Hello there!

My name is Mikael Vesavuori, and I architect, develop and design experiences & interactions.

Currently, I am co-founding Popcorn Cloud, which enables the creation and operation of sustainable, scalable, best-practices-driven software deployed to the cloud in a simple, abstracted way that even non-developers can perform.

Most recently, I was Technical Standards Lead at Polestar, where I was also responsible for leading the Software Engineers Competence Group and being the Developer Advocate in our Open Source Program Office. I also initiated and continuously supported the work of the Platform Services and Developer Experience teams.

Prior to this, I was the Lead Cloud Architect at Humblebee, Lead Frontend Developer at Sogeti, and in 2015 I co-founded Being with Nika Helia Persson.

I've also given talks, presentations, and lectures at (among other places) the University of California, CloudNativeGbg, React Gothenburg Meetup, AWS User Group Göteborg, Världskulturmuseet, and Varbergs Konsthall.

Selected projects and work

• Architected and built early-stage solutions for Volvo Autonomous Solutions (through Volvo Group Connected Solutions)
• Prototyped a next-generation system architecture for Polestar and then being in the technical spearhead/platform team, helping lead the implementation with a crew of ~200 people (which became a 700-strong department)
• Built a skeleton for a developer experience platform that was approached by Silicon Valley investors, but was "killed" by us (the founders')
• Supported a start-up venture idea with technology strategy, including technical vision, architecture and stack proposals, and capability roadmap
• Launched the Pay Transparency Card, which helps you settle the facts on role, compensation, and everything else you want from a job, transparently and openly
• Built ArchFit, a CLI/library tool that helps you run architecture fitness functions to validate your AWS solutions
• Wrote tools to inspect software quality, such as GitAnalyzed and Codemetrix
• Constructed the HealthCheck review format that helps to quantify technical debt and wrote about it on Medium
• Wrote the books Domain Driven Microservices on AWS in Practice, Testing for Software Engineers, and Better APIs: Quality, Stability, Observability
• Built Minion, which supports you with your software development and architecture work using ChatGPT through a CLI, and the GPT variant of Minion, which does many of the same things but inside of ChatGPT
• Made a collection of ChatGPT priming prompts for software architecture and development
• Templated Wardley Maps and Domain Storytelling for Figjam users
• Wrote and launched a book/course on Newline for how to create React component design systems with Figmagic
• Created Figmagic, a design system workflow tool which extracts design tokens and graphics and also can generate React components from Figma documents
• Produced StandardLint, an extensible standards auditing and linting tool that makes it convenient and easy to set up guardrails and guidelines for development teams and making sure they follow your house conventions
• Developed MikroLog, MikroTrace and MikroTrace, ultra-lightweight cloud-native options for logging, tracing and metrics as well as MikroTester, which makes integration testing super easy, and MikroValid, the no-bullshit way to validate your JSON objects
• Made Dorametrix, a serverless web service that helps you calculate your DORA metrics, and Gitmetrix, which helps you find your team-level engineering metrics from GitHub
• Built Catalogist, the easy way to catalog and make your software and (micro)services visible to your organization in a lightweight and developer-friendly way
• Developed TripleCheck, a minimalistic ecosystem of tools for modern serverless-first and CI-ready contract testing
• Released SlaMax, a DevOps tool for SLA tracking with the data available at cloud-sla, and two open APIs to easily use these at getsla.cloud and maxslaofmy.systems
• Presented on how to scale developer platforms for teams at AWS User Group Gothenburg
• Presented on speculative interfaces for students at University of California Santa Cruz
• Created A Drift, an audio-driven performance focusing on sharing experiences, which has been shown worldwide
• Exhibited installation-format games as part of a multi-year art exhibition
• Helped renowned luxury textile maker Märta Måås-Fjetterström take almost 100 years of history into a cloud-empowered future
• Conducted content audit and UX vision for the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at Gothenburg University