Peeter Kaju

Background

About Peeter Kaju

I have always been interested in a lot of things from mathematics to literature, sailing to folk dancing. I constantly read books about a variety of subjects and fields, and I can dive into several topics simultaneously. My love for problem solving led me to study software development in kood/Jõhvi. It’s an innovative school based on self-learning and group projects. I decided to move to Jõhvi full time to focus on my studies with maximum effort. Studies in kood/Jõhvi began with widely used algorithms from which we moved to web technologies and then to more complex programming projects. I chose devops as my specialisation and learned about Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, Gitlab CI/CD and other automation technologies. I built my own pipeline which utilised all those technologies, a project of which I am still the most proud of. I appreciated the practical value of the skills I learned during the project - automating tasks for companies, making life easier for developers and saving money in result. To support my studies, I began working as a freelance developer and helped solve problems for small companies. Some examples- I connected an old website to Maanteeamet's database through x-tee API, which allowed for automated spare parts searching for all car owners- I built a 3D model in Javascript to design custom furniture parts and easily send them to the company for making- I created an image processing tool for a camera store (runs on MacOs) to upload photos from cameras to AWS cloud, process them to reduce the size and upload them from cloud to a website all in one click. After successfully finishing kood/Jõhvi 6 months before my nominal graduation, another journey began. I had to complete mandatory military service, and thanks to my skills I was selected to serve in the Estonian Cyber Headquarters. Now I work with greatly skilled cybersecurity experts, learn from them and help elevate Estonia's cyber-defence to the next level. A few highlights from my immersive experience during this past year- Completed HTB's CPTS certification, which concluded with a 10 day long full-scale penetration test and Maldev Academy's Malware Development Course through which I gained deep insight into Windows Internals - Participated in Crossed Swords 2024, Locked Shields 2025 and Telia Cyber Defence Battle 2024 final round Above all, I'm driven by the challenge of solving complex problems, and I'm keen to do this on a daily basis as part of a collaborative team.