Heli Sivunen

Full Stack / Front End Developer with TV news background 🎬

I'm a full stack developer, a recent graduate of the Makers bootcamp in London and work for Channel 4 News.

I'm particularly excited about front end work, especially building beautiful, user-friendly apps and immersive scrollytelling pages. I love it when something small I've built elicits reactions of wonder from those I demo it to! For example, I've recently built and deployed websites with birthday greetings for friends and family instead of cards - exciting to receive, and great for the environment too.

I want to put my programming skills to use for the benefit of our planet, and see endless possibilities for this. I'm a tree-hugging vegan, and member of my company's Sustainability Forum, where we work to reduce carbon footprint.

I also want to demystify programming for those who aren't normally drawn into it as a career, especially girls. I got into programming myself thanks to a RailsGirls workshop, and have been coding with my daughter on Sphero Edu and Scratch.

Inclusive design fascinates me and I want to become good at it - I knew the issues but Chimmy Kalu's talk at this year's Women Driven Development conference was an eye-opener for me.

Projects

Jack The Ripper

iOS native Jack the Ripper geolocation game. This was my final project at Makers, designed and written in a group of 6.

Here's my blog from the two-week project!

Tech stack: Swift, Xcode.

Jack The Ripper gif

Disco

Colour-changing app for learning to write React.

Tech stack: Swift, Xcode

https://blooming-waters-22212.herokuapp.com/

Headline Search

API call app for searching FT headlines.

Tech stack: Ruby, Rails, CSS to emulate FT's colour and font.

Tarvikkeet

Finnish-language front end CRUD project to learn CSS and scrollytelling with still images and video. Tech stack: Ruby, Rails, HTML, CSS.

Transferable skills
  • Excellent communication skills - I can condense complex information and
    present it convincingly.
  • Understanding of user behaviour online (click-throughs)
  • Logistics, copyright and legal/music clearance
  • Writing, video editing and editorial skills
  • Juggling multiple tasks at once and remaining calm under pressure

Experience

Channel 4 News, ITN

Current role:

  • News Editor: running the newsdesk, which is the nerve centre of
    the newsroom. I generate story ideas, spot the best picture of the day, assign
    reporters and camera crews to cover stories and provide editorial and legal
    guidance.

Previous roles:

  • Site Editor, Channel 4 News Digital: managing a team of
    journalists working on our digital platforms. I learned about SEO,
    thumbnails/story promotion, CMS and publishing tools.
  • Producer: making stories into engaging TV.
  • Avid Edit Trainer: training more 100+ staff across departments
    on Avid editing software and server tools, in London and DC

CNN International

  • Satellite Feed Producer in the CNN London Master Control Room

Heart 106.2

  • Reporter: interviewing politicians and covering stories from
    scrabble championships to police raids.

Education

Makers Academy

  • 12-week, intensive career change bootcamp. First four weeks was
    Ruby/Rspec, then JavaScript,and for the final project I learned Swift.
    The course taught me pair programming, TDD, Agile practices, modelling,
    debugging and clean code. I'm currently taking a top-up React course with
    Makers, because I want to gain amazing front-end skills.

    Tech learned:

    • Languages: Ruby, JavaScript, React, HTML, CSS, Swift
    • Frameworks: Rails, Node.js
    • Test suites: Jest, React Testing Library, RSpec, Capybara, Travis
    • IDEs: Atom, Visual Studio, Xcode
    • Other technologies: GitHub, Heroku, SQL/TablePlus, Azure DevOps

London School of Economics (LSE)

  • MSc International Relations

Institut Universitaire de Technologie (IUT) Bordeaux

  • Attended their prestigious journalism school for 3 months

City University, London

  • BA (Hons) Journalism and Psychology

Spoken languages

  • Bilingual Finnish / English, fluent French, A-level standard Swedish and German

Interests

  • I love the TLDR newsletter, which is a perfect tech geek roundup for someone
    like me, who's juggling many things!
  • Pod Save America and Campaign HQ are essential listening to enable me to
    stay on top of the US Presidential election
  • I'm in the early stages of writing a book and scrollytelling project from
    more than 2,000 letters my grandparents sent to each other when my grandfather
    was fighting in the Finnish Continuation War during WWII.