#005 - A fresh start
Hey ❤️!
I'm happy you're there, taking time from your day to read this email of mine.
In the last email, I mentioned that I had just started a new job and this month has been a full on onboarding mayhem. I've been getting to know colleagues, learning about the company culture and how we operate, learning new practical skills and even got my feet wet with work as well as I ran my first training session for a client.
To focus on the first month at work, I forbid certain addictive video games from myself (looking at you Stardew Valley, Balatro and Factorio) but I still fell into the trap of Blue Prince accidentally. The mansion is just too mysterious to stay away from.
The summer is right around the corner as we roll into June. In Finland, we like to joke about how summer is the best day of the year and I have high hopes for this year's summer too. I have some holiday plans, mainly to do a long weekend writing retreat to finish some of my unfinished stuff by going to a remote place and focusing only on creative stuff and writing.
Stuff I made this month
This month I felt very creative. The new job reduced the amount of stress in life which opened up a lot of good energy for writing.
I wrote two pieces about taking notes. In Writing notes helps you remember — and forget, I wrote about how writing notes serve two opposite purposes. When you write things down, you process your thoughts an extra time and that helps you remember them better. It also helps you unload things from your working memory, helping you forget what's on your head so you can focus on other things.
This week, I published As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook that I had initially written for our company internal discussion forum and after publishing, it went viral, got to the top spot in Hacker News and got around 65 000 reads on Wednesday. On the positive side, I got into a bunch of really nice discussions with people and on the negative side, I racked up bit of an extra bill and some rather nasty comments.
Another post that got attention online this week was Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, what next? in which I looked at a few options for where to move next if you're a Mozilla Pocket user. I picked up wallabag for testing out first and the initial experiences have been good.
For this month's IndieWeb Carnival, I wrote about the graduation moment for communities. There are a lot of really good posts by other people participating in the festival listed in Chris's original post.
Alistair's blog post inspired me to share how I use ntfy.sh to create custom notifications to make life easier. And I wrote about how I've been working on building a small API endpoint for community websites with Netlify Functions and how I configured Prettier to help me avoid bugs from reformatting my redirects file.
Community activities
May is always a big and fun and important month in our communities. We operate on a spring and fall schedule — I learned very early on that I don't want to compete with Finnish summer so we wrap up after May, go frolic in the forests and touch grass in the meadows, recharge our batteries and come back with new enthusiasm in September.
With our Python community archipylago we had a wonderful meetup at Sofokus where Eemeli Aro talked about locale codes, Calle Laakkonen talked about type safe data validation, Asko Soukka came to share with us the news of PyCon Finland returning after 9 years and Aarni Koskela showed us his typtyp project that generates Typescript types from Python code.
Our Turku ❤️ Frontend meetup took us to Vincit where we had a stellar lineup. Daniel Yuschick did a wonderful talk about the collaboration between designers and developers during handoffs and how developers should learn the basics of the design tools like Figma so we can have better conversations with the designers. Our very own Teemu Mäntyharju finished the season with a traditional frontend pub quiz that was once again a nice challenge for our participants.
We also had our Future Frontend conference this week. We had great three days in the beautiful Aalto University campus and you can check the livestream recordings for day 1 and day 2. We'll publish the talks as individual videos once we get them edited and I'll be publishing my review and favourite talks in a blog post later but there were a lot of good ones this year again.
I love this conference because — in addition to great talks, inspiration and learning — it's one of those moments where once a year, I get to meet a lot of people that I've met and became friends with during the conference so this is our once-a-year get together.
My new office has a ice cream stand right outside the door so I decided to try out all the different flavours of ice cream (about 37) and document them in a website I built for them — built with Eleventy of course.
Lovely bits from the Interwebs
Owls in Towels
Have you seen an owl in a towel before? Regardless of if you have or not, Owls in Towels is a wonderful website showcasing also sorts of cute owls in towels.
In the world right now, there's so much nasty stuff happening, that it's good to take a break from all the news and just look at some cute animals to remember that there's also a lot of wonderful and positive things in the world as well.
Fediverse Donut Club
One of the lovely things about the web is how easy it has become to connect with others, to build fun projects and have a globally distributed experiences.
I've been participating in Fediverse Donut Club for a while now. It was started by Seth Larson.
Every other Friday, people who celebrate FediDonutFriday go out and buy a donut, take a picture of it and post it to Fediverse. Then other people can come and share a virtual coffee moment in the replies. I have participated a couple of times now with various Finnish munkkis as we call them. Last week, the one before that and one more donut from before that.
I've started to invite people to share a win — no matter how small or big — from their week to practice self-reflection and to notice the small positive things in our weeks.
About software estimates
Estimating how long it takes to build something is a hot and divisive topic in the software industry and many books and articles have been written about it.
I ran into this really good one: Task estimation: Conquering Hofstadter's Law by Jacob Bayless. He writes about how one of the challenges is how these estimates are treated differently by different people in the company and has some data to back up that actually the estimates are quite accurate for the average case but the outliers and the differences in expectations cause the main issue.
If you're interested in the topic more, I can highly recommend Mike Cohn's Agile Estimating and Planning book. It has a lot of very practical insights into when, how and why you should (or shouldn't) bring in estimates into your software team.