Helmes

What Ülari likes about IT is that it doesn’t seem like work. “Everybody in IT is a fan,” he says. “It’s your job, sure, but it’s also your hobby.” Which is probably why Ülari speaks with equal enthusiasm about all his projects, large and small.

Like the solution Ülari’s team of 15 Java developers created for NASDAQ. “NASDAQ has all sorts of different systems—fund systems and pension systems, for example—and all these are written by different companies. But these different systems still need to be able to swap information with each other.” Helmes’ Java team created a central enterprise service bus to enable data flows and data transformation, so that data would become readable by multiple systems. “It can handle a couple of thousand simultaneous requests for information.”

On a smaller scale, the Java team created an informational system for the Estonian drivers education system. The system enables instructor and student alike to log into a screen in the vehicle using their state-issued ID cards. The system then tracks their route, measuring time in the car, kilometers traveled, as well as other data. “The system makes it impossible for teachers to falsify data about how many hours a student has spent in the car or about how many kilometers he’s driven.” The system, also created on the Java platform, may be the first in the world of its kind.

When not leading the Java team, Ülari spends time with his other team, an eight-man sailing crew. Surprisingly, his job on the boat has nothing to do with numbers: he’s the boat’s cook. “I make porridge for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch,” he says. “For dinner we usually eat in port, so I make reservations.”