My name is Mikael Vesavuori, and I'm a human with an artist's soul (MFA background), a techie's love of bits and bytes (lifetime builder), and the hunger of being a three-time founder. I make software, write about software, and share opinions about software and the industry.

Currently, I am co-founding [UNNAMED COMPANY], where we are building Popcorn Cloud and Starlite: Popcorn Cloud enables the creation and operation of sustainable and scalable software deployed to the cloud in a simple, abstracted way that even non-developers can perform; Starlite helps makers of software understand their software estate and how it's aligning to expectations.

Before this, I was Technical Standards Lead at Polestar, a member of the Architecture & Standards team, led the Software Engineers Competence Group for two years, and acted as Developer Advocate in the Open Source Program Office. I also initiated and continuously supported the work of the Platform Services and Developer Experience teams.

And in the rear mirror, I was the Lead Cloud Architect at Humblebee and Lead Frontend Developer at Sogeti. Long before my most recent business venture, I was an entrepreneur, having started Being in 2015 and Propaganda Bureau in 2009. I am also forever indebted to all that I learned while teaching artistic and technical subjects at both university and high school levels, early in my professional career.

Much of what I have learned and have come to know and/or believe I share with others. Throughout the years, I've given talks, presentations, and lectures at both private, paid events, and places such as Cygni Tech Summit, the University of California, CloudNativeGbg, React Gothenburg Meetup, AWS User Group Göteborg, Världskulturmuseet, and Varbergs Konsthall.

My motivation is really quite simple:

I'm fortunate to have worked with lots of great people, companies, and projects. Here's some of what I've done in my time:

• Consulting within Developer Experience strategy and product strategy for evroc
• 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
• Supported a start-up venture with technology strategy, including technical vision, architecture and stack proposals, and capability roadmap
• Spoke as one of the keynote speakers at Cygni Tech Summit on how to make sustainable (green) software in practice
• Wrote the books Domain Driven Microservices on AWS in Practice, Testing for Software Engineers, and Better APIs: Quality, Stability, Observability
• Constructed the HealthCheck review format that helps quantify technical debt
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Exhibited installation-format games as part of a multi-year art exhibition
• Co-designed A Drift, an audio-driven performance focusing on sharing experiences, which has been run worldwide, including as part of "Free! Music" at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin
• 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