I wanted to start this newsletter by stating how much of a roller coaster this month has been but then I started to think how that’s how I feel about every month when I come here to write this newsletter.

I had a wonderful month. I met a lot of new people, made a bunch of new friends and got to discuss topics close to my heart from early mornings to late nights.

Now that life has settled in to a more predictable and stable state with work (I’m in a new project, yay), it has opened up a lot of room for pondering and contemplating life and future. I even had a wonderful dream last night where I was invited to do something I’m most passionate about in life and I felt very reinvigorated waking up.

For the first time since 2019, I’m heading into December in a relatively “normal” life situation after years of things like pandemic, burnouts and unemployment. I’m really excited about next month ❤️.

I wish you a wonderful December and end of the year too.

Stuff I made this month

One of the fun things that lasted the entire month was TILvember, coined by Thomas Rigby. TIL stands for Today I learned and in his blog, Thomas wanted to start writing about daily things he learned and I jumped into the bandwagon. Instead of posting daily blog posts, I decided to keep track of new things in my digital garden.

For example, I learned that if you make a document in Google Docs and share it either as-is or as PDF export, all the links go through Google’s servers so they can track what people link to. And I learned about Japanese way of dividing the year into small seasons in a very poetic way.

I participated in IndieWeb Carnival by writing about how my writing inspiration lives through cycles and how at the start of the month, I was really struggling to get anything written. Luckily the cycle started turning right around the same time and I ended up writing a lot of stuff and starting a couple of new interesting writing projects (instead of you know, finishing some of the old ones…).

I bought Tiny Epic Galaxies board game and designed a 3D printed insert for it. It’s my first proper 3D print that I felt was good enough to be useful for others too so I put it up on Printables.

Programmers’ advent calendar Advent of Code is starting tomorrow and as has become a tradition, I finished November by writing about why developers should participate. Once again, I will be solving the puzzles with Python and writing educational explanations.

If you are a software developer who wants to get started with writing a tech blog, I can highly recommend solving these too and writing about your solutions. You’ll get 12 free ideas for what to write about this year and once that momentum of writing starts to kick in, you’ll have your blog going.

Last month, I talked in PyCon Finland about debugging Python and that talk was released to Youtube this month. If you’re not into talks, you can also find the same content in blog format linked in the post above.

Community activities

November was a wonderful month for community stuff.

I gave two talks about building a developer portfolio, one in Helsinki with Hive Helsinki and another in Turku with Root Expo. Best part of both talks were the dozens of discussions they sparked with wonderful people.

There were some excellent and even surprising questions that arose from those discussions. I was asked about my failures in life, whether I still enjoy programming and why and why I do what I do in life.

I also talked about comparing version numbers in our company internal Thursday Dinner Talks. It’s a 5-minute lightning talk with mostly fun anecdotes about the wild west of version numbering systems.

While visiting Helsinki, I had a lovely dinner with friends and decided to stay in the hotel bar to write as I had found a lot of inspiration for writing. By sheer coincidence, an old friend walked by, recognised me and came say hi. I love hotel bars for these kinds of serendipitous encounters.

We had a wonderful archipylago meetup where we learned about building finite state machines in Python and how to use keyword and vector searches and we heard lightning talks about Python 3.14 news and Python profiling.

And another great meetup with Turku ❤️ Frontend just this week where we learned about Super Mario Bros’ intuitive design and how that can be applied to UX design of websites and apps. And we learned about different ways you can communicate with your DIY electronics and build UIs to control them.

We didn’t forget the power of afterworks either as we organised a TurkuDev afterwork session one Friday to catch up after a long week at work and I got hooked on strawberry-lime smoothies.

I went to Aurajoki Overflow where we saw two inspiring talks about creative coding, one with a visual focus and another with a musical focus. I was planning to attend tiny ruby #{conf} in Helsinki as well but fell ill the night before and sadly missed what I’m sure was a wonderful event.

A few people in the community set up Fediversuomi ry, a non-profit organisation to promote Fediverse in Finland and to host a couple of instances. I signed up as a support member for now and hopefully in the future I’d have more time and energy to also contribute otherwise to the great cause.

Lovely bits from the Internet

In case you already forgot it (it’s been a while since I mentioned it earlier in this newsletter), Advent of Code starts tomorrow and I’m so excited for it again.

Paged Out! is a tech magazine with 1-page articles about all things tech written by the readers. Ever since I found it this month and have been reading through the earlier issues, my brain has been racing with ideas for an article I’d like to write for it.

I ran into two fantastic new word games this month: Tiled Words where you need to move and rotate tetrominos around to build words that match the clues, and Reunion where you swap letters in a grid around to solve a puzzle by building words and reuniting cute fox and hedgehog mascots.

And finally, if you want to discover new indie music, check out The Indie Beat Radio. I’ve been listening to it a lot this month. It’s a project that builds a radio stream from music published in Bandwagon.fm.