#001 - A musical prelude to a new year
Happy 2025 and warm thank you for joining me on this maiden voyage of From Juhis with Love.
Raindrops are dancing their rhythmic dance on the tin windowsill outside my balcony as I write. Its irregular beat plays perfect lo-fi tunes to enhance my creative process and help me focus.
I've always been a fan of rain – except maybe on those cold fall evenings when I need to trek through the nasty weather. Whenever it rains, I like to take a break from what I'm doing and sit on the balcony to listen to it. And when I dream, I dream of sitting on a porch outside an old lighthouse in pouring rain.
Stuff I made this month
I published 8 blog posts on my blog this month and the highlights were my piece on my yearning for human curation over recommendation algorithms and info dumps and my entry to this month's IndieWeb Carnival where V.H. Belvadi invited us to write about the importance of friction and I decided to write a cautionary tale about how using LLM models with your notes can deprive you from the most important part of the process: the thinking.
All in all, there were 28 wonderful entries this month and I recommend checking out the roundup post to read about them all and to find new great blogs to follow.
And if you're a fellow blogger, Joe Crawford is hosting this month's Carnival where he invites you to write about affirmations. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it so join our merry group of bloggers and participate in the carnival. Instructions are in Joe's blog post.
Garden of Learning
Over the holidays, I started reorganising my personal notes which made it possible for me to start publishing a subset of them as a digital garden. Compared to a blog where posts are written and published in somewhat chronological order and don't usually change much after being published, the digital garden allows me to share more incomplete and ever-evolving thoughts in the spirit of learning in public.
Community activities
Yesterday, I gave a talk in TurkuMobile meetup about why developers should write blog posts. It was such a lovely evening and the 30 minutes on stage turned into so many good discussions with old and new friends.
I love these community events for this exact reason. Meeting new people and having good discussions about topics I'm passionate about with lovely people.
This meetup was one of the three this week in Turku: on Wednesday we hosted the first Turku ❤️ Frontend meetup of our 10th anniversary year and today after this email goes out, I'll join the fine people of TurkuSec to wrap up the week and the month in quality company.
Software projects
One of my current software projects, ModMayor, is a Stardew Valley mod manager that I've been working on for the past couple of months. It's not yet published as I'm still experimenting with a lot of stuff but it's getting closer to a beta release. It's a desktop software that allows easy on/off toggling of individual mods or groups of mods, shows which ones are out of date and makes it easy to update them.
I already use it to jump between two different save games that both use different sets of mods: I can define a per-save mod listing and when switching to another save, I can disable the previous set and enable the next one and be on my merry way.
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die
A friend shared a book called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die that is a curated collection of listening worthy albums from the modern history of music from the 1950s until early 2000s. It ties really nicely into my call for human curation: instead of just endless streaming platform playlists, in the book, music critics write about the album and its importance in our shared cultural history.
To make the listening experience more interesting, someone built a website for it where you can sign up and every day, it randomly selects one album for you. Instead of being overwhelmed with the sheer volume of albums in the book or following its chronological timeline, the website makes the process more interesting and easier to follow. One album per day. That's it.
I tried my earnest to not turn this into another project but since the first album I was hit with was such an experience, I decided to keep track of the albums I've listened and write about what I think of them.
These short notes are more explorations of my feelings and thoughts rather than reviews and reflections on what my relationship with music is and what kind of a listener I am - more than what kind of music the albums are.
Thanks Teemu for sharing this wonderful project with me!
(I then made the mistake of reading about the book in Wikipedia and discovering there are a metric ton of books in the 1001 Before You Die series. There's even one including 1001 video games and I'm putting my 30+ years of video gaming experience on the line to say that there's no way there are over 1000 games that are must plays.)
Speaking of music and joy
1001 albums ain't the only musical masterpiece that I ran into this month. I'm a fan of video game speedrunning - the art of trying to beat video games as quickly as possible - and one of the main events is Games Done Quick. In January, they organise Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ), a multi-day marathon of 24hrs/day speedrunning, streamed live with entertaining commentary for everyone to enjoy.
I love all the quirky stuff that is more than just glitching oneself out of bounds and running to the goal. When I saw a run titled Wes plays New Super Mario Bros. Wii while playing piano, I got excited. I had seen all sorts of wacky controller schemes used to play games before and piano sounded fun.
What I didn't expect to see was that Wes wasn't playing the game with a piano but rather while playing the piano. To control the character, he had strapped controllers to his head and foot. And he speedran and completed the game while playing its soundtrack on the piano. And then he did one level blindfolded.
I can't fathom the excellence this requires. Playing the piano is hard. Speedrunning the game is hard. Playing blindfolded is hard. I can't even comprehend how hard it is to control the character by tilting your head and foot. And Wes did all of those at the same time. And he kept explaining what he is doing. Talk about multitasking mastery.
This video was one of the most wholesome things I saw all month. You should watch it even if you don't care about video games.