I tend to see myself as a professional programmer with special niche on security (and writing secure programs).
My CV lists about the same things though in more formal and compact form. Actually I've never done any 'real' (physical) work regularly. When I was kid I helped my mother with her natural product shop and thus had never really need for a summer job.
After the freshman year and returning from the military service I got involved with CS-lab, mostly being assistant to basic programming course, and some odd 'How to use Windows/Unix'-courses.
My first real summer job was at KONE Elevators, at Computer Department of their Hyvinkää's factory. Me and an another trainee (from Oulu) implemented ad-hoc EDMSweb database interface for managing patent documents. My partner wanted to use PERL for it, so I learnt it as well..and fell in love with it :). I also become fond of Hyvinkää; nice and peaceful, yet close to Helsinki..kind of place where one could raise his kids.
Of course I had to check out Nokia, the largest software company around here, as well. I spent a year in Leppävaara's faculties, mostly coding maintentance/control logic with 8-bit CAN-chip (using an oscilloscope as the debugger initially). One day I should find one of those in some BSC, and point to the blinking leds proudly exclaming 'I did that!'..
It was actually nice place to work at, but the tasks were not that much security related. My attempt to get temporary transfer to Boston's lab failed, so instead I followed my friends hints and applied to F-Secure.
In addition to getting more interesting things to do, my salary leapt quite a bit; Nokia was big company offering default student wages, whereupon F-Secure paid for skills.
We made a deal that I would start with Quality Assurance (mostly checking PKI-related stuff/interoperatibility), and after a while would start programming/developing (ended up doing Windows API stuff, like installer for VPN product).
The end wasn't so nice; after couple years I had agreed to take a study leave from next autumn, yet was fired at April (ok, some 20% of the employees, mostly part-timers/students, had to leave as well). Suppose it was about the numbers; waiting till autumn would have been quite much cheaper option for the company.
My next place was Netseal, a small startup company with single product (Netseal MPN, a variant of Mobile-IP). The company never made the breakthrough (so far), but at least I had lot of fun things to do.
During the year did things like porting our product to HP's Secure Linux, added the new AES algorithm in our IP stack. Most interesting was planning and developing an automated system to built a pre-configured Linux operating system with our product pre-installed (which soon became the sole server-option we offered).
At the end I took a study leave for a year, intending to make some real progress towards my graduating. Meanwhile the company decided to get rid of most of the R&D folks. They seem to be still up; not quite sure who all still work there.
After a break, in spring 2005 Kirsi introduced me to Indagon; a small startup with Nokia background, focusing in GPS position systems for companies (so no auto-navigators..).
Been mostly involved in coding for embedded systems; small 8 and 16-bit prosessors which process GPS and input data and relay it to centralized servers. Customers include HKL, and countries like Kuwait.
