Hi there! My name is Aki Saarinen.

About

I'm Aki, a professional and hobbyist software developer from Finland. I tweet crap at Twitter and publish my code at GitHub. Work history can by spied at LinkedIn or later down this page . Oh, and I might occasionally rant something at my blog.

You can contact me using on of the following:

Projects

Here are some of my public projects. I usually share my source code in github, you can check that out for more.

  • Project Ghettoblaster: How we built a kick-ass portable boombox. Not really a software project, but an interesting project involving DIY electronics and carpentering. Check it out :)
  • SmartDiet, a research toolkit for studying the energy efficiency of Android applications. Part of my research at Aalto University School of Science.
  • CleanReader, a browser extension for Google Chrome to make Google Reader more usable. Sources code available at GitHub. A related blog post.
  • CCF, a library for implementing real-time collaborative software in Scala. Actively used in the software for which it was originally written for, but not much active development nowadays. Based on my Master's Thesis on Concurrency Control.
  • Centripetality, Winner of Assembly Summer 2007 Game Development Competition. See video on YouTube.
  • Lullizio, a simple IRC bot written in Ruby. Shouts all kinds of useful and non-useful stuff to IRC channels, like Youtube video titles and Twitter status contents. In active personal use.
  • NetOgler, a distributed data gathering platform. Developed with C++ using the Qt framework as a summer project with Teijo Laine in 2008. Nice experiment combining Qt, networks and graph visualization, but not likely to be developed any further.
  • PoolFXP, a Java pool-game developed during a course in Object Oriented programming at HUT back in 2005. Uses IRC as back-end for multiplayer support, which is kind of cool. Haven't touched this since 2005.

Work

I am currently working as a senior quantitative analyst at Valo Research and Trading. Valo is an automated trading company, focusing on developing algorithmic trading strategies for the global financial markets. It is a subsidiary of Reaktor, a Finnish software company specializing in expert IT services and effective software solutions.

I started at Reaktor as a software developer back in February 2009. My position has since shifted more towards the quantitative work at Valo Trading and Research, but as a subsidiary we are naturally working very close together with rest of the folks at Reaktor. Want to get your IT project done properly? Let's see if we can help!

In 2011 I served my compulsory Finnish military service as civilian service by doing research work at Aalto University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. I spent most of the year 2011 there and concentrated on analyzing the energy efficiency of Android mobile applications, and offloading parts of mobile applications to cloud services in order to save energy on the devices.

2004 through 2009 I worked as a software engineer at Image Soft Oy, a software company based in Helsinki, specializing in advanced industrial measurement and data acquisition systems, remote maintenance products and demanding signal processing software. Mostly C++ development for Windows and Linux.

You can also take a look at my LinkedIn profile.

Education

I graduated from Helsinki University of Technology (nowadays called Aalto University), department of Computer Science and Engineering. My major subject was Computer and Information Science and minor Telecommunications Software.

I wrote my master's thesis at Reaktor about concurrency control in Group Editors in the context of a Product Backlog management tool. It was approved with the grade 5 (excellent). Quite interesting stuff, as a result of which the CCF project was born.

» Concurrency Control in Group Editors: Case Study in a Product Backlog Tool (PDF)

Photos

Midsummer 11
With homemade
Boombox at a lake.
(midsummer 2011) 		Potato machine
Group portrait from the potato fields of Nauvo.
Awesome.
(midsummer 2010)
Petanque
A tough game of
pétanque with style
(midsummer 2009) 		Flying, kinda
Flying!
(midsummer 2008) 		Surfing 2007
Hardcore surfing
(midsummer 2007)
A few years old picture of me
Business on the beach
(midsummer 2006)

Yeah, I like midsummers! It seems to be getting wilder each year...
Update in 2011: Nope, now it's no longer getting wilder. Seems like we're getting old.

Jack the worker

Under construction

As a tribute to all the hard-working guys who digged those neverending holes to the home pages of 1990s, I want to let one of those heroes keep on working on my site.

Go Jack, go! You can do it! For more of these working class heroes, check out this site.

xkcd #302

I know you all want to know this, so here it goes, a reply from Randall Munroe about xkcd #302 being a reference to a Friends episode.

From: Randall Munroe <press@xkcd.com>
Date: Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 2:33 PM
Subject: Re: Is xkcd #302 (Names) referencing to the TV show Friends?
To: Aki Saarinen <XXX@akisaarinen.fi>

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 4:44 AM, Aki Saarinen <XXX@akisaarinen.fi> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I was left wondering whether xkcd http://xkcd.com/302/ (Names), is
> referencing the popular TV show Friends by using the name Rachel in the
> altar (as you might know, Ross failed at the altar by saying Rachel instead
> of Emily in the Friends season 4 episode 24).
>
> I'm a fan of the Friends, so I can't help but think that this is yet another
> ingenious reference in the xkcd series. But it might just be a coincidence,
> too... I can't rest until I know the truth, so if you have the time to
> answer this, I'd be really pleased!  :)
>
> Sincerely,
> Aki Saarinen

You can rest -- sadly, it's not a reference.  I am pretty unfamiliar
with Friends.  I think I've seen about one episode, total.  It's a big
gap in my pop-culture knowledge.  It's just based on my own
embarrassing experience (suitably exaggerated)  :)

Best,

Randall

I was of course a little bit disappointed that it was not referencing Friends but really big thanks to Randall for replying! Finally, I can rest.

Friends

Some friends of mine, let's improve their Google juice. :)