Welcome to the OpenShift Developer Spotlight where we get to know the members of the OpenShift community a little better and show off their skills as developers. Also check out their applications developed on OpenShift in our App Gallery. Interested in being featured? Apply here or view past entries.

Tero Ahonen

  • Name: Tero Ahonen

Learn more about GameRefinery in our App Gallery

What inspired you to be a developer?

I didn't plan to become a developer, but after I saw my first lines of code running on the console, I knew this what I wanted to do. Nothing beats the feeling when you solve a problem or when you see that your code helps others to do their stuff.

Why did you choose OpenShift as your hosting platform?

I have been using OpenShift since OpenShift Online was released and was stunned how well it worked for me from day one. Since then I don't see any point to use any other platform than OpenShift. OpenShift provides all the services that I need and has a nice boundary for your applications and services. If your application or service cannot be hosted on OpenShift, it is not simple enough.

What advantages does OpenShift give you that other platforms don't?

The biggest advantage is that I don't have to worry about the underlying operation system and application runtime. OpenShift also provides an easy way to manage service runtimes and because of that, I can implement services as microservices without an increase in operations work. Team management and integrated Git provides a very smooth workflow to roll deployments from development to the testing environment and onto production. When your production deployment is "git pull && git push production" you know that you've made the right choice.

Tell us more about your application currently hosted on OpenShift:
  • Name: GameRefinery
  • What does it do? GameRefinery is an insights hub for mobile games featuring related information for game developers and publishers. It is also a self analysis tool for analyzing your own mobile games and game concepts to get benchmarks on their commercial potential.
  • What technologies were used to create your app? JavaEE and Wildly providing REST endpoints to AngularJS front-end. MongoDB and Amazon S3 is used to store data and Keycloak is centralized providing IDM and SSO services. New Relic is used to monitor production services.
  • What motivated you to create this application and what problems does it solve? The mobile game industry is a quickly growing business and competition is getting tougher - there are thousands of new games available in the App store alone. Yet the most important decisions, what features to include in the game, are not based on facts but subjective opinions and biased assumptions. Our service helps game developers (and also other industry stakeholders like publishers and investors) understand what features are key to success and how combining those can greatly increase changes on launching commercially a very successful game. Making fact-based product-related decisions has been used in more mature industries for years, but we are the first ones to bring the similar analytical solution and data to the gaming industry.