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About Anne-Mari Silvast

IT Professional
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Helsinki

Hi! I am Anne-Mari, a Software Developer, Technical Project Manager and an experienced Team Lead and PO. I have been in IT from 2005 professionally in various roles from systems tester to telecommunications consultant and from programme manager and to software developer.

I enjoy projects and roles where I get to write code but I also enjoy leading the team to reach their best possible potential. I am at my best in the intersection of tech and leadership.

I have a Master’s degree in Signal Processing from Helsinki University of Technology (current name Aalto University), where developed a strong foundation in telecommunications and cognitive technology. I have also studied marketing and economics at Helsinki Business School (current name Aalto University).

Currently, I work as a Team Lead, Product Owner, and Software Developer at Yle (Finnish Broadcasting Company), where I lead the “engagement team” responsible for services such as the Yle ID and multiple APIs. My experience in technologies like Clojure, Rust and React as well as project management and leadership skills makes me capable of combining technical and business point of view.

My previous experience includes roles at Gofore and the University of Helsinki, where I have held roles as a scrum master that codes and technical project manager, further deepening my skills in software project management and agile methodologies. My contributions as a board member at Gofore brought me a lot of understanding of IPOs, mergers and acquisitions and board work. My main project under my term, was developing employee share savings programme.

Additionally, I am passionate about volunteer work, having significantly contributed to events like Helsinki Pride, proving my ability to manage large-scale projects and lead diverse teams.

Tech

  • JVM: Clojure 4 years professional development in a customer project and 4 years at Yle, Scala (small fixes and understanding), a bit of Java. Hobby projects such as a weekly menu generator, a twitterbot to tweet member of parliament shouts (doesn’t work anymore since Elon went and f’d up the apis, hence the rewrite, see below) and a twitterbot to tweet votings in the pariament of Finland.
  • Rust: web courses and some lambdas as a hobby project (this is a BlueSky Bot that retrieves memos from parliament hearings and parses mp’s shouting over each other and shouts them on BlueSky)
  • ClojureScript, Reagent + Re-Frame 1 year. professionally, 3 years hobby projects
  • React 5 years in customer projects, NextJS in hobby projects (such as this site)
  • Vue, Angular etc. the very basics
  • Comfortable with Postgress, ok with mongodb and some knowledge and experiments with Neo4J
  • Solid understanding of AWS, accociate solutions architect sertificate
  • Solid Matlab skills from my studies in signal processing
  • Radio Networks (wcdma) 2 years profesionally at Ericsson and years in my master’s degree studies.
  • Understanding of statistics, stochastics, signal processing.

Project Management

  • Technical project management experience fulltime 7 years
  • Agile Scrum Master SM/PO 5 years at customer projects. Worked as as a Scrum Master that codes, meaning I coded with the rest of the team about 40-50% of time and focusing on facilitating the team and helping the customer with requirements etc rest of the time.
  • Agile Product Owner, Technical Product Owner 10 years of experience

Event organizing

  • Organizing as a volunteer the Helsinki Pride Week (biggest human rights event in Finland) from 2008 to 2011 in my free time. The last two events I acted as a managing director to produce the week of 100+ events. My responsibilities included leading the tens of volunteers, negotiating sponsorships, dealing with press and producing gala’s, concerts and other events.
  • I was actively organizing Clojure Bridge Finland from 2015 to 2019. CB is a free workshop organized over a weekend to tech women or other minorities to coded. All work has been done as pro bono. I have been in charge of organizing, sponsorships and also tutoring students.
  • I organized 2015 “IT Päivät”, a two day tech conference for all IT staff and affiliates of universities and polytechnics in Finland. The conference had five tracks and about 40 presentations and panels as well as a night gala.
  • I was a board member for Blue Arrow Awards, an IT awards gala rewarding best IT solutions in the field, from 2015 to 2019. I was involved in sponsorships, track organizing and producing the gala.

Personal

I live in Helsinki with my wife and our two children so most of my freetime is spent with my family. If I do have some spare time, I play Fortnite (solo, zerobuild) or work on my hobby projects.