I learned the basics about Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL. My interest in these things was understood by only a few classmates and for everyone else, I was a bit of a weirdo. Because of that, I didn’t make many friends from the same age group with me – and that stays true to this day. Finding WordPress At some point in all this, I found WordPress. It was around 2009 and version 2.8 when I installed WordPress for the first time. I immediately started looking for ways to modify and extend the website. One thing lead to another. Soon I had installed WordPress quite a few more times, and even helped one of my friends to set up a website for their parliamentary election campaign. For getting the timeline right in this post, I looked up my old websites and found out that in 2010 I had published a guide on how to translate WordPress into Finnish and even offered some theme translations to download. And yet I still didn’t think that IT, servers, websites or WordPress could be my career. When secondary school ended, I applied to study live production. Like audio and lights in concerts and all that stuff. Didn’t get selected for that school, because of the low numbers on the diploma. That was devastating. But little did I know. The third school I applied to, selected me and there I was, going to study multimedia for three years. Photography, video editing, design and a little bit of web development. The most inspiring and toughest times of life at the same time Looking back, this was one of the most pivotal points in my life. Three years in that school taught me how to be creative with design and boosted my self-confidence in coding skills. Starting almost from the first web development classes, teachers saw my skills and encouraged me to continue coding. I started helping other students during the classes, as most of the web development stuff was already familiar to me. I really enjoyed the print design classes, photography and school in general after a long time. I had also become active in running one of the few Internet cafes in Helsinki that were left in the early 2010s. At the time, we were one of the few places which served only vegetarian food, had open wifi and laptops available for customers. As I was interested in tech and some knowledge, the natural thing was to be involved with maintaining those laptops and the website for the cafe. Some same founders of that cafe cooperative had founded another cooperative in the early 2000s, to offer reasonably priced hosting and email services for associations and other NGOs. After some time, they invited me to join and soon I started helping with server upkeep and customer service. I would also make a number of websites with WordPress for our clients. For the first time in my life, I was getting some money from doing things on the Internet. I started to feel that I had found what I want to do in my life. Then my partner at the time did get severely ill mentally. That started to affect me as well, and the last year of school with one half at on-the-job training and another half at school doing a bigger final project was very emotional and filled with deep worry. During that year we broke up and that led to depression. I didn’t go to school.