#002 - Touch the grass
Hello Internet friends and strangers ❤️
February has come and gone and I would describe it as a month that happened. I grew older and wiser in the middle of all of that but so far I'm still waiting to notice any significant increase in wisdom – maybe the delivery time is just prolonged or maybe universe didn't notice me growing older. I feel my life is still in so many ways stuck in the spring of 2020 so maybe these last five years don't count, right?
Stuff I made this month
This month I wrote about how my internal framing on mentorships has shifted over time and about how I encourage everyone to start documenting things for themselves because explaining things helps you learn them. Explaining things to myself and to others through blogging and speaking has had a massive impact in my personal and professional life.
My mother took me for a birthday lunch and I ended up teaching her Leaves, an abstract tile-laying, 2-player board game and shared the game in my blog. It's a great new addition to my collection of small board games I can keep with me at all times. Another tile-laying game that I've been looking to add to my collection lately is Hive but the local game store had just sold out.
I continued last month's blogging for developers topic with a blog post replying to a question I was asked in the meetup I talked about blogging: how long does it take for me to write a blog post? It's such a seemingly simple question but to get any kind of impactful answer, I'd need to know more about the intent of the question because the answer changes a lot based on that.
On the project front I've been preparing for continuing working on my Stardew Valley mod manager ModMayor that I haven't touched in a while but would like to get to a stage where I could publish the first version and open source the code. There are some issues that I need to solve before I can do that though and they are more on the legal/moral side rather than technical side so I haven't been super motivated at solving them.
I also started slowly working on Banquet, a spiritual successor of Potluck, to get a few more of my favourite board games into a single deck. So far I've been experimenting with a few ideas to build it around the trio of Startups, Scout and Flip 7.
Community activities
Our regular monthly events continued as usual. With archipylago we hosted a hands-on programming sprint and got a good chunk of projects progressed and had good discussions. With Turku <3 Frontend we hosted a meetup this week and learned about CSS variables from Teemu Suoranta and got to peek behind the scenes of how Javascript is created as Mikhail Barash joined us to talk about TC39 and how proposals become features in browsers and other Javascript engines.
I also got on stage at Aurajoki Overflow meetup where I presented my love letter for Django. The second talk at the event was a live demo of Ruby on Rails and as there's a lot of shared goodness with the two frameworks, we had a wonderful evening discussing why Django and Rails make developers lives better.
We also had a lovely 11ty Meetup where Bob Monsour, the author of fantastic 11ty Bundle, talked about how he showcases books he has read on his website and Sia Karamalegos, the author of a great web performance newsletter, talked about themevitals.com, a website which displays web performance data by Shopify theme.
Touching the virtual grass
While the grass in real life is still wet, cold or under piles of snow, I've been touching grass lately through a couple of Youtube channels. I love sports but haven't really written or spoken much about sports in social media or the blog unless it's been Finland winning the olympics in ice hockey or some of my software projects overlapping with sports. Today I'm changing that by sharing two fantastic sports Youtube channels:
StuntPegg
StuntPegg is a Youtuber from UK who creates wonderful videos about football and especially the lower levels of the English football pyramid. Her videos are lovely stories of people at these smaller clubs, club histories and their impact in local towns and surroundings.
I love how her videos feel really humane and genuine. In a world full of rage bait, clickbait and content for the sake of content, every video she makes is about the real stories.
If you've liked Netflix's Wrexham series but want to hear more stories with less millionaires, StuntPegg is the place to go. She combines heartwarming stories with lovely humour and my days are always better when I find a new video from her in my Youtube subscriptions.
Behind the Whistle
A bit more (a lot more) niche channel is Behind the Whistle which is a rather new channel by a grassroots English football referee who documents weekly the games he has refereed and analyses the games from the perspective of how to improve his own refereeing.
He shows us an interesting and very personal view into what it's like to referee these games at the lowest levels of the English football pyramid and what goes on into game day preparations and activities.
With some of my fellow sports fans, we often end up in discussions whether only the highest level of sports is interesting and I'm strongly of the school of thought that likes the lower level leagues and enjoys all sorts of sports, not only the olympics or NHL or UEFA Champions League. That's why both StuntPegg and Behind the Whistle brings me so much joy as we get to see and learn about the sports that don't usually get screen time.
Mossy Earth
From sports to nature, Mossy Earth is a team that works on nature preservation and restoration around the globe and creates fascinating and well-produced videos of different projects they work on.
Whether you like to see cute beavers, flowing rivers or Scottish lynxes, they've got you covered.
In the world where media is full of negativity and horrors of the world around us, I find channels like Mossy Earth very soothing and positive.
And don't forget to check their other channel Mossy Earth Field Notes if you run out of interesting things on the main channel.
Corner of Joy
This month's IndieWeb Carnival's theme was affirmations and I loved this entry where Sophia displayed different affirmations as mathematical equations.
Sophie at localghost wrote a lovely article about personal websites and blogging.
After my blogging talk at the end of last month, at least two people wrote and published blog posts inspired by it! Denis wrote about Astro and Daniel wrote about setting up a Typescript/Node project. If you're into web development, I recommend taking a look!
For all the technical geeks in the audience, Chad Nauseam wrote a great post (originally an X thread) about why programming a calculator is a very hard technical problem. Dealing with numbers in computers that speak binary is such a challenging problem.