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.
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.
Developers do design — but we’re not taught it
In many companies, most of the days we developers end up doing design choices. Whether it’s graphic or service design, by the virtue of building things we make design decisions. But most developers are not taught design, not even the very basics.
Everyday design decisions
Not all of us have a privilege of working with amazing designers for every feature we build but nothing is done without a design. Maybe someone gave you a sketch about a feature with a single state and you end up making decisions on what the other states look like — you make a design decision. Or maybe you’re given a spec of what needs to be done but not how — you make a design decision.
City Bound Nomadic
In the near future (say, within the next 5 years), I want to explore the possibilities of a digital nomad lifestyle. Working independently of location and time is a compelling idea and having followed digital nomads in blogs and Youtube and Instagram for quite a while, I'd definitely love to give it a try. Seeing the world, learning about new cultures and being able to experience the wonders that the world has to offer — sounds good, right?
I realized some time ago that it takes quite a lot to jump from regular 9-to-5 office job and permanent home to remote-only, timezone varying work with no permanent place to call home. So I decided to start learning the required skills and getting used to things before taking a full leap. I also felt that I needed to hone my skills so I could find enough work to keep me going once I decide to start traveling.