#004 - Small and personal web
Dear friends, foes and those yet undecided!
You're receiving this month's newsletter a few hours later than usual — but for a really good reason. I started a new job on Monday 🎉! My 18-month unemployment is finally over and I'm so excited to join a bunch of old (and new) friends to press buttons to make the pattern of lights change.
I joined Reaktor, a Finnish tech consultancy, as a full-stack developer and will soon be joining my first client project to start making cool stuff. We have such a beautiful office in an building next to the river bank and an ice cream stall, perfect spot for the upcoming summer.
Stuff I made this month
April was a great month! I published 7 blog posts (+ this newsletter you're reading), amongst them my entry for this month's IndieWeb Carnival in which I write about the urge to rewrite your blog engine every time you decide to write a blog post. I also documented my current tech stack and workflow for blogging and wrote about our meetup collaboration with improvised lightning talk extravaganza.
As the spring marches on, the best part of the year starts as the NHL playoff season kicked in. NHL organises a Bracket Challenge competition where people can make their guesses for who's gonna win each series. We've had our own league for this with Koodiklinikka people and since the official UI is quite rough experience, a few years ago I built an open source kk-bracket UI that we've been using for it. I made some updates to bring it to the new season and Niko contributed a bunch of refactoring improvements and a dark mode!
And I won a local Pokémon Gym Leader Challenge tournament with my Fire deck featuring a bunch of Italian cards because English ones were too expensive! Yay.
Community activities
Our meetup activities continued as usual: with our Python community archipylago we organised a sprint to work on our personal projects and with Turku ❤️ Frontend we organised a collaboration meetup with a fellow meetup Aurajoki Overflow with a talk about the upcoming European Accessibility Act and a lightning talk extravaganza that I mentioned in my blog post section above.
Our final events before the summer are also finally ready: with the Pythonistas we'll gather together on the 15th to learn about locale codes, data validation and upcoming return of PyCon Finland(!!!) in October.
With our frontend crew we will wrap up the spring season to learn about design systems and enjoy our annual pub quiz.
If you're in Turku area or close enough to travel, come join us!
Small and personal web
There's more to the Internet than corporate social media platforms and overly aggressive engagement algorithms designed to addict you to doomscrolling and destroying your attention span.
There's a lovely ecosystem of personal blogs written by amazing people. Finding them can take a bit of work because there's no one place to find them all — you need to find a starting point and explore, little by little.
One such way to start is checking out if there's a blogroll. Blogrolls are ways for website authors to let others know which blogs they read and recommend.
Other way is to find a few newsletters or newsletter-esque publications.
Shellshark's Scrolls is a wonderful one deserving a shoutout. I've found so many new blogs to follow from them and there's always something delightful and exciting to read.
Bob Monsour's 11ty Bundle is an amazing resource for anyone interested in learning how to build static sites with Eleventy.
Manu publishes People and Blogs, a weekly interview series of people who write personal blogs.
IndieWeb Carnival is a monthly blogging festival where someone from the community picks a topic, writes an introduction and invites anyone with a blog to contribute. At the end of the month, the host compiles a list of entries to a round-up post and you get to find many great new blogs through it.
In May, Chris is hosting it with a theme of Small Web Communities. I originally found Chris' blog through IndieWeb Carnival and have been enjoying his blog posts ever since.
RSS
The key to building a nice collection of blogs to follow is to install an RSS reader (like Feedly, InoReader, NetNewsWire, Lire or any of the other many options) and add interesting blogs you encounter to it.
Little by little, your collection grows and you can read interesting stories from people all around the globe and thanks to RSS, you don't have to worry about X, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram or any other platform deciding what you get to see — you will be in full control of your feed.
When there's less competition for the algorithm's attention, people can also write less clickbait, less things aimed at getting a reaction out of you and more long-form, well thought out stuff.
I start my day by going through new articles in my RSS reader before I open any other internet service (other than DTMTS during playoff season) and I like how it gives me a slow way to kick off the day. No notifications, no messages, no news, no doomscrolling. Just good stuff from good people.