#007 - July's been HOT 🔥
Sweating. That's July in a nutshell.
I was on a summer holiday for most of July, enjoying the extra time playing video games (I finally got Bear and Breakfast, it's so cute), reading & writing and daydreaming.
I was going through my journal to check what I've been up to this month. Most of the daily entries start with "Didn't sleep very well due to the heat" and ended with "It was so hot today". We've had a historic heat wave this summer and I can't wait for the weather to chill out a bit.
On a completely different note, languages are fascinating. In English, there's the word scale which means different things like to scale (climb), scale (as in fish scale) and a scale (a weighing apparatus). What's truly mind-blowing is how all of these words have completely different etymologies.
The scale as act of ascending comes from Latin scāla, the fish scale from French escale, and the weighing scale from Old Norse skál. Next time you scale something, you can remember the different origins and giggle a bit to yourself.
Stuff I made this month
This month I built a few things, digital and physical.
I started the month with my Everyday Tabletop Gaming Carry (EDTGC). I rummaged through my backpack and catalogued what I bring with me whenever I leave home for impromptu gaming sessions on the go.
To celebrate the International RNG Day, I built a random blog post feature to my Eleventy blog and wrote a blog post about it.
I also improved my website tooling by building a new command-line tool that connects my blog posts with my Mastodon posts — an integration I use to provide commenting feature to my otherwise static site.
I took part in IndieWeb Carnival with a blog post about my good luck charm, a hand-drawn Mario Super Star post card I received from a friend 12 years ago before I moved to San Francisco. It's been with me ever since providing me super powers (and good soundtrack) whenever I've been feeling down or insecure.
To continue on IndieWeb theme, I took a look at the 11 principles the community has come up with and wrote about how I see them and how I follow them on my own website.
I've been writing a lot of small scripts to help automate tasks and simplify things and recently with the improvements in the language and tooling ecosystem, Python has become better suited for the task. I wrote about how I use uv, PEP 723 inline metadata and pytest to build self-contained scripts.
I had an opportunity to contribute to the local startup ecosystem as well this summer. I was invited to coach early stage startups at Startup Journey (a program I used to run 2016-2017) and today after publishing this newsletter, I'm heading to talk to young entrepreneurs at Omahomma project about what I've learned over the past 20+ years building communities.
And finally, I've been preparing for this year's blogging festival Blaugust. It's an annual celebration of blogging, aimed at inspiring people to write a bit more than usual. In 2023, I participated for the first time publishing 31 posts in 31 days and last year, I did the same but with a focus on Python's standard library. This year, I haven't been able to come up with a good theme so I won't be aiming for full 31 posts but I'm hoping to land somewhere around 15, increasing my pace from the usual a bit.
Community activities
As the summer heat continues, our community activities mostly continue to be on break. We've had a couple of afterworks and lunches during the summer and they have been very nice.
We have started to plan and organise fall events with Turku ❤️ Frontend and archipylago for our communities and are still on the lookout for sponsors and speakers.
If you have an office in Turku and want to be part of our communities, get in touch! If you're interested in coming to Turku to talk about frontend or Python topics, get in touch!
The conference schedule for the fall is also filling in. Here are some that I'm going to or planning to go:
- 2.-3.10.2025 PyCon Estonia in Tallinn
- 17.10.2025 PyCon Finland in Jyväskylä
- 30.-31.10.2025 PyCon Sweden in Stockholm
- 21.11.2025 tiny ruby #{conf} in Helsinki
and Django friends in Copenhagen are organising a 20-year Django birthday party on 10.10.2025 if you're in the neighbourhood and WordPress community in Finland is organising WP Suomi the same day in Helsinki!
Lovely bits from the Internet
Draw a fish
DrawAFish.com is a joyful collaboration across the global Internet. You draw a fish and once you submit it, you're welcomed to an ever-changing aquarium of lovely fish — including yours. Some of them are by people who know what a fish looks like and can draw one and others are by people like me who scribble something resembling a infinity sign with a smile. All the fish swim happily together in the same virtual aquarium and every fish is welcome.
The Northwoods Baseball Radio Network
This one's such a lovely idea that I've never run into anything similar. The Northwoods Baseball Radio Network is a podcast/audio play with ASMR style radio broadcasts of fictional baseball matches for moments when you're heading to sleep or want to relax.
Each broadcast is 2-2.5 hours long and absolutely fascinating. If you know of other things like these, I'd love to hear more because this seems to be such an interesting niche with lots of creative opportunities.
Studio Ghibli Nature Loop
Linda shared this one in her newsletter (you should check it out!) and I'm passing it along to you.
Studio Ghibli Nature Loop is a 30-minute compilation of the most stunning nature shots from Ghibli anime movies. It's an ultimate cottagecore relax experience amongst the busy daily lives and I'm all here for it.
Tatami puzzle game
I love puzzle games but I can barely play them. Even a relatively short session during the day leads to my brain being in overdrive with puzzle stuff when I try to go to sleep. The same problems and attempted solutions loop over and over in my head, never reaching a solution. It sucks because I'd love to play more of my favourite puzzles.
One game that I've been enjoying a lot — even at the risk of losing sleep — is Tatami by Kaylee Calderolla.
It starts simple with numbers on a grid and your goal is to draw rectangles that fit the grid. Each rectangle will include one number and its size needs to match that number.
As you progress through the puzzles, more variants are introduced keeping the puzzles interesting.
Kaylee says:
This game was made with love and patience.
and it shows. The UX is smooth and everything is built with focus to serving the gameplay. And importantly
And obviously: no ads, no tracking, no data collection, no account required, no dark patterns.
TODOs aren't for doing
For the software developers reading my newsletter, I wanna share this short piece by Sophie Alpert on why marking something as TODO in code comments has more utility than just remembering to do something later.
She concludes with
Sometimes TODOs are useful, sometimes they’re not, but well-placed TODOs can often answer a future reader’s “Am I totally missing something, or wouldn’t it better if this code was refactored like this?” — and answer it well enough to get past the hump of “Ehh, maybe I’ll just leave it the way it was in case the original author knew something I don’t.”
In some ways, these TODO comments can help with the Chesterton's Fence problem.
Sophie's blog is full of great posts about software development so I highly recommend looking beyond just the one I linked. For example, Why review code? is great!