Avainsana: Redefined Efficiency

Decoding the Consultant Life: Real stories from real consultants

Timo Koola, Lead Cloud Architect, about working for our customer Underground City

 

I am Perttu Pakkanen and my interest as Codento’s talent acquisition lead is to better articulate why consulting could be a great career choice.

When potential customers ponder whether they should use our services, they usually like to see some reference cases. Why wouldn’t our potential employees think the same?

So, I had a chat with our Lead Cloud Architect, Timo Koola. Timo has been working with our customer Underground City to help water utility companies in managing their water and sewer networks better.

I asked Timo to sit with me in our office meeting room during a busy Tuesday afternoon and share some of his thoughts on the project.

Here we go:

 

Can you tell me about the solution you’ve built?

The customer had an old React application hosted on a virtual machine with PostgreSQL. We migrated it to Google Cloud. Now we have a modern Node.js backend with Google Cloud services including e.g. Cloud Run and Cloud SQL.

The software itself has a very meaningful function: To protect the Baltic Sea. More specifically, sewer network asset management.

So, Underground City addresses the challenges faced by water utility companies by offering more cost-effective and sustainable solutions for locating and repairing faults.

 

That sounds interesting. What’s been your role in the project?

Architect, developer, a bit of everything. Also helped with data analysis. So, pretty much an all-around champion helping with many things. 

I provided the customer senior-level architecture and programming expertise. In the future, the tasks will most likely revolve more around architecture work.

 

Out of everything you’ve worked on, what’s been the most interesting?

Developing the analysis side – helping the customer do things that no one else does with data. With this, we can present the state of the sewer network on a map, both at a high level and by drilling down into details. A unique solution for presenting sewer data.

 

To continue from that, what keeps you excited about your work?

Interesting problems and improving water bodies. Therefore, making a real impact in the real world.

 

That is for sure an exceptional benefit in a project. What has been the most difficult part?

There’s a lot of data, and presenting it in a reasonably comprehensible way across multiple levels. It’s not only about the data analysis but it’s also essential to make the data understandable to different stakeholders.

 

What have you learned?

How data compiled from basic elements can be valuable to the customer. Even if the data could be simple from the beginning, having it in the right form can provide much value.

When aggregated and analyzed effectively, data reveal patterns, trends, and insights that were previously hidden, enabling customers to uncover opportunities or solve problems with greater precision.

 

Finally, any thoughts to wrap things up?

It’s incredibly interesting to bring software development solutions into a traditional industrial sector. Physical work coupled with software creates a lot of added value.

 

Thanks Timo for the interview!

 

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Being part of pioneering projects like this allows for both personal and professional development. I strongly feel that at Codento you can engage in work that is not only challenging but also highly impactful in many industries.

Read more about us from our career site and see if there are any suitable opportunities for you and connect with us on our recruitment system!

 

About the interviewee:

Timo Koola is an experienced software engineer and cloud architect. He has been in the field for almost 30 years and has a diverse background in many different roles and technologies.

About the interviewer:

Perttu Pakkanen is responsible for talent acquisition at Codento. Perttu wants to make sure that the employees enjoy themselves at Codento because it makes his job much easier.

Decoding the Consultant Life: Real stories from real consultants

Muhammad Faiz Wahjoe, Data Engineer, about working for our customer Plugit

 

I am Perttu Pakkanen and my interest as Codento’s talent acquisition lead is to better articulate why consulting could be a great career choice.

When potential customers ponder whether they should use our services, they usually like to see some reference cases. Why wouldn’t our potential employees think the same?

So, I did an email interview with our data engineer, Faiz. 

Faiz has been working with the Codento team to gather the different use cases of data and ultimately establish a robust data warehouse to centralize Plugit’s data management and enhance its organization.

In customer’s own words, it has been “the best-run consulting project we’ve experienced”.

I asked Faiz some questions about the project and to my delight, he gave very comprehensible answers.

Read more below:

 

What kind of solution have you built?

In brief, we did modernization of the client’s data platform. The client operates numerous charging points for electric vehicles and as such, they handle a lot of data. 

The motivation for this project was while the client’s previous data platform was already established and fulfilled the day-to-day requirements, Performance and scalability issues started to be detected. Hence, modernization was deemed necessary. 

The modernization was about creating a GCP-focused BigQuery-based data platform and its related tools, for example, Dataform for data transformation purposes. We then created a pipeline to connect customer’s data sources to BigQuery in which we use Dataflow and then we leverage Terraform as our IaC tool to set up and manage our system’s infrastructure on GCP.

 

What kind of tasks have you done in the project?

I spend most of my development time in Developing data pipeline using Dataflow and setting up transformation script using Dataform.

 

What has been the most interesting thing you have done working for the customer?

We held a workshop together with the client and we identified one particularly interesting insight that we are keen to know. This insight is about automatic problem detection of the client’s many charge points by looking at the pattern of one of the particular kinds of data they produce. 

This sounds quite simple but to realize that such an important insight could be derived from such simple data, with the right transformation, is intriguing – in my culture we have a saying ”We could see ants across the sea but missed an elephant in our face”.

Even more interesting, while deriving this insight from a limited size of dataset could be said as simple, Deriving it from millions of data record, every day, across tens of thousands of data producer points bring another dimension of challenge and here, the strenghts of tools that we are leveraging shine. The powerful data processing capability provided by BQ and Dataform made this operation reliable both in performance and accuracy and easy to develop and manage.

 

What brings enthusiasm to your workdays?

I always like if my work produces real impact(s) in solving a problem for our clients and users and in this project those impacts are plentiful to see. I also put a positive and productive work atmosphere as one of the main factors and it is quite visible in this project as well, working with my fellow codento consultant and the periodic, routine discussion with the client has been quite a positive experience.

On top of that, I got to work on many modern innovative tools in solving the client’s problem, while I always think of a tool as a means to solve the Client’s problem e.g. we should not pick a tool based on ”hype” or ”that’s what everyone is doing” alone but rather the suitability.

 

What has been the most difficult part?

I think the most challenging part for us is understanding and navigating Dataflow traits, quirks, and limitations. 

Especially the Python SDK library that we are using. It’s a relatively new tool and its rather specific use case means community support is not as plentiful as we want it to be. This also has a consequence that LLM tools quite often fails to give consistent and accurate help. I also do not have extensive experience in production-grade Dataflow so the learning curve was quite steep.

But, we worked together, leveraging our experience so we could learn and understand the tools better faster, and in the end, we were able to deliver the project in a state that the client was really satisfied. So, the client’s satisfaction and my own skillset growth have been more than rewarding.

 

What have you learned?

I learned a lot. 

From the technical perspective, I gained important knowledge and experience and got to improve my skillset in the various tools that we are using: Dataflow, Dataform, BigQuery, and so on. 

From a non-technical perspective, I also gained experience in how a consultancy project is run and managed, how to identify important milestones and navigate challenges, and how to deliver a solution that solves the problem and produces a positive impact on the client’s case.

I also met and worked with new people, understanding not only their needs and requirements but also how to effectively communicate and cooperate in teamwork. As such, interacting and working together with them and fellow Codento consultants has been quite a pleasant and fruitful learning opportunity and experience.

 

Thank you Faiz for the awesome and comprehensive answers! 

 

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Being part of pioneering projects like this allows for both personal and professional development. I strongly feel that at Codento you can engage in work that is not only challenging but also highly impactful in many industries.

Read more about us from our career site and see if there are any suitable opportunities for you and connect with us on our recruitment system!

 

About the interviewee:

Faiz is a talented data engineer with a computer science degree from Aalto University. 

About the interviewer:

Perttu Pakkanen is responsible for talent acquisition at Codento. Perttu wants to make sure that the employees enjoy themselves at Codento because it makes his job much easier.