As some Facebook friends already guessed from my status updates this week, my 9 month paternity leave is now over and I've survived my first week back in work life, waking up at seven in the morning! This is just a personal-life blog post to let everyone know what I'm up to, (For those asking: Ebba is doing fine, she recently started to stand up and even takes steps if I hold her hands.)

During the past months I had many interesting conversations and ideas of what to do next, but in the end Nokia was the company standing out with a very interesting offer. So as of last Tuesday I work at Nokia as Senior Performance Architect in the Mobile Solutions division, better known as the Nokia Ovi web services.

There are many great things that I'm excited about with this job. First of all it is a 100% LAMP/LAMJ job with me being the MySQL go-to guy in the team. This was a preference when looking for new jobs, as working with MySQL professionally supports my desire to continue to contribute to the community via MepSQL and just generally participating in conferences and blogging (of which my manager is very supportive). Compared to any of my previous jobs this one is also much more technical and hands on: I will actually be looking at real MySQL servers most of the time and doing more benchmarking and much less traveling and PowerPoints :-) The Ovi environment is also one of the few really web scale and interesting ones to work with if you happen to live in Europe like I do. While we are not quite as big as Facebook, it's still about serving some hundreds of millions of users, so in the same league.

The only thing missing from this job is that it was not a pure work-from-home job. So now I have to wake up early, dress up and go to an office in Helsinki - at least some days of the week. I get to smell the scent of Spring from the Baltic Sea, from which the Nokia office is about 50 meters away. It's not so bad after all :-) (Except for the house we live in now, I've lived all my life less than 5 km from the sea and the scent one can feel when the ice breaks is a special annual thing for me.)

Since I get asked about it all the time: Yes, I signed the contract just very shortly before the news of the Microsoft partnership and change in strategy became public, but even so I'm relatively unaffected by all of it since I don't work on the phone side of Nokia. From my point of view there will still be a billion S40 phones to serve from Ovi too, in addition to a few WP7 ones... They all generate load on our servers, which is where my job will be.

Looking for MySQL/LAMP/LAMJ jobs?

Since I know I still have friends out there looking for interesting MySQL related job opportunities, it is worth mentioning that the Ovi (aka Mobile Solutions) division has dozens and dozens of similar positions open in various parts of the world. People with MySQL experience seem to be highly valued, in my experience. I'm more than happy to make introductions to anyone interested. (As you'll see, the online recruiting tool isn't the easiest web site you ever used, so using an internal channel may be your preferred choice...)

Just as a sample 2 positions from managers I work closely with. Sorry, it's impossible to link to the Nokia recruiting tool, you have to go to https://www.nokia.com/careers/find-your-career/open-positions
and use the codes below for searching.

ARC0000005Q
Principal Data Architect (need both MySQL and Oracle competence)
US-Burlington (I hear this is == Boston?)

SER0000004A
System Engineer
Berlin
This is your normal sysadmin/dba type of job (there are more than one open positions)

Berlin alone has dozens of open jobs in addition to these, from SW developer and test lead and analytics engineer to architects and "Principal" this and that. The guys in Berlin are great, the unit is built around the acquisition of Gate5 Gmbh which now produces Ovi Maps service. They are real Linux guys with a good web and open source culture. This is significant since Nokia as a whole is only know figuring out the transformation from a electronics supplier to an agile web 2.0 company.

While I have no specific job to promote there, there are also positions in Mountain View, California where a certain Rich Green is the new CTO. This is also a completely new area for Nokia to be in, so many opportunities there too. (Previously Nokia was focused on the East Coast only.)