My writings
I love to write about programming, communities and minimalism.
In addition to these posts, I wrote a blog in Finnish about my year in San Francisco back in 2014. It lives on it's own page at https://hamatti.org/unelma.
I love writing scripts to solve small problems
One of the reasons I like programming so much is that it allows me to automate small and annoying things that would otherwise require bunch of manual work.
Yesterday, I downloaded a set of files that came in a following directory structure inside a zip file:
Make your function calls more readable
Introduction
“Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.” - Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
“Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.” - Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
Writing code that is easy to understand, modify and extend is a good goal for a software developer. But it's hard. So hard that multiple books have been written about the topic and people do conference and meetup talks about it all the time around the world.
How to enable SSL in Netlify with custom domain
Do you have a static site you need to put somewhere in Internet so others can access it? You're in for a treat: there are dozens of really good options. I wanted to try out Netlify for my website renewal because everyone had been saying good things about it and I had never used it.
I had an existing domain on Hover and used to run my website from a self-hosted Hetzner VPS. But during the past decade, the website and my server had become a mess. I wanted to start using a static site generator and to make deployment easier. So I installed Eleventy, piece by piece transformed my old site into an Eleventy site and ran eleventy. Boom, few seconds later I had _site folder that I dragged and dropped into Netlify and the site was up.
PHP needs its own ES6
I have a love-hate relationship with PHP. I have written PHP in many forms from website templating and Wordpress to full MVC and SPA backend solutions in the past 15+ years.
I was reading through Bronson Dunbar's post "Using and learning ReactJS for 2 years, what have I learnt, and I stopped at this:
“Event is over and it was a failure. What happened?” — Pre-mortem can help you avoid pitfalls
In modern day and age, many organizations are adopting retrospectives (a session where you look back and talk about what went well, what went wrong and how we can improve) and post-mortems (how did the project go and where did we go wrong) as part of their day-to-day work.
If you haven’t looked into them, I highly suggest you do so. I think especially regular retrospectives can help you build better team work, better project work and improve the conditions around you.
Event organizer - automate what you can, focus on people with all you’ve got
I have built hundreds of events, many of them with a very small team. The fewer people you have, the more you have to prioritize your efforts. But I don’t want to compromise communications (I’ve seen what bad comms do to an event) for quality time with people and especially not the other way around. So I have learned to build and automate things. This is a story of how you can do it too.
Organizing events is a lot of work. If you are a professional event organizer who’s only job is to do events, you probably already have invested in learning tools that can make your life easier. If you are working in marketing or development, and event organizing is just a tangent of your job, I have collected a few ideas to help you focus on what truly matters: your participants.
Better bash history search with McFly
If there's one functionality of bash that most beginners don't know but get very excited about when they discover it, it's history. First you learn to go through the history by pressing up and down, then you find out that CTRL+R is the spell that gives you access to write commands and find them from history.
I'm a huge fan of that. Probably 80-90% of my bash command history is repeating commands over and over again. Whether it's npm install, npm run start, git add . or something similar, I can find it from my history.
Post a message from Slack to Twitter with Zapier
I was chatting with friend on a Slack community last Friday, and he had a feature he'd love to have. When people post new job ads into #jobs channel, he'd love to automatically post them to Twitter for larger reach. I liked the idea!
As a big fan of automation and Zapier, I told I could take a look over the weekend and so I did.
Learning programming has never been more accessible in Helsinki
If you're interested in learning programming, the scene in Helsinki is blooming right now. There are long-term options as well as weekend workshops, evening workshops and support groups so everyone should be able to find their place in the community. And if you're an experienced developer who wants to share their knowledge, most of the community initiatives are always happy to have new people join as coaches.
This list is not exhaustive – these are just the ones I'm familiar with and new ones pop up all the time. If I'm missing something, please let me know in the comments!
Internet = People = ❤️
I love Internet. And I have ever since I gained access to it in my pre-teens at the turn of the millennium. There has been so many different steps in my path through the Internet forest but almost all of them are about people.
The Early Days: In Internet Nobody Knows You’re a Dog
These days with Facebooks and the boom of the video, we have an Internet where many people represent themselves with their real name and/or face. But back in the day, it was forums and IRC where you really didn’t know who people were unless you got to know them.