#003 - To the galaxies beyond
Hey you! Yeah, you!
I hope your having a fantastic Monday. A friend of mine used to always say that the "H" in Monday stands for happiness and I've been thinking about it ever since.
The spring has finally taken its first steps for this year here. One of my favourite days of the year is the first day when it's warm enough to open the bedroom window after waking up. The scent of forest, the soundscape of singing birds and the breeze of fresh air gives me such hope for the upcoming spring and summer.
There is something magical about spring. The wintery whites give room to an explosion of color as the nature starts its dance with green trees and flowers in every imaginable color and birds and butterflies joining in the air. The grassy fields and the mossy forests. I'm so happy I live in an apartment where my windows open straight into the forest and every morning when I look outside, there's something new and different out there.
Stuff I made this month
March was surprisingly productive and creative. I wrote 8 blog posts (+ this newsletter) ranging from my opinions on the newest Pokemon TCG set to my habits of making notes when getting ready to fall asleep.
I visited Helsinki Python this month to talk about blogging for developers which led to lovely new friendships and good discussions. One of those discussions was about how to deal with the potential issue of technical blog posts getting outdated. I decided to finally make something happen and implemented a way to keep track of version numbers for used code snippets.
I also wrote about websites and IndieWeb. I shared an example of how to group blog posts by year and month in Eleventy, how I make my website friendly for view-source explorers and my recent ponderings about the UX of home-cooked software.
And finally, my favourite of them all, I wrote about my hobby within a hobby: "shrink designing" board games.
On software side, I rewrote Playtest Printer for quickly printing prototype and playtest cards when experimenting with games.
I also made progress with my (still in unpublished dev state) Pokémon TCG Deck Builder after learning about Encore from a recruitment discussion and starting to test it out. It's a really nice Go and Typescript tool box that helps with setting up web backend services and I'm very impressed by how quick it was to get up and running with it.
And since Pokémon TCG got a new set this month, I updated my Gym Leader Challenge Decklist Validator to support the new set for all the cardboard gaming enthusiasts like myself.
I've also been experimenting with designing 3D prints and following the philosophy of building in public, I started keeping notes and showcasing different iterations in my digital garden as I design a TCG Companion Tray.
Community activities
In addition to the aforementioned talk in Helsinki Python, we had a lovely month with meetups locally too.
With archipylago we had a meetup where Juho showcased how he built a demo Texas Hold 'Em poker bot and another bot that assessed how well the first one did, using LLMs and Python tooling. I talked about contemporary documentation and how one can use version control and task management software to keep track of the state of the world and software at the time of changes to better understand why they were made.
With Turku ❤️ Frontend crowd we hosted an afterwork last Wednesday and became the hottest meetup in town after we had to evacuate due to a fire alarm. Luckily it was a false call!
I also celebrated my 10th anniversary with Koodiklinikka as well as my 4th anniversary as an admin there.
Quite a month! I also spent a lot of quality time with both new and old friends and had a bunch of job interviews but so far, no luck there.
Traveling to the galaxies beyond
I've been recently enjoying a lot of good scifi. I missed this year's Kronomoon which made me a bit sad but my last year's time travel story recommendations still hold strong.
A couple of recent recommendations from the world of scifi:
- Nnedi Okorafo's Binti is a wonderful scifi novella about a young woman who's the first in her society to be accepted to a prestigious intergalactic university and her journey from Earth to Oomza Uni. It's also the first story in a series and I'm looking forward to reading the sequels too.
- Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time was my favourite book from 2024. It's not so much a space traveling adventure story but a lovely subgenre of scifi that is very much like our world but with scifi (and time travel) elements woven into that world. Its story is very much told through the relationships of the people in it. It does have its dystopian moments too as you learn that the people must use Teams to communicate at work.
- Becky Chambers' Monk and Robot series (A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy) is a hopepunk duology from one my favourite authors. I borrowed the first one from the library one sunny Sunday, sat down in the local pub and read it all in one session. The next day, I read the second one. They are absolutely fantastic stories about a monk and a robot who meet in the forest and embark on a journey together. The books resonated really well with my life situation as I've been feeling lost in life just like Dex.
- In 2022, we had a discussion about scifi books in Koodiklinikka and I put together a list of scifi book recommendations. There are so many good ones on the list and every time I've felt a desire for scifi stories, I've returned to the list.
If you have scifi recommendations from outside these lists, let me know! I'd love to learn about new books that I haven't read yet.