Fifteen years at Nokia, building and shipping mobile software for the Series 40 platform — code that ran on hundreds of millions of devices around the globe.
I joined in 1999 as a software developer specialising in the WAP stack, working on S40 at a time when mobile internet was just beginning to take shape. By 2002 I had moved onto a global integration team, coordinating contributions from multiple R&D sites worldwide, an early lesson in the complexity of large-scale distributed development.
Responsibility grew toward platform-level challenges in the years that followed. In 2007 I led critical integrations with third-party baseband software suppliers, working at the intersection of hardware and software where the cost of mistakes is high. In 2010 I led the integration with SmarterPhone, delivering a major overhaul of the S40 UI framework. In 2013 I led a team to replace the aging GNU Make-based build system with a Python-based WAF framework, delivering measurably better performance, maintainability, and reliability, and the kind of infrastructure improvement that quietly makes everything else run faster.
Throughout, I worked deep in the platform stack: debugging embedded systems with a Lauterbach JTAG debugger, writing simulation tools to reproduce problems that standard tooling couldn’t reach, and contributing to the CI infrastructure that kept platform releases on track.