Gàbor Horvàth-Ulenius: Far from the A4 way into a programming career

Gàbor moved to Finland from Hungary in 2016, with a background as a construction technician.

Language barriers and a lack of credit for his earlier studies made him change his plans of becoming an architect.

- I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t give up easily and have always wanted to do something meaningful in life – which can be challenging in a new country.

He started working in a nuclear power plant in the city of Rauma, then moved to Espoo where he established a drop shipping business. That’s where he first got into coding, modifying the website.

- My curiosity led me to program a mobile phone game and I found that I liked coding very much.

It’s very powerful, challenging, and fun to see what you can create with lines of texts.

Gàbor realized that he needed more formal training and came across Supercell’s coding school Hive Helsinki.

- It’s a unique educational institute built on the French Ecole 42 curriculum, where you learn coding at an expert level. There are no lectures or teachers, you get by with your own resourcefulness, the help of peers and the internet. Hive teaches you not only to become a high-end coder, but a great learner and problem-solver with hard and soft skill. It’s a steep learning curve, with a lot of challenges – which is very rewarding.

Gàbor is quick to mention that finishing the course would not be possible without the support from his wife.

Enter Tietoevry

Gàbor got in touch with Tietoevry during his studies and became interested in their graduate program.

- The great thing about a company of Tietoevry’s size is that they have the capacity to take on new graduates.

The company culture is also great for younger employees.

- Everyone is very supportive and eager to help, even when I have what might be silly or very straight forward questions. Take my manager – she goes out of her way to help me learn Finnish. It would be much more efficient if we were to talk English all the time, but because I have expressed a desire to learn the local language, she helps me.

AI for the children’s hospital in Helsinki

Last year (2023), Gàbor has been working on a project involving generative AI for the New Children’s Hospital in Helsinki.

- I started working with ChatGPT two days after it had its global release back in November 2022. All team members have now applied our common expertise on generative AI to create an application based on LLM that lets medical staff search through medical documents much faster than before.

This project is special to Gàbor for more than one reason.

- First, it’s cool to apply AI on a project of this size. What is more important is that we’re contributing to something important – the health and well-being of children. As a father of three who’s had his fair share of trips to the hospital, I know how important it is to have doctors and nurses spend as much time on the young patients, and as little time as possible on administration.

For Gàbor, it’s quite easy to express why he enjoys working at Tietoevry.

- Interesting technology, supportive colleagues and meaningful projects – what more can you ask for?