Hey there!

My name is Kai Hannonen and I'm a senior level software engineer from Helsinki, Finland. Here you can read about me and find my contact info.

graphic

Quick intro

My name is Kai and I live in Helsinki, Finland. I'm married to my wife Nadia and I've got two girls, Sofia and Noora. I'm a male and I was born in 1978.

I love listening to music, skateboarding, movies, hanging out with my family and friends, taking walks outside, drinking coffee, cooking.

I'm probably not a typical nerd, even if I got my first computer in the mid 80's and have been hooked since. I really got into programming in the early 90's. I'm pretty easy-going, calm and analytic if needed. I'm slightly introverted, I usually listen more than talk. My mother language is Finnish, but I speak, read and write English pretty fluently. Naturally I have the typical Finnish rally accent. I also know some Swedish and German.

I have a B.Sc. Engineering in Electronics and Information Technology from Vaasa University of Applied Sciences. I exchange studied in Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand.

Soft skills

I typically think about humans first when working on tech stuff. I love having brilliant (and not so brilliant) people around me, so that I can learn and help others to get the best out of themselves.

I have lead multiple tech teams. I've gone through most of the project management styles and agile frameworks. I'm familiar with Scrum, Kanban etc. and usually favor really lean ways of working. I hate bureaucracy like most people.

I believe that it's easy to build a (tech) team around me and I'm also OK working as part of any team.

Tech skills

Obviously I've been working on software for a long time, so I've had the chance to use a lot of different technologies. Here are some of the relevant ones categorized.

Typical project
  • JavaScript
  • Vue/Angular/Vanilla
  • HTML
  • Sass
  • Node.js
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • GCP
Back-end
  • Node.js
  • Java
  • PHP
  • Go
  • C
Front-end
  • JavaScript
  • Vue/Angular/Vanilla
  • HTML
  • Responsive layouts
  • Sass
  • Grunt
  • Gulp
  • Browserstack
Databases
  • MongoDB
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • DynamoDB
  • Schema design
  • SQL
  • Indexing etc.
  • Backups etc.
  • DB clusters
Environments
  • Linux
  • MacOS
  • Google Cloud
  • AWS
  • Heroku
  • DigitalOcean
  • Cloudflare
  • iOS
  • Android
Protocols etc.
  • HTTP protocol
  • TCP/IP
  • UDP Datagrams
  • Binary arithmetic
  • Able to create and reverse engineer protocols
APIs
  • Facebook Graph
  • Twitter APIs
  • Instagram API
  • Google APIs
  • Any REST API
General
  • Load balancing
  • Horizontal scaling
  • Vertical scaling
  • Multi-threading
  • TDD
  • NLP, like sentiment analysis and semantic analysis
  • Machine learning and AI

Some services and tools I use

node mongodb redis googlecloud angular aws gulp sass vue

My career so far

Freelancer

After Underhood, I've been working as a freelancer designing and developing web based products. I'm writing most of my UI code in Vue and Quasar and back-end stuff with Node.js.

Underhood && Mimid.io

At Underhood, my role was CTO and Co-founder. My role was to work on all technical aspects of the service. Underhood is a startup that's funded by a great group of angels and companies. Underhood is a social media metrics service that gathers information about brands automatically and lets users to create reports, compare to other brands and find good content that works well on social media. I worked on Underhood since 2016 until December 2019.

Majority of my work there was to design and architect the service and make it all come together with other team members like designers and often other developers. I developed most parts of the service by myself, from the front-end down to the App Engine setups, deployments and databases.

Underhood was sold to Tekir in the summer of 2019.

We also created another service/startup called Mimid.io during the time. Mimid.io is a full browser based document editor with the ability to robotize some or all of the writing, so that one could automate document generation based on data.

Freelancer

Before joining Underhood, I worked as a freelance developer since 2012. I worked mostly on web and mobile apps and services. During that time, I worked on brands and companies like Sanoma, L&T, City of Helsinki, A-lehdet, Tallink Silja and Finlex, often with agencies such as Nordkapp, Isobar and Motley.

Majority of the tech work was planning and implementing web services and apps.

Sofanatics

In 2010, I joined a startup called Sofanatics, as the CTO. We created a service for Social TV, so that sports fans could connect in real time during the match days. Our main focus was on team sports like football, ice-hockey and basketball. Our "Stadion" chat made it possible for the fans (1000s of live users) to chat, chant and cheer in real time during the matches. We had clients like FC Barcelona and NBA.

I worked mostly on the real-time backend that was made in Java and JavaScript, but also took part in other areas of the service, like working on the web stuff in PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, Flex and AWS.

While we came close to making Sofanatics successful, we failed to get round A and we're forced to close the company in the end.

Entrepreneur

Before Sofanatics, I was an entrepreneur since 2001. My company, Beam Jive, was a small development shop that focused on digital services and advanced prototyping. We worked in standard web technologies and we were also well known as Flash/Flex developers. We had a strong focus on user interfaces and user experience from the start.

In addition to the UI work, I worked a lot on server-side stuff in Java and PHP. I also implemented several socket servers (TCP and UDP) and custom web servers in Java. For one client I also reverse engineered the (then popular) Flash Media Server binary protocol and implemented a server based on that work - all that work for a client.

We were a little (around five) developers and designers - all really good in our craft. We served clients such as Telia, Elisa, Comptel and Nokia.

Dynexco

My first real and full-time developer job was at Dynexco as a developer. There I was part of the engineering team implementing a mobile/web based payment system. I worked mostly in Linux environment coding stuff in C/C++ and GTK/Qt.

This was still during the great hype era, and dear lord what a ride it was to work for this company 😅

Some testimonials

Kai has unique competence in creating ideas and making these ideas into great products. He is not only a wizard level developer but also a skilled leader with outstanding managerial experience.

He is very analytic, calm and result oriented - and fun to work with! Highly recommended!

Toni Laturi
The Head of Digital, Sanoma

When you need things to get done, Kai is your man. He is a solid professional with deep expertise on his craft, and an eye for visual side of things as well. Not to mention he's one of the nicest guys in business you'll ever meet. Highly recommended, will hire again!

Sami Niemelä
Creative Director, Nordkapp

Kai is one of the most experienced developers I've ever met. 20 years of coding experience has given him such an huge stack of mental tools that he can do pretty much anything. He can internalize new things rapidly. Kai is also very pleasant guy to be with and one of those dudes I would love to work with again in the future.

Simo Santavirta
Creative Director, HeadAI

Kai's broad knowledge and experience of all web-related technologies make him a fantastic addition to any team that does anything web related. Highly recommended!

Tuomas Artman
Engineer, Uber

My services

Below you can see my services and pricing.

I work remotely from home. If you're based in Helsinki area, we can certainly meet when needed or arrange a Hangouts meeting.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Grass
Cloud Start (GCP)
  • Full App Engine setup
  • Node.js setup of your choice
  • Scalable web service
  • MongoDB, Redis, Cloudflare setup
  • Git setup
  • Frontend and backend covered
  • Documentation in Git
More info by email
Grass
Consulting
  • Technical due diligence
  • Technical review
  • Technical feasibility study
  • Evaluation of employee competence
  • High-level concept design
Grass
Development
  • Bug free backend development
  • Pixel perfect front-end development
  • Brilliant prototyping
  • Thoughtful database design
Tree
Shit in the fan
  • Shit has already hit the fan and you need someone to fix your product
    or
  • You cannot figure out something and need help quickly
  • I bill the work only if I can do/fix it