Digia Oyj : Crash course in API's – Digia API Hackatemia offered a proper learning by doing -experience

Are you wondering what Digia API Hackatemia has to offer? Ari Lappalainen, one of last time's participants tells about his experiences both in API Hackatemia and working at Digia.

I am Ari Lappalainen, system developer/consultant in one of Digia's API teams. My career in Digia started last autumn when I applied and was chosen to Digia API Hackatemia. I am also working on my Bachelor's Thesis for Digia concerning cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. This is how I ended up working for Digia.

Hands-on training on API's

API Hackatemia is a 4-day event where participants learn about API technologies and how to develop API's from scratch. Learning about new technologies and AI were my main reasons for applying to API Hackatemia. I have always been interested in what lies underneath the surface. Since Node.js was not my strongest area of expertise, I also thought API Hackatemia would be a good place to learn the basics.

API Hackatemia is a real learning by doing -experience. You get to meet new people and work together as a team to find best solution for your challenge. You develop a real solution based on some common problem or challenge and you get to pitch your solution to fellow participants.

What made API Hackatemia special was digging into a challenge with people you had not met before and thus without prior knowledge about their skills and expertise. The best part was to create something completely new, get your hands dirty and see the concrete results of your teams work as well as see what other teams had accomplished in their own projects.

Why I joined Digia

I was familiar with Digia before API Hackatemia since I had done many projects with them in my earlier career. I had noticed that the atmosphere was good and relaxed. Thus, it was an easy decision to join the company when I was offered a job.

In my job I get to work with several technologies and tools such as IoT, AI, AWS, IBM Cloud, CI pipelines, analytics tools, Docker and Vagrant. Agile methods and DevOps are no strangers to our team. Coding is made social via pair programming as well as mob programming.

In Digia you can build your know-how and to lead your career to the direction you want. I get to influence what kind of projects I'm working with. We have low hierarchy and the self-organizing team chooses its working (and organizing) methods. Everyone is trusted and I get to learn new things every day. Learnings and knowledge are shared from peer to peer. The hours are flexible and remote work is possible as well.

We have also technology tribes to meet all kinds of interests. Technology tribes share information and arrange internal training sessions. I am active on tribes such as Cybersecurity, DevOps and Integration. These tribes are an excellent way to get help when needed whether it's about your thesis or some ongoing project.