#009 - End of summer
Friends, foes and those yet undecided: welcome to September issue of From Juhis with Love.
It's been a bit unusually warm late summer and early fall here but as I walked to the train station this morning to catch an early morning train to Helsinki, fall reminded me of its arrival with a chill +3°C. While I went back inside to change to a warm winter jacket, a young school kid ran past me to catch a bus with nothing but a t-shirt and jeans on.
September was a weird month for me. On one hand, there was a lot of good in it: I got to work on a prototype project that was demoed in Helsinki Design Week; I had a good amount of brainstorming and mentoring meetings and a ton of fun playing games.
On the other hand, there was a lot of stress as the uncertainties of life keep making it difficult to focus or manage doing anything with more long-term commitment or planning.
Stuff I made this month
After a busy August celebrating Blaugust blogging festival and publishing daily, September found its course and I returned to the regular pace.
I published six blog posts this month, starting with my announcement of my upcoming PyCon Finland talk. I'm so excited to return to Jyväskylä with tech events. October 17th will mark a ten year anniversary since we organised Rails Girls Jyväskylä.
I then collected a few good tips for using global git ignore files or git exclude to keep custom, personal files out from shared repositories. I always feel a bit weird about these kinds of blog posts where I'm mainly just reiterating what other smart and kind people have written but then remind myself that if I can put the good stuff in front of new eyes, it's always worth it.
At the start of this month, I started running a 5-player Pokémon TCG Scarlet & Violet Progression Series with our local gaming group. Each week, we open virtual packs of different sets from the Scarlet & Violet block, add our new cards to our card pool and build decks and battle against each other. It's been a lot of fun organising and playing but also building custom tools.
I used Eleventy's custom data file format functionality to build us a website, I built a bookmarklet to export card lists and I've been building a yet unpublished Django app to visually explore my card pool. It's been a lot of fun and as the card pool grows with roughly 200 cards per set, it has become a vital tool for my own gaming as I can easily see all the evolution lines I have available.
Internet's recommendation algorithms keep bringing videos and discussions to my face about how we're somehow not allowed to have hobbies anymore. It's such a weird social media bubble (I guess mainly in TikTok and Instagram) where content creators who run their business camouflaged as a casual hobby make people feel like hobbies need to be branded and monetised at every step. I wrote about how that's not the case.
For IndieWeb Carnival this month, Sophia hosted with an interesting and mysterious theme of "Second Person Birds" and while I tried to write a short story about belonging first, I ended up sharing my favourite Pokémon TCG bird art instead. There are some real good bangers out there!
Finally, I wrote about how I manage Eleventy filters in my website projects.
It was a good month!
Community activities
Finally, after a long summer break, we returned to meetups this month.
I did a lightning talk in Aurajoki Overflow afterwork about @11ty/import, a tool that can help you archive your old WordPress blog posts into Markdown. That talk inspired a good chunk of nice discussion about blogging, static sites and why Eleventy is lovely.
We also had our first Turku ❤️ Frontend meetup of the fall when we visited the beautiful rooftop offices of Readit.ai on the 11th floor with a stunning view over the city. We got an introduction to Module Federation 2.0 and got a lesson on how to use the new View Transitions API to make silky smooth page transitions on the web.
To wrap up the month, I'm part of a panel discussion at Community Collective x HIVE Helsinki: Managing live communities in the attention economy era event today. I'm excited to geek out about community building with a wonderful group of people.
Lovely bits from the internet
Want a virtual hug? The Nicest Place on the Internet got you covered. The website is a collection of autoplaying videos of strangers from around the globe giving hugs.
As an aspiring (and procrastinating) board game designer, discovering Judson Cowan's Dredging Up Fun - A Board Game Design Primer was a delight. Cowan is the designer of a fun fishing board game Deep Regrets and a great storyteller.
To quote Sia Karamalegos:
I'm a big believer that everyone should have their own little corner of the internet — a home base that reflects you, not just whatever social media platform is popular this year. Your website can be your landing page, your blog, your portfolio, or even just a single page that says, "Hey, here I am."
Most of the stuff I write about building stuff is more geared towards developer audience but Sia published a brilliant piece exploring different options that there are for building websites without writing code.
Ratio App is a software for my taste: a small utility that does one thing and does it well. It's a tool that allows you to check for contrast between two colors and how it compares with accessibility guidelines. It's gorgeous and such a delight to use.