Hello World!

My name is Filipp and this is my little corner of cyberspace. Nice to see you here! I have no idea who you are or where you’re from or why you’re here and that is very much by design. My site doesn’t use any tracking tokens or cookies or even links to third party resources and I believe more sites should be built like this.

But allow me to introduce myself.

I’m a hacker, a musician, a cook and a technology geek. A native of both Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finland, I have four native languages and am a total nerd about most things in this world. I play drums in two awesome bands - Fuzzolini and Talbot. I’m 44 years old and when I grow up, I want to become a teacher.

Most of my days are spent studying at the Technology Governance and Sustainability masters program at TalTech with a particular interest in the history of technology and how it affects human culture.

Got my first job in IT at age 15 and have spent most of my existence working in this field, particularly around Macs, networking, storage systems, web development and Mac/BSD system administration. I’ve also spent a year at the Cybersecurity master’s program at TalTech, hold certificates from the Postimees’ journalism school and Perho Culinary School.

Before my masters’ studies, I spent 25 years working in Helsinki where I was best known for my work on all things Macintosh. Starting my career as a Mac service engineer fixing everything from LC’s running Mac OS 7 to iMacs with OS 8 and 9 and G4 PowerBooks and Cubes running OS X 10.0 (although, let’s be honest - everyone used that thing more to oogle at Aqua than to do anything useful).

I was once proud of having taken apart nearly every Mac built between roughly 1985 and 2010. Most of the times I even managed to put them back together. Sometimes they even worked. And often even better than before! :) Actually, I’m still pretty proud of my experience in hardware repairs and customer service work. It has given me an excellent vantage point to analyze our increasingly ICT-dependant society.

I studied Electrical Engineering at a vocational school and was later admitted to the Media Engineering bachelor’s programme at EVTEK polytechnic (now Metropolia). No less than 21 years later I received my BASc in ICT (the Media Engineering was gone along with my original school building). In those intervening 21 years I also worked as an onsite Macintosh systems specialist for all manner of organisations including schools, ad agencies, TV stations, post-production facilities, universities and a large architecture office.

Some time around 2003 I moved back to Estonia to help my ex girlfriend work on her rotoscoping animation project. During that time I was fortunate to work with Sander Paas in a four-person team at IM Arvutid - then the only official Apple reseller and service provider in Estonia. Our tiny team handled the sales, repairs, training and support for the entire country. These were some of the most inspirational years of my career.

Although I had dabbled in BASIC already in secondary school, it wasn’t until age 21 that I truly discovered my passion for programming. My first language was Perl, followed by Java and PHP and JavaScript. Since then I have also done a lot of work in Python, but my main go-to language is still PHP. I also like Ruby a lot and occasionally dabble in Elixir and Erlang. TCL is awesome too. As is Racket! And Rust! And Elm! 🤣

The first decade of the 21’st century was a wild time in web development and I have gone through more languages and frameworks than anyone should. In my early college years I was very much into media streaming (mostly audio because video was still very difficult at the time) and experimented a lot with Darwin Streaming Server (RIP). I feel very fortunate to have studied media engineering at precisely the time at which media was going through perhaps the biggest transformation since the printing press.

I founded my first software company (Digikoda) on my own through college in 2005, and another one (Mekanisti) with former colleagues and friends of theirs in 2007. During these years I created and sold my own CMS (Haldur) and operated a service for sending large files over email (kind of like WeTransfer). In 2009 me and my former boss founded what was at the time by far the most innovative Apple Service Provider in Finland. I left mcare in 2013 and was sad (if not surprised) to see it go bankrupt in 2024.

In 2014 I had the privilege of serving as the IT Manager for JKMM Architects which was an intense learning experience. As the one-man IT department of one of the leading architecture offices in Europe, I was in charge of everything from end user support to procurement to network and system administration. After that I’ve also worked as a PHP developer at Verkkokauppa (kind of the non-evil Amazon of Scandinavia), as a systems specialist at the University of Helsinki

After working in IT for a quarter of a century, I honestly feel I’m done. Done fixing problems, done creating new ones, done being chained to a Company, done being chained to the phone or a Slack channel or a ticketing system, done sitting behind a screen and keyboard for 12 hours a day. I realise what a privileged thing that is to say, but I have to say it. There is nothing that I miss about “knowledge work”. As much as I love helping people and applying my creativity to tackling tough technical challenges, the way that we “do IT” these days is completely unsustainable. That’s why I’ve decided to use my remaining time on this Earth to help forge a more sustainable path for ICT.