Lassi, who started working at Monad this year, is a software developer with a passion for game projects. He is also fascinated by the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence in various fields.
Legal books turned into IT
Lassi Köykkä is a 24-year-old computer engineering graduate from Savonia University of Applied Sciences. After finishing high school, he considered studying law, but a gap year and preparations for the entrance exams led him to contemplate other options:
“While preparing for the entrance exams for law school, I realized that mere memorization and interpreting legal texts didn’t really interest me, even though I retained that information well.”
During his high school years, Lassi gained work experience by working as a cashier in a store and working full-time in an aluminum machining workshop. The IT field eventually felt like a natural choice for Lassi because he had always been good with machines and devices, and he was already familiar with coding.
Originally from the Tampere region, Lassi applied to study in Kuopio because the new city intrigued him, and he also had friends studying there. During his studies, he found summer jobs at Istek in Tampere University Hospital’s IT support, which allowed him to spend summers in his hometown. After a couple of years of studying, he was employed as a software developer at Talentree Oy in Kuopio. The experience gained from work, the pandemic period, and life in general accelerated Lassi’s studies, and he graduated a year ahead of schedule.
Lassi is a Full Stack coder, and he is motivated by a wide range of problems and the variety of his workdays. Various software projects related to gamification are among his dreams
“So far, all the work projects have been interesting in their own way,” he says. Lassi aims to grasp the big picture first, and then he starts implementing it: “I also like to fine-tune things, and I’m a bit of a perfectionist.”
Balancing Act: Gaming and Game Development in Leisure Time
In his free time, Lassi is interested in various programming and game projects. He has several unfinished game projects, which offer diverse challenges. Lassi has also participated in Game Jam events, where games are built from scratch.
Currently, Lassi is interested in the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence. It has proven to be a very useful tool in many areas, but it comes with many ethical questions and issues to solve, including how training data is acquired and its quality, the copyright of the collected data, and the problems that artificial intelligence aims to solve.
“Artificial intelligence can create, for example, concept art for a game based on your own ideas, without the need for drawing skills. This significantly eases game design and implementation,” he says.
From an entertainment perspective, both computer and board games interest Lassi, especially when playing with friends. Strategy board games like War of the Ring and Brass Birmingham have been recent favorites, as have team-oriented first-person shooters like Hunt Showdown and Rainbow Six: Siege. Like many Monad residents, Lassi maintains his physical fitness by going to the gym and rock climbing. Padel, an easily adaptable sport, has recently caught his interest as well. This popular game also provides a social aspect.
