Blog posts in category “Blaugust”
Blaugust is an annual blogging festival that runs in August.
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Aug 3rd, 2025Find new blogs to follow from this year’s Blaugust participants
We have over 100 blogs participating in this year’s Blaugust blogging festival and even if you’re not a blogger yourself, you can find many great new blogs to read.
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Aug 2nd, 2025"You can't pause an online game" — how childhood gaming formed my work preferences
As a kid, generational tension with my parents grew from my online multiplayer hobby — as an adult I find myself wanting a heads up early at work just like I did as a kid so I can schedule and prepare.
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Aug 1st, 2025Welcome to Blaugust 2025
August 1st means it’s time to kick off this year’s Blaugust blogging festival with an introductory post.
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Jul 14th, 2025Blaugust 2025 starts August 1st
Blaugust is a blogging festival we celebrate in August by writing and publishing blog posts and enjoying our art and craft.
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Aug 31st, 2024Blaugust 2024 retrospective
Another Blaugust finished with 31 posts in 31 days. I got to share my love for Python and its standard library over a series of posts that hopefully inspired readers to learn something new.
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Aug 30th, 2024Book recommendation: Fluent Python (2nd Edition)
Fluent Python is one of the best - if not the best - Python books and will help you become better at writing pythonic code.
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Aug 29th, 2024What’s coming to Python in 3.13 and 3.14
With new Python versions in the horizon, what goodies can we expect to see?
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Aug 28th, 2024Couple of great Python podcasts
Python community has so many great podcasts to learn more from. Here are 4 picks of the ones I’ve been mostly listening lately.
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Aug 27th, 2024Quick prototyping with sqlite3
Python’s sqlite3 bindings makes it a great tool for quick prototyping while you’re working out what it is exactly that you’re building and what kind of database schema makes sense.
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Aug 26th, 2024Parse command line arguments with argparse
In 2021 I wrote a blog post documenting argparse in a way that made more sense to me. This year for Blaugust and Batteries included, I want to resurface that for those who are new to argparse.
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Aug 25th, 2024Pretty print and validate JSON on command line with json.tool
Python has a variety of command line interfaces that can be run without writing any code or starting a REPL. Json module has one that I use quite regularly.
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Aug 24th, 2024Test your codebase with unittest
Few weeks ago I wrote about doctest and today, I’m looking into another way to write tests that is built in to Python: unittest.
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Aug 23rd, 2024Branch out with pattern matching
Since Python 3.10, Python has had support for pattern matching which is made it my all-time most anticipated release when it came out. It makes branching while capturing data to variables a breeze once you get used to it.
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Aug 22nd, 2024Serve local HTML and CSS files with http.server
python -m http.server provides a handy way to spin up a local server for your files.
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Aug 21st, 2024Bring your custom toolkit to REPL sessions
You can bring in your favourite tooling and most used imports to every REPL session with environment variable PYTHONSTARTUP.
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Aug 20th, 2024Keep track of happenings with logging
Python provides good basic functionality for logging in its standard library.
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Aug 19th, 2024Memoize with functools.cache
Do you have computationally expensive functions that are called often? Memoizing is a strategy that caches results in memory so the full computation can be skipped in future calls.
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Aug 18th, 2024map and filter with list comprehensions
Python has map and filter functions but we like to use list comprehensions instead because they flow off the tongue so smoothly.
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Aug 17th, 2024Combine iterables with zip
Combine or iterate over multiple iterators at once by zipping them together.
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Aug 16th, 2024Random number chosen by fair dice roll
Python’s random module offers tools to generate pseudo-random numbers.
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Aug 15th, 2024Write more pythonic code with context managers
Context managers enable you to create “template” code with initialisation and clean up to make the code that uses them easier to read and understand
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Aug 14th, 2024Combinatoric iterators from itertools
itertools module offers four combinatoric iterators that generate different combined outputs from one or more iterable.
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Aug 13th, 2024Rituals build community camaraderie
Shared rituals help build sense of belonging to a group. In this IndieWeb Carnival entry I discuss a few ways to build them.
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Aug 12th, 2024A bunch of small game reviews: Shogun Showdown, Into the Breach and Fly Corp
I’ve been recently enjoying three great games on my Steam Deck and I wanted to share them with you
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Aug 11th, 2024Data classes in Python with dataclasses
Python has a couple of methods to implement data class pattern. Last week, I looked into namedtuples and today, I’m writing about a newer option: dataclasses.
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Aug 10th, 2024Rotating turn order with deque
deque is a double-ended queue that I’ve used to implement rotating turn order for a (very simplified) game engine.
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Aug 9th, 2024Debug with pdb and breakpoint
Python’s standard library comes with good tooling to debug your code – and a lot of community-made tooling that can be configured to take your debugging productivity to a whole new level.
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Aug 8th, 2024Document intended usage through tests with doctest
There’s a lot to like about Python’s doctest module. It enables you to write tests as examples in your documentation, fulfilling two important duties of tests.
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Aug 7th, 2024Improved print readability with pprint
Pretty print module provides more readable prints for complex data structures
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Aug 6th, 2024help() me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope
Python’s built-in help system is your companion when developing or debugging Python code.
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Aug 5th, 2024Count ‘em
Python’s Counter provides a way to count items in iterables or mappings and get them in a dictionary-like object with a small handful of handy methods.
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Aug 4th, 2024Improve your code with namedtuples
We continue our journey in Python standard library by taking a look one of my absolute favorites: namedtuple. It’s like a regular tuple but adds documentation, making your code cleaner and easier to read.
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Aug 3rd, 2024Reading and writing CSV with Python
Python has great tools for reading and writing data in CSV format.
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Aug 2nd, 2024Parsing nginx server logs with regular expressions
Regular expressions are fun. In this series of Batteries included, I write about Python’s standard library with practical examples.
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Aug 1st, 2024Blaugust 2024: Batteries included
August’s blogging festival Blaugust is here again and this year, I’m writing about the goodies in Python’s standard library.
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Jul 15th, 2024Blaugust starts August 1st
Blaugust is a festival of blogging that takes place over the 31 beautiful days of August. Here’s what you can expect and how and why you should join!
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Aug 31st, 2023Blaugust 2023: Lessons Learned
It’s August 31st. I’ve published a blog post on each day of the month and now it’s time to reflect on what I’ve learned throughout this experiment.
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Aug 30th, 2023Use pangrams to avoid mistakes in conference badge prints
If you have a name that is not just ASCII letters and you’ve participated in an event abroad, it’s likely you’ve had your name messed up in the badge. Organizers can avoid that with pangrams
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Aug 29th, 2023My First 100K
My blog got over 100 000 views in the last 30 day window for the first time ever.
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Aug 28th, 2023Custom cookie consent for video embeds
Occasionally I want to embed Youtube videos or social media posts on my blog but wanted a clean and straight-forward way to deal with cookie consent. So I built my first version for Youtube embeds.
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Aug 27th, 2023Compressing overlapping strings in Python
I developed a solution to a overlapping string puzzle with Python using Test-Driven Development and in this blog post, I share my thinking and development process.
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Aug 26th, 2023Where do my links live?
Chris wrote last week about his link saving schemes and since I’ve talked about this topic surprisingly lot recently with people, I decided to share my approach as well.
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Aug 25th, 20236 months of recovery, how is life?
It’s been about six months since I last wrote about how things are going. Time for an update.
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Aug 24th, 2023Building Dark Mode for hamatti.org
It’s finally time to make people who can’t stand light themes happy when they visit my page by building the dark mode.
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Aug 23rd, 2023Let’s talk about Steam Deck
I’ve now had Steam Deck for nearly a year and little by little I’ve gotten more comfortable with it and have opened up new avenues within the system.
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Aug 22nd, 2023Website rewrite and switching to Notion as CMS
This website served me well for almost 5 years with minor improvements, tweaks and hacks. Now, it was time for a total rewrite and upgrading my stack and tools.
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Aug 21st, 2023Stardew Valley Mods I use
Stardew Valley is one of my all-time favorite games and I have spent so many hours building farms and making friends. These days, I’ve added so many great mods that extend the playability and story of the game and wanted to share them with you.
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Aug 20th, 2023Youtubers I watch
I love Youtube and especially its many great indie creators. Since Youtube’s algorithms affect so heavily what everyone sees, I wanted to share some of my favorites so you could maybe find new channels to follow.
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Aug 19th, 2023Bloggers I read: Saturday
I read a lot of tech blogs to learn new things and stay up to date with my industry. This week I’m sharing a few of them so you can too!
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Aug 18th, 2023Bloggers I read: Friday
I read a lot of tech blogs to learn new things and stay up to date with my industry. This week I’m sharing a few of them so you can too!
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Aug 17th, 2023Bloggers I read: Thursday
I read a lot of tech blogs to learn new things and stay up to date with my industry. This week I’m sharing a few of them so you can too!
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Aug 16th, 2023Bloggers I read: Wednesday
I read a lot of tech blogs to learn new things and stay up to date with my industry. This week I’m sharing a few of them so you can too!
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Aug 15th, 2023Bloggers I read: Tuesday
I read a lot of tech blogs to learn new things and stay up to date with my industry. This week I’m sharing a few of them so you can too!
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Aug 14th, 2023Pokemon tools updated for Obisidian Flames
With the newest Pokemon TCG set Obsidian Flames being released last Friday, I’ve updated my tools to support the new set
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Aug 13th, 2023Desert Island Discs
Desert Island Discs is a BBC radio show where people share 8 songs, a book and a luxury item they'd take with them on a desert island. Here are my picks!
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Aug 12th, 2023Future Frontend 2023 Recap
In June, we organized Future Frontend conference in Helsinki with a couple of workshop days followed by two great conference days full of amazing talks. Here's my recap and talk recommendations from the bunch.
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Aug 11th, 2023Projects I'm proud of: Teaching programming
This week in Blaugust is themed 'Introduce yourself' and each day, I'll share a project story that I'm particularly proud of. For Friday, my story is an overarching story of a decade of teaching programming.
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Aug 10th, 2023Projects I'm proud of: Potluck
This week in Blaugust is themed 'Introduce yourself' and each day, I'll share a project story that I'm particularly proud of. One of those is Potluck, my latest tabletop design project.
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Aug 9th, 2023Projects I'm proud of: Newsletters
This week in Blaugust is themed 'Introduce yourself' and each day, I'll share a project story that I'm particularly proud of. Today is two-for-one special as I share my work with Dev Breakfast and Syntax Error newsletters.
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Aug 8th, 2023Projects I'm proud of: Turku ❤️ Frontend
This week in Blaugust is themed 'Introduce yourself' and each day, I'll share a project story that I'm particularly proud of. Today, I want to tell you about Turku <3 Frontend.
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Aug 7th, 2023Projects I'm proud of: Boost Turku & Startup Journey
This week in Blaugust is themed 'Introduce yourself' and each day, I'll share a project story that I'm particularly proud of. Today, I'm starting with my journey at Boost Turku.
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Aug 6th, 2023Tools don't matter - until they do
When starting blogging or coding, it can be overwhelming to choose the right tools. In the beginning, spend your time and energy on doing and learning, not thinking about and tinkering with your tools.
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Aug 5th, 2023What makes a blog post a blog post?
I have a very powerful inner critic when it comes to my own blog and what kind of posts I write. But I don't have that same filter when reading other people's post. I love the variety. Which makes me think: what does make a blog post and is there some criteria to fill?
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Aug 4th, 2023Where to publish your blog?
A question every blogger has to go through at the beginning is where to publish their blog. I'll give you a few options that will get you blogging in no time so you can focus on writing.
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Aug 3rd, 2023Build an idea bank and never run out of blog ideas
Often I get enough ideas throughout a week for my weekly blog posts. But sometimes I don't because I'm too busy or in a non-creative mood. That's why I have an idea bank that grows thoughts into ideas ready to be written into blog posts.
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Aug 2nd, 2023A bunch more of small game reviews: Dredge, Dishonored, Farm Keeper
I've recently been playing horror fishing simulator Dredge, magical first-person assassin stealth adventure Dishonored and tile-laying farming puzzler Farm Keeper.
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Aug 1st, 2023Blaugust 2023, here we come
Blaugust is a month-long celebration of blogging and I'm participating for the first time. I'm hoping to find new inspiration, write more, find new blogs to follow and to learn from fellow bloggers in the community. Join me on my journey through Blaugust.