#010 - A wonderful October
Happy first of November!
October was quite a ride full of positive vibes. My 6-month trial period at work finished and I’m still employed so there’s one thing less to stress about. I treated my colleagues with some donuts to celebrate
Most of the month, I felt I was in quite a lot of creative rut, I managed to maintain a steady blog publishing cycle and did quite a lot of brainstorming for what kind of community activities I want to do next spring and summer. I’m so lucky to have friends in my life that are always up for brainstorming and letting me pick their brains and who are eager to help me take my ideas to the next level.
I met author Katja Kontturi in Lokacon and got a dedication on her book Ankkalinna - Portti kahden maailman välillä which is a less academic version of her doctoral thesis on Don Rosa’s work. If you’re into comics and read Finnish, I highly recommend picking it up.
Stuff I made this month
I reached the 100 published posts mark for the second year in a row this month. In addition to writing, I also got to talk quite a bit in various events so it was a very fun month.
On the blog, I started the month by writing about my favourite Youtube tabletop gaming shows. I love playing games but I also enjoy watching others play, especially if there’s a bit of fun discussion happening at the table.
In Networking and writing as a catalyst for relationships and opportunities, I wrote about how both in-person events and writing are a good way to build relationships and open doors to many interesting opportunities.
Mid-October, PyCon Finland returned to the conference circuit after a 9-year hiatus and just like 9 years ago, I was there to talk about technology. I talked about debugging Python to a wonderful audience and enjoyed the rest of the event as a participant, learning new things and meeting wonderful people from all around the globe. I wrote a recap post about the event and the talks I listened to.
I’ve been quite vocal about the fact that I use (and love) Obsidian as my notes tool and every so often I hear people discard it as an option because “it’s so complex”. After the latest one of these, I wrote a blog post about how it can be as simple or complex as you make it, making it in my opinion such a great tool to choose. You can start simple by just writing your thoughts on notes but it also grows with you as your needs increase. No need to migrate to a new tool at that point!
In October, AWS had an outage on one of their servers and many digital services went down for the count. But it wasn’t just digital services that were affected: we heard stories about beds that overheated and were stuck in unsleepable positions because they relied on 3rd party, internet accessible services to function… as a bed. I wrote about this madness in product design.
In addition to the aforementioned PyCon Finland, I was also invited to talk about prototyping in Boost Turku’s Builder Challenge and to be a judge in the final showdown event with participants presenting their projects.
I took that prototyping talk and turned it into a couple of other variants too. I spoke about it with a Python angle in archipylago meetup and in our company’s October Monthly meeting as it was based on a work project.
To finish the month, I got invited at the last minute to talk to students who were visiting our office on Thursday morning and did the first of three scheduled talks about building a developer portfolio. The first comment after the talk from a student was:
This was such a f’n boring topic … but you made it very interesting and inspiring.
so I succeeded at doing what I was hoping to achieve.
Community activities
We hosted our two meetups.
With our Python community archipylago we had a wonderful meetup as I was excited to introduce Maaret Pyhäjärvi to our community and I talked about prototyping in Python.
With our frontend community Turku ❤️ Frontend we had similarly wonderful event as Fotis Papadogeorgopoulos joined us to talk about different ways to include SVG into your projects and showed us @svg-use, a tool he had built to make it even better. Janne Kalliola delivered a great talk about energy consumption of software, why it matters and how you can measure your websites consumption with Firefox Profiler.
For a non-technical community stuff, we continued our Pokémon TCG Scarlet & Violet Progression Series that I’ve been running and building tooling for since late August. My favourite part of being a developer is that I can build tools, big or small, that I or my communities need on an ad-hoc basis.
Lovely bits from the internet
November seems to be a popular month for different challenges and campaigns in the web.
Thomas Rigby launched TILvember, a fun November thing where the idea is to daily share something you’ve learned (TIL = today I learned) that day. I’m trying to participate and started a note in my Digital Garden for TILvember where I’ll track them. Let’s see if an old dog can still learn 30 new tricks.
NaNoWriMo, a popular novel writing month started facing backlash last year and shut down. Aspiring writers didn’t let that slow them down and multiple new ones popped up. Writing Month and NaNo 2.0 are two of the maybe most prominent ones and it’s wonderful to see the community rising from the ashes.
I participated in NaNoWriMo a couple of times in high school and it was a lot of fun. It was also so intense that I have never tried to participate in it after I got my first job.
Did you know that October 25th is Crisp Sandwich Day? Now you do and can adjust your celebrations accordingly next year. The day celebrates the lesser known culinary treat of combining sandwiches with potato chips. If you’ve never tried, you have to! The crispiness of chips and the softness of sandwich is a brilliant combination.
Comic artist Alvaro Montoro released a fun quiz in which you need to guess the movie based on CSS rules. You don’t need to know much of CSS to participate. So even the non-developer readers who love movies, go test your knowledge!