Juha-Matti Santala - Community Builder. Dreamer. Adventurer.

Thumbs up for a good adventure

2026-04-15T00:00:00Z

Pablo Morales is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival and he has invited us to write about adventures:

Close your eyes for a second. What comes to mind when you think of the word, adventure? Do you think of thrill? Do you take a risk?

I love a good adventure. I love to travel because of the unknown factor. You never know what’ll happen, what kind of exciting things you encounter and what kind of wonderful people you meet.

Back in the day when I was around 18-20 years old, I went on to three different adventures on consecutive summers, hitchhiking around the country to hang out with friends who lived across the nation, seeing parts of the country I had never seen traveling by train and meeting incredible, kind people who offered me rides.

What I cherish even more is that it was before the smartphone era. I didn’t have full access to everything at every given time. I did have a mobile internet dongle for my mini laptop to help me out in a pinch but otherwise I was out there, most of the time in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a pocket camera, beautiful summer and the kindness of strangers.

One day, I was picked up in the Eastern part of the country by a couple of guys who had just had their last day at work and were heading to celebrate that. They picked me up, I joined them to the bar, they invited me to watch Penguins - Red Wings Stanley Cup finals at their place, let me crash for the night and even took me to my next destination the following morning as one of them had a meeting there.

Another day I ended up joining a Finnish baseball (pesäpallo, significantly different from the American baseball as a sport) game because that’s where my ride was going. I was really happy about that because watching the sport has always been a delight to me and during these trips I always aimed to find a way to see games in towns I’d otherwise never go to.

A different day I ended up working for an evening selling tickets to a student event that my friends were organising at a bar because I had no other plans and wanted to help out friends. We ended up having such fun discussions during the quiet times and I met so many people I would not have otherwise met.

Unknown adventures are always exciting. One of the best parts of hitchhiking is that you cannot have any plans. It’s so liberating. You start your day by finding a nice spot leading towards a big road or highway to the direction you want to go, lift your thumb and sign (I used to write my destination to a cardboard sign to help people make decisions) up and see where the day will lead you.

Sometimes it took 10 hours to get to somewhere 3 hours away. But every single day I got somewhere and managed to find a place to sleep — either with friends if I reached my goal destination or with strangers if I didn’t.

Finland is incredibly beautiful, especially during the summer. I’m normally quite socially reserved and introverted but when I pick up my backpack and head on to adventures, I become surprisingly social, make small talk with strangers and look forward to meeting new people.

Thanks Pablo for hosting this month’s festival!

Small bit of functional graphic design I like

2026-04-08T00:00:00Z

I watch a lot of sports. Hundreds of hours every year. All major competitions that are broadcast here and some that require finding international sources.

Last night, I watched another round of UEFA Champions League and every broadcast I’ve enjoyed this tiny element in the clock & score graphic in the top corner:

The white and red stripes next to the team abbreviations tell you what the colours of their kits are. Real Madrid is playing in white while Bayern München is playing in red.

It blends in so well, takes no attention to itself and if you don’t watch a lot of games, you might not even realise that’s what the colours stand for. That’s what makes it so genius. While it’s almost unnoticeable, it provides such a crucial bit of information, especially if the teams generally share a colour (which these teams don’t).

If you join a match mid-game, you don’t have to try to figure out which team is which. A quick glance at the top corner to see what the score is and how much has been played and you immediately know who is who.

I often feel that in sports, there’s a lot of assumptions of what the viewer should already know. Recognising the kits is one of those things.

I love how this design reduces that burden from the viewer.

Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers is the Betamax of casino roguelikes

2026-04-01T00:00:00Z

As 2024 rolled in, we were expecting two exciting games in the casino roguelike genre to be published: Balatro and Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers. It was a great year to be a gamer.

First came out Balatro in February and as they say, rest is history. It took the world by storm and was beloved by everyone and their dog. Six months later, Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers came out but didn’t quite reach the hype that Balatro did. I think that’s a shame.

Balatro is roguelike deckbuilder that’s loosely based on poker but not really. You start the game with a regular 52 card French suit deck and need to play poker hands to gain points to beat the level before you run out of hands to play.

Between rounds, you can buy cards to improve your deck: you can add seals and enhancements to your cards to get more points or coins from them; you can buy Joker cards that add extra effects; you can buy tarot cards that give one off abilities; you can buy planet cards to improve your base points for different poker hands.

The goal is to build an engine that increases your points on an exponential scale to beat the ever-growing requirements.

DDG is a roguelike deckbuilder that’s loosely based on blackjack but not really. It’s a game where you fight an opponent by dealing damage to them based on your blackjack hands. Regular rules of blackjack apply: you play one card at a time to your side of the table and if you go over 21, you go bust. If you stand before or at 21, your score and your opponent’s score are subtracted from each other and the extra goes through as damage. If you get exactly 21, you gain extra bonuses like heal, shields and so on based on which suits you played.

After fights, you can add new cards to your deck to build combos, deal more damage, put up shields and more.

They have so many commonalities: they both start from a casino card game, adds wonky cards with nerdy pop culture references that don’t quite fit into a poker or blackjack deck and eventually make the game about something very different.

I think DDG is the better game. The cards you get to add to your deck are more creative. You can add old baseball cards, Yugioh cards, Pokemon cards, Magic the Gathering cards, Slay the Spire cards, birthday cards, credit cards, Playstation memory cards, scratch cards and much much more into your deck. That’s what really charmed me when I first learned about the game.

It takes the concept of “card” and jams in every imaginable card from outside the world of regular playing cards in a really fun way. There’s even Jimbo from Balatro in it. The most ambitious anime crossover of 2024?

One thing Balatro does better and why I believe it succeeded better is the juice. It’s in the category of addictive “number goes up” games and the developer did a wonderful job making that dopamine hit feel good.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like Balatro. I’ve played almost 100 hours of it and have to ratio my gaming sessions to only long weekends and holidays because it’s that addictive. But I like DDG more and before either game came out, I really hoped it would have been the “winner” of the two.

Just like VHS beat Betamax in the videotape wars, Balatro became the more popular game despite in my opinion not being the better game. The good thing is that unlike with the videotape wars, the losing side doesn’t disappear so we get to play both of these great games for years to come.

If you have played neither, I can highly recommend both. If you’ve only played one, go check the other one out as well.

From Juhis with Love #013 - Sun is back

2026-03-31T00:00:00Z

In March issue of From Juhis with Love, I share updates of my projects and lovely bits from the internet.

Read #013 - Sun is back.

I’m building a Python script to create form filling bookmarklets

2026-03-28T00:00:00Z

In 2024 I wrote about how I like to create bookmarklets to help me fill in forms on apps and sites I develop. It’s not uncommon to have a dozen or even two fields in a form and filling them up over and over again by hand while developing gets boring real fast.

In that 2024 blog post, I mention

Not only is it boring but that boredom can lead to us entering silly or funny entries that can sometimes accidentally leak during demos or screenshots or database dumps and lead to negative outcomes.

Until now, I’ve been doing them by hand but this week I wanted to explore this problem space a bit more. I figured a nicer interface would be to have a spec file (in my case, written in YAML) where I could define all my fields and values and then run a script to generate the bookmarklet.

I wrote the first version of form-filler to satisfy my own needs. It’s an open source Python script and if you’re interested in simplifying a rather boring aspect of your web dev work, check it out.

Each bookmarklet represents a single use case and is defined in a YAML specification file as the example:

inputs:
  name:
    type: text
    value: "Jane Doe"
    selector: "#name"
  age:
    type: text
    value: 23
    selector: "#age"
  confirmation:
    type: checkbox
    value: false
    selector: "#confirmation"
  date:
    type: date
    value: "2026-05-25"
    selector: "#date"

Running the script with this example specification will generate a bookmarklet that when run, will fill in the given form with the values provided.

I tend to create a bookmark folder per form and create a bunch of bookmarklets to test different scenarios.

How much change is the right amount of change?

2026-03-21T00:00:00Z

A fellow Blaugustan Steve from Frostilyte Writes published a great piece about Slay the Spire 2 this week. In it, he wished that the developers would have made more changes and especially points out how dull and repetitive the early game — especially Act 1 — can get in a game where you always start with the same deck of cards before you get to build your own build.

Overall, his criticism of the sequel is very good.

What stood out for me was this quote:

As you might’ve surmised, I’m fairly lukewarm overall on the sequel. A big part of that stems from how Slay the Spire 2 doesn’t do much to actually move the needle forward. The new artwork is nice, as is the rebalancing of a subset of cards from the first game. However, it’s hard to shake the feeling that I’ve already played this game before given how much it has in common with its predecessor.

We had a bit of a back and forth discussion about it because for me, that was the best part of Slay the Spire 2. I opened the discussion in our Discord chat with:

For me, that was the biggest relieve when I bought the game. I was worried they'd change the game I really enjoyed too much for the sake of changing things and so far I've been really happy with the new stuff that breath new life into the well proven basic gameplay loop.

This lead to a great discussion about different expectations for sequels and what makes a sequel worthy of full price game rather than updates or DLC to the original.

After our discussion, the thought stayed with me and simmered in my mind for a few days.

For a while now, I’ve been planning to write about the difficulty of sequels or 2nd seasons for movies and TV shows. There are two shows that have recently pushed me towards disappointment with their strong first season and meh second season: first one is Absentia and second one is The Night Agent.

Both of them had strong opening seasons. They had a good gimmick that separated them from other run-of-the-mill agent/alphabet agency stories and that kept me immersed to the stories. Their appeal was in the strong storyline and less so about specifically interesting characters or world building. So when the second seasons rolled out, they lost their charm. They became regular stories that unfortunately didn’t carry it for me to enjoy.

It happens way too often: someone writes a great story, it gets popular and then someone decides they need to make a continuation. Not for the purposes of telling more great stories but to make money on something popular.

When it comes to video games, I think there is a fine line between a cheap cash grab and not breaking a working, proven model. And it’s very subjective too. I can’t always tell why I like minimal changes for one game but am disappointed by it for another one.

With Slay the Spire 2 (by the way, I have written about it more in my digital garden, spoiler alert), I was worried the game would change too much. I really really liked the first one and was genuinely hesitant to buy the sequel when it hit Early Access because I worried they’d change things I loved about it. (Spoilers: they didn’t).

So far, after ~20 hours of play time under my belt, I’m really satisfied with the balance of good old stuff and new fresh additions and tweaks. Could the new stuff have been a DLC instead of a full game? Probably. Especially the parts that I care about. But I’m still happy to pay full price and don’t feel like I’ve been duped.

A related point is controller schemes in games. So much of video gaming for me is muscle memory — especially when playing with a controller — that when games change how controls work, it irritates me so much. I recently replayed The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part 2 and even really small changes to controls took me roughly 80% of the game to adjust to and I died a bunch of times because in a heated moment where quick reactions needed to happen, I pressed the wrong button.

Even if the new way of controlling is objectively better and fixes some issues with the old one, I would rather have the memorised old system than having to learn a new one because that stuff is hard.

Otherwise Last of Us Part 2 is a brilliant example of a good balance between new things while sticking to a good working base. The gameplay is very familiar to anyone who has played the first one and most elements are there as-is from the original. Yet, through masterful storytelling, the game feels like a completely different experience.

New protocol proposal for indie web: human.json

2026-03-18T00:00:00Z

The past week or so, the indie web circles have been talking about this new protocol proposal for a human.json file by Beto Dealmeida.

Beto describes the background as:

One of the problems with the internet today is that a lot of the content is AI generated. There's no way to know for sure if a site is maintained by a real human or if it's just slop. The only way to know for sure is by getting to know the authors, which usually takes time and requires developing a relationship with them through other channels, like email or social media. But what if we could expand that trust by building a web of vouches between sites?

I really like these kinds of ways of verifying identity or building trust between people. Not through corporations destroying our privacy or through governmental proof of identity which can have its own problems.

For me, it’s not crucial that someone is who they claim in some absolute sense. Rather — for example in the case of Mastodon verification — if I know you through your website, it’s enough of verification for me to know that the person who runs that website is the same person who runs the Fediverse account.

Same kind of thinking applies with the human.json idea. The way it works is that you can put a file to your website and then add a

<link rel="human-json" href="/human.json" />

Inside that file, you state which version of the protocol it’s written for and what domain/subdomain/subpath it covers, like mine.

{
  "version": "0.1.1",
  "url": "https://hamatti.org"
}

Additionally, you can vouch for other websites. For example, if you have a file in your site and you want to vouch for me, you can add:

{
  "vouches": [
    {
      "url": "https://hamatti.org",
      "vouched_at": "2026-03-18"
    }
  ]
}

to your human.json.

I started by adding the base version and I’ll be working over the vouches as I go forward.

Other people have been writing about this too. Evan Hahn shared it on Saturday, followed by Seth Larsen the same day who also wrote a Python script that checks who in his RSS feeds has added it to their site. Gina Häußge wrote about it too. As did Dave Slusher.

Beto Dealmeida has also written a Firefox extension that helps you see if sites you visit are within a trust network of people you trust.

What about humans.txt?

A similar but slightly different approach is humans.txt that’s been around for quite a while and is a human counterpart for robots.txt. It’s described as:

It's an initiative for knowing the people behind a website. It's a TXT file that contains information about the different people who have contributed to building the website.

Ned Batchelder explored this idea further in his blog post Human.json, taking a look at its benefits and pitfalls as well as previous attempts at similar things.

Markdown content split to sections in Eleventy and Nunjucks

2026-03-13T00:00:00Z

Last night, while sitting in the train on my way home, I got nerdsniped into writing another Eleventy post by tlohde who asked if there was a way to separate content from a Markdown post so it could be used in multiple parts in the layout. You can read the full question in the toot linked earlier.

I couldn’t resist figuring the puzzle out. Before I had my solution tested, Mark Llobrera shared his approach with shortcodes but I wanted to offer an alternative with Filters.

Let’s start with the filter. In your Eleventy config, add:

eleventyConfig.addNunjucksFilter("split_by_keyword", (body, index) => {
  return body.split("=~=~=~=")[index];
});

Here, I decided to use =~=~=~= as the splitting keyword as that is a beautiful section marker in Markdown but you can use whatever you like.

In your layout (let’s call it layouts/two-parter.njk), you can then do:

<body>
  {{ content | split_by_keyword(0) | safe }}
  <h2>Second part</h2>
  {{ content | split_by_keyword(1) | safe }}
</body>

Here, I’m splitting into two. If you sometimes have a need for a three-section layout, create a new layout and add another call to content with the filter. The same filter works with as many sections as you like but the amount of section splits in the layout needs to match the amount of splitting keywords in your content or otherwise some parts will be left out.

Finally, to use this layout with your Markdown file, you can do

---
layout: layouts/two-parter.njk
---


Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus et
ultricies diam. Vivamus sodales felis sed neque pellentesque, ut
elementum orci laoreet. Quisque lorem est, tempor in lectus sodales,
bibendum faucibus elit.

=~=~=~=

Sed iaculis ligula in volutpat feugiat. Nam eu lacus rhoncus, gravida
eros eget, aliquet mauris. Fusce sit amet convallis purus. Nam sagittis
sit amet ex id sagittis. Nullam mattis urna ut dapibus aliquam. In
imperdiet vitae elit vitae faucibus.

and it will render with the first paragraph, then a h2 from the layout and then the second paragraph.

Update: anydigital shared this section filter solution in Mastodon that is basically the same idea but with bit more robust code than my quick prototype.

I completed Stardew Valley’s shipping collection — in reverse

2026-03-11T00:00:00Z

Gvendolynn’s video Completing the Entire Stardew Valley Shipping List in Reverse Order inspired me to give the challenge a go and experience the game in a new way. It was more fun than I expected.

The rules and goals of this challenge

Stardew Valley is a RPG style farming game that was published 10 years ago where the player engages in variety of activities like farming, combat, fishing, mining, foraging and relationships. There are multiple things the game tracks for what it calls Perfection, an achievement of doing mostly everything in the game.

One of these things is a shipping list. There are — at the time of this challenge — 154 unique items in this list.

The goal of this challenge is to ship at least one of each item, filling the collection tab.

Rule #1: On any given day, you can only ship items that have already been shipped on previous days or is the last item on the list that has not yet been shipped. So the first item you can ship is a Powdermelon, then the following day you can ship Broccoli, then Summer Squash and so on.

Rule #2: You are not allowed to sell anything outside this list or through any other means. This means you can’t sell regular fish, artifacts, gems and so on.

Rule #3: No mods.

These three are my rules and if you want to complete the challenge with different rules or don’t agree with mine, you’re welcome to do it however you want.

Preparing and planning

I started preparing for this challenge by copying the list of items in reverse order and making notes about how I figure this would go.

I identified a couple of items I considered “chokepoints”. Items that I cannot just decide to buy and grow and ship.

These are:

#8 Mystic Syrup that requires reaching Foraging Mastery which means you need to first reach level 10 on each of the five skills (Farming, Foraging, Mining, Fishing and Combat) and then gain another 10 000 experience points to reach first level of Mastery and using that to unlock Foraging Mastery.
#11 Radioactive Bar and #12 Radioactive Ore that require either Danger in the Deep or Skull Cavern Invasion Mr. Qi’s Special Order to be active. For that to be active, you need to 1) complete either the Community Center or JojaMart Community Development Projects to unlock Ginger Island and 2) gather 100 golden walnuts to unlock Mr Qi’s room.
Ostrich Egg which is quite an elusive item that requires Ginger Island access and either finding 10 Journal Scraps or a tiny probability of finding one in a rare chest in the Volcano. This has usually been one of the last things I get in a regular full Perfection run.
Void Egg and Void Mayonnaise require either an upgraded Coop and a low-probability Witch event or donating 60 items to the Museum and gaining access to Krobus.
Not quite a chokepoint because it’s easy to achieve but needs to be taken into account: to gain access to Tea Leaves (and then Green Tea), you need 2 hearts friendship with Caroline. It’s not hard but it takes a bit of time so if you want to guarantee you don’t get a gap between days, you should do it early.

On my early notes before starting, I considered #10 Smoked Fish to be the main money maker in this run and I did focus quite a lot on it during the run. We’ll learn later I was wrong.

My planned approach

Since Dried Fruits and Smoked Fish are very early on the list, I made a decision to start on a Riverlands Farm because that comes with a free Fish Smoker and that I would choose the Bat Cave when presented with that because it comes with a free Dehydrator. What I didn’t think at this point was that you unlock the cave once you’ve earned 25 000 money so that didn’t come into play at all because that was very late.

While you cannot sell anything, you can gain income through Help Wanted quests and Special Orders but until you can sell your first crops in the winter of year 1, you’ll be very limited with your money.

Since money is tight and we still need a ton of farming experience to reach Mastery, I focused on crops that regrow: strawberries in Spring, blueberries in Summer and cranberries in Fall. This way, I could maximize the amount of experience points I gain per money spent and all of these are fruit so I can sell them relatively early as Dried Fruit once I reach that point.

Another early money maker is Dried Mushrooms so as soon as I was able to, I crafted a dozen Mushroom Logs to gain consistent supply of mushrooms to dry and sell.

Lastly, I decided for the first time in my life to go with the Joja route. I have owned this game for over 9 years and have played for way over 1000 hours but I have never bought a Joja membership before. This time I did because I figured I need to get to Ginger Island early and getting all the specific items for the Community Center would be very difficult given I had almost no money to spend.

The actual gameplay

I mostly followed my plan, realizing way too late that smoking fish didn’t matter at all.

I can’t remember when was the last time I played this game without mods. It was kinda painful. Not having access to quality of life improvements like the information UI Info Suite 2 displays makes planning way harder when you can’t know what crops are growing, when they’ll be ready or where you are in your skill progression.

One of the first realizations was that reaching Fishing level 10 with just the Bamboo Rod is so much harder and time consuming compared to buying a better rod and using bait like I usually do. Spending money on the fishing rods wasn’t a smart thing since you can’t get money back from fishing until year 2 or so. I got to level 10 fishing around mid-summer, year 1.

As is usual, Foraging was the hardest skill to complete. I crafted Wild Seeds and prioritized getting to Steel Axe to access Secret Woods to get hardwood and experience.

I completed Joja Community Development Projects in Winter 20th, Year 1 and after fixing the boat, I gained access to Ginger Island Winter 22nd, Year 1 which was way faster than I expected. The Special Orders that open in the beginning of Fall net you a ton of money that I wasn’t expecting to be that big.

I eventually gained Mastery on Spring 8, Year 2 and reached the first level of Mastery on the 18th. I gained access to Mr. Qi’s room on Spring 22, Year 2.

I got super duper lucky that my first Qi’s task was the Skull Cavern Invasion that I needed. That was a lucky strike as I that could have been weeks, even months before it showed up. I kept spamming the first floor of Skull Cavern over and over again until I was able to get 6 Radioactive Ore and got even luckier that I got a Rabbit’s foot on the first trip to the Skull Cavern.

I managed to get a Banana Sapling by trading 5 Dragon Tooth to Island Trader on Spring 26, Year 2 and the Rusty Key by donating 60 items to the Museum on Summer 3, Year 2.

Finally, Summer 14th Year 2 I collected my first Mystic Syrup and then kept shipping items one by one until the end of the challenge. At the time I got the Mystic Syrup, I had everything else ready as I spent the time waiting for that tree to grow and the syrup to happen building the required animal buildings. Basically after that day, I slept, shipped the new allowed item and slept some more.

I made 90% of my money from selling Dried Strawberries. As soon as I got the Greenhouse unlocked, I filled it with strawberries and did the same in Ginger Island. When I shipped my first Smoked Fish, I already had all the money I needed to complete the challenge.

Challenge retrospective

I had a lot of fun with this challenge, even though some aspects like reaching Mastery without upgrading other tools than my axe was kinda painful and annoying. But it forced me to play in a very different way than I usually do: I couldn’t go my regular route of buying ~500 blueberry seeds on Summer 1 to finance everything. I think I had money to buy like 20 of them instead and couldn’t even sell them.

I finished the run in 35 hours. I may have done nothing else all weekend and I’m not sure if it was worth it but I had a blast and had no other responsibilities so I’m kinda happy I did.

What surprised me, I only had one gap between shipping. That was the gap from Winter 14, Year 1 after I had shipped Raisins to Summer 14, Year 2 when I managed to ship a Mystic Syrup. Everything else was shipped the day after the previous. So there were only 56 days when I didn’t ship something.

I also expected to need Skull Cavern much more. I expected to need it to gain majority of my experience for mining and combat but I didn’t as the regular mines provided more than enough. I only did one run there.

Au revoir, Eleventy

2026-03-04T00:00:00Z

I learned about the static site generator Eleventy in the spring of 2018 from a colleague of mine. It had just released version 0.3.1 when I built the first Eleventy-based version of this website.

Ever since, it’s been my go-to tool for all my website needs. It would be an understatement to say I’ve enjoyed building sites with it. Its simplicity and the full control it provides have been unchallenged and I haven’t felt the need to even look elsewhere.

I’ve built dozens of websites with it in the past 6 years. I’ve written about it (according to 11ty Bundle’s listing, I’m a top 10 author which is kinda cool), taught others how to build sites with it and talked about it in various meetups.

Now, Eleventy is no more. Yesterday, it was rebranded as Build Awesome with a start of a crowdfunding campaign by Font Awesome.

Eleventy becomes Build Awesome. The engine stays the same. The scope grows.

It’s going to a direction I won’t follow. Almost everything in that campaign is making me feel that the direction is not towards something I care about. It’s corporate, it’s product and it’s about features I don’t care about. While I don’t believe big changes will come to the core static site generator, I’ve seen this kind of change enough times to know when it’s my time to part ways.

1.5 years ago I wrote about how it’s important for me that I have limited amount of external dependencies for building my website:

Eleventy itself is also a 3rd party dependency but since it’s a Javascript library that I download to my computers when I install it, it’s not gonna be able to “just disappear” like a SaaS service like Notion could.

I’m really happy about that: I’ll pin my Eleventy to the current version and store a forever copy on my computer so I can keep using it in the future as well.

In a fast moving technology industry having been able to use the same tool for almost 6 years is amazing. Zach has been an excellent developer and driver for the project and the amazing community has been a key reason for me to get so excited about the tool itself. And in this economy, I can’t blame anyone for wanting to figure out a more sustainable way to finance their work.

Happy 10th birthday Stardew Valley

2026-02-26T00:00:00Z

A pink cake is in order for the celebrations!

Published in February 26th 2016, Stardew Valley has reached a very mature age of 10 years and it’s incredible how much excitement and enjoyment it still brings me. Not quite daily because I need to ratio how much I dare to play. The game is one of the “oops, it’s 4am” games so I mainly these days limit it to longer holidays.

With recorded 1,165.9 hours in Steam (excluding time playing when offline), it’s my most played non-sports, non-TCG video game. I bought the game for my 29th birthday a year after its release.

Stardew Valley is in many sense a wonderful game. Developed by a single developer ConcernedApe, the game has received regular large updates and the 7th update is coming some time in the future. Imagine buying a game for like 5 euros and then receiving a decade worth of well crafted updates that keep improving the game — for free.

It’s not only the developer who keeps improving the game. There’s a very active modding community with a ton of great mods of all sorts: quality of life improvements, visual changes, new characters and stories. Whenever I feel like I’m getting bored with the game, switching to a new story mod or getting an official update brings me back for dozens of hours. Over and over again.

As a teenager, I fell in love with Harvest Moon games. I loved the cozy vibes, farming and relationship building. Stardew Valley is what you could call heavily inspired by Harvest Moon games. It brought that experience to PCs and improved on a ton of different things and captured the hearts of millions of players around the globe.

If you haven’t played Stardew Valley yet, I highly recommend giving it a go. But maybe do it during a weekend — just in case.

Thanks Eric for this wonderful game!

To celebrate the anniversary, Eric published a video looking back at different old builds from game's history. He also revealed two new marriage candidates that he had promised for 1.7 update.

Different notebook sizes for different ideas

2026-02-18T00:00:00Z

My workflow of taking notes, brainstorming, sketching, scribbling has settled to three different notebook/sketchbook sizes for different types of ideas.

Pocket notebook for everyday pondering

My main notebook is a Moleskine Classic Pocket. A couple of years ago I wrote about how I use it and that is still accurate. I always keep it with me either in my winter jacket’s pocket or in my backpack and whenever I sit down at a pub or a restaurant or just need a moment to clear my head, I pull it out and write.

It’s a great tool for flesh out blog post drafts, journal about major milestones in life or clear my head when things get rough. Its small size makes it easy to keep always with me but mainly works for purely text-based note taking due to its smaller size.

It has a pocket at the end which is lovely for keeping index cards for ad-hoc notes, business cards, stickers and other things that can come handy when on the road.

A5 size notebook for ideation

The second notebook I keep with me always is A5 sized notebook. I use it for more functional brainstorming and planning. I rarely write about my thoughts on these notebooks nowadays.

What I do write and draw are plans for events I organise, software I build, courses I plan and so on. A5 is a perfect size for that: it’s small enough to be practical to carry around and fit on a small coffee table but provides enough space to spread ideas around on different layouts and a full spread offers enough space usually to sketch one thing and keep it all on view at once.

Actually, I have multiple of these notebooks: one for personal notes and one for work notes. While working as a developer, I regularly spend a lot of time away from computer with my physical notes as I think through writing so I can figure out what code to write.

A4 sketch book for big ideas

Last fall, I received an A4 sized sketch book as a gift. Before that, I hadn’t really used notebooks of that size as I found them a bit inconvenient but as I appreciated the gift, I wanted to give it a go.

And I’ve been blown away by how increasing the canvas has given space for different types of sketching.

A4 works really well both in portrait and landscape depending on what I’m thinking through. For software stuff, I may draw landscape architecture drawings or design UIs but when I plan a workshop content and material, I turn the page to portrait orientation and have a lot of space to work through my thoughts and ideas.

Relationship between paper and digital

I treat my paper notebooks mostly as “fleeting ideas”. It’s a starting point rather than a long-term, searchable library. That’s what my digital notes — stored in Markdown files (rather than locked down in a 3rd party proprietary format) — are for. I don’t however transform everything from notebooks to digital.

I transfer, or rather transform, the most important ideas to the digital realm. I often then add a reference to where I originally wrote about it so I can find the initial thinking process if I want to understand where it came from. To be able to do that, I have a big box of previous notebooks.

When I finish a notebook, I create a digital note where I jot down the index of that particular notebook. Page numbers and page titles. Nothing else. That way, if I remember I’ve written about something in paper, I can search the index digitally and then go and find the right notebook.

Them weird dreams

2026-02-11T00:00:00Z

I’ve never been excellent at waking up to alarm clock, especially early in the morning. I basically sleep through the alarms, turning them off without waking up — kinda like sleepwalking but more like sleep-turning-off-alarm-clocking. Weirdly, it’s considered as a personal character flaw even though nobody can control themselves while they are sleeping.

Anyway, I have this one really weird subcategory of dreams that happen occasionally when I really need to wake up early and sleeping in has consequences. I happened to have one of those this morning and still remember it so I wanted to share it.

My theory is that these dreams trigger after the first alarm. My brain knows something’s up but it sabotages its own opportunity for success.

This morning, I had a doctor’s visit at 8 so I wanted to wake up at 6. The last dream I remember from the night was that I had to complete 4 tasks (which were coded in a video game style guests) before I could wake up. Obviously, it wasn’t quite that straight-forward. Almost always, the trick is that either one of them is impossible within the dream’s fabricated reality to achieve or they keep switching around so that I’m always one short.

Somehow then, I get stuck in that loop for a long time — or sometimes what feels like a long time — before somehow resolving it. Unfortunately sometimes it means I wake up hours late because I spent so much time stuck in that loop. It’s kind of a groundhog day style dilemma but completely in a dream state so I have very little active agency to solve the problem.

Today, I luckily woke up early enough and made it to my appointment.

IndieWeb Carnival hosting Q&A with Zachary Kai

2026-02-04T00:00:00Z

I hosted my first IndieWeb Carnival in May 2024 on the topic of creative environments and I’m hosting another one in May 2026 with a new topic.

While waiting for May, a fellow carnivalist Zachary Kai (who is hosting this month’s carnival with the topic of Intersecting Interests, you should participate!) reached out to do a bit of a Q&A with me about hosting the carnival. In addition to me, he has also asked a bunch of others.

The original one was posted in Zachary’s site but I wanted to share my answers in my blog as well.

What drew you to this theme?

My theme was creative environments. At the time, I was unemployed and spent more time than usual following my creative ideas — mostly writing — and spent a lot of time doing that outside of my home: in the libraries, pubs, trains and so on.

To me, leaving home and going somewhere with vibrant life and buzz was a major influence in my own creativity. I was wondering how others experienced the effect of their environment to their creative process so I picked that theme.

Manu's People and Blogs was an inspiration as well. Around the same time, I had read a bunch of stories from fellow bloggers on the topic through their interviews for that publication.

Did you consider any other prompts before settling?

No. It was already something I had been thinking about and when I was encouraged to host one myself, I immediately knew where I wanted to go with it. I have been thinking about other prompts ever since though which led me to pick up another hosting spot for this following May where we'll explore love letters.

How did you decide on your prompt's wording?

The main part of my prompt was:

What kind of environments you create in and what works for you or what you’d like to improve. Has things changed lately? If yes, was it intentional or forced and how has it affected your creative energy?

I had an idea for what I wanted to ask: how different environments affect people's creativity and output (or does it even affect at all). I wanted to keep it bit vague and open however because there are so many different people participating in these carnivals and I wanted to give everyone an opportunity to explore it from their perspective.

I added a

Or you can interpret in a different way that I didn’t even consider when choosing the topic. World is your oyster.

prompt to explicitly give people the permission to write about whatever they wanted — it is their blog after all! While I appreciate the narrowed focus these kinds of thing bring, I always enjoy open prompts that allow me to write about whatever fits my blog best so I tried to offer the same to people participating in my festival month.

Did hosting change how you think about the theme?

Not really. I expected this to be a thing that affects people differently and the posts reflected that. Some people didn't see an effect at all and they wrote wherever they happened to be at, some were similar to me that they got their ideas flowing best when they were outside of home and others found their creativity best when in familiar environment at home.

Did the submissions surprise you in any way?

I wouldn't say surprised by I was definitely delighted! I got 26 entries and many of them from blogs that I hadn't followed before. There was a lovely diversity of people doing different things, people from around the globe and a few that led to me staying in touch and continuing discussions about variety of topics in the year and half that followed.

Hosting a carnival is a wonderful opportunity to learn about new things, new perspectives and meet new people. I highly recommend it for everyone!

Taskmaster UK Series 7 is peak entertainment

2026-01-28T00:00:00Z

For years, I’ve been working on an ultimate Taskmaster Tier List. But they keep making more of them all around the world and I haven’t quite gotten to the finish line of writing about all of them yet. I think I’ve seen them all — not just the UK ones but all 13 different countries and a bunch of really well done fan editions as well. Hundreds of hours of peak fun.

If you’re not familiar with the show, Taskmaster is a masterpiece TV comedy game show that originated from the UK and has spread around the globe in various qualities. In the show, 5 comedians, actors or generally public figures complete tasks set to them by the Taskmaster and get judged by their performance.

I shouldn’t find Taskmaster so fun

Before I talk about why I love series 7 so freaking much, I need to talk about why I’m baffled by this format. On paper, it’s antithetical to what I find interesting. I’m a stickler to the rules and I hate any type of games or competitions that participants don’t take seriously or where the rules and scoring is not transparent and consistent.

Taskmaster is none of that. It’s completely arbitrary in scoring and pretty much every task has some kind of a carefully designed loophole solution and part of the fun of the show is trying to figure out how you would have completed them and seeing if any of the contestants find those loopholes.

Despite all of this being something I generally find uninteresting, this show has kept me audibly laughing for over a decade — even on multiple rewatches.

Alex Horne, the Taskmaster’s assistant and the mastermind behind the tasks for UK (and some other shows) is simply amazing. Greg Davies, the UK Taskmaster is so funny and has great chemistry with most of the guests throughout its already 20 seasons and many specials.

Series 7 of the UK show is the best

While I’ve been rewatching different series and writing my tier list, I keep bouncing between a couple of different series to nominate the best. New Zealand has 6 stellar seasons and gun to my head, I’m not sure I can decide whether I enjoy their second season or UK’s 7th the most.

Today, I’m calling UK Series 7 the best because I just rewatched it for the umpteenth time and want to talk about it.

The cast of the 7th series is

All five of them are funny as heck and as is so important in this show, their chemistry with each other is brilliant. It’s only rivaled by the wonderful five of the aforementioned NZ season 2’s cast.

James, Jessica, Kerry and Phil are the wild young kids and Rhod is the weird uncle and Greg is the disappointed dad. It’s even more funny because Rhod and Greg are real-life friends which comes up all the time as Rhod is sparing no shots as he heckles Greg throughout the series.

Each of the 10 episodes is pure fire. There are not a lot of comedy TV shows that I actually laugh at out loud when watching but with this series, I’m constantly laughing.

Episode 7 is also home to the best individual moment in all hundreds of episodes across all Taskmaster shows. It’s so monumental that the stage where final task of each episode takes place is called The Knappett these days and why I always come back to this series when I need a good feel moment. I won’t spoil it for you.

The outcome of a Taskmaster series is a result of multiple factors: the cast and their chemistry, the tasks, the team compositions (they have team tasks throughout the series and split teams to two and three people) and of course, how the contestants perform (+ the amazing editing that goes into the show). Sometimes even a strong group in paper can fall flat and sometimes another group surprises.

This one gets all of it so right. There’s a ton of interaction between the participants in the studio sections which really ties it together. You can see that they truly enjoyed being there together.

If you’re new to the show or haven’t seen the 7th yet, find it and take a look!

I made a board game zine

2026-01-21T00:00:00Z

Say hello to Roll the Zine, a board and card game focused 8-page zine.

I really like the idea of zines and for a few years, I’ve been reading other people’s zines and spent time reading zine forums, dreaming of making one myself. I’ve always felt zines are beyond my skills as I can’t draw or illustrate or write poems or anything like that.

After a couple of sleepless nights sick in my bed to start off 2026, I decided it’s time to make one to get something going. I have some ideas for zines that have been living rent free in my head but decided to start practicing the art of making them with something with smaller stakes.

Hence, Roll the Zine. It’s an 8-page zine with words about games I enjoy. In the first issue, I wrote about Wingspan, Print and Play games, Dandân, Tinderblox and Hive. I wanted to challenge myself and my need to write comprehensive and structured things. Some of the text is slightly tilted, paragraphs don’t align perfectly and some pages have less text and bigger pictures. I was definitely way outside my comfort zone with some of the layout decisions.

I’m so used to publishing in the web (this blog and my digital garden) where I can link to other things that I found it difficult to adjust to a print medium. I’m publishing the zine as a PDF as well but I wanted it to be first and foremost a printed paper zine and to operate within that constraint.

Here’s an example page about Wingspan:

I’m quite happy about how it turned out.

With this zine, the process was definitely the most important bit: I learned a lot about technical stuff (like how to lay out pages so they print correctly) and about the constraints of page space (as in the web there’s always a lot of space and ability to link to more stuff).

If you’re into board games or zines, give it a look! I’d love to hear your opinions about it.

Gaming for busy people

2026-01-14T00:00:00Z

I enjoy playing games, both video games and board games a lot. One of my many joys in life is to spend an entire day either diving deep into a long story of a video game or get together with friends to move tokens around boards on a table while having a great time.

As an adult in modern life, these full gaming days are few and far between so my gaming has shifted a lot lately to play more games that can be enjoyed in shorter sessions while still enjoying them equal amounts.

A big shift for me started with Nintendo Switch and later continued with Steam Deck as both of them are mobile and crucially, they both provided a sleep mode where you could suspend the device mid-game without having to save and exit. That combination meant I can pick up a device, immediately jump into the game, play a 10 minute session during a break and then put it back to sleep and continue my day.

For both devices, I have a dock in my living room connected to my projector and full AV setup but I also have secondary docks at my desk connected to my display and in the case of Steam Deck, my keyboard and mouse.

Once I started getting into this mindset, I ended up buying and playing more games that didn't require me to remember where I was the last time I left off. Heavier story-based or base-building games also take a while to immerse myself into the world so they are not great for short sessions.

Natural genre for this kind of gaming is roguelikes and roguelites. You start each run from scratch and in many games the individual runs are short, anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. Other great genre that is perfect for short sessions is sports games where individual games usually last less than half an hour.

Short-session game recommendations

I recently returned to Lonely Mountains to do mountain biking and downhill skiing. Each run is only a couple of minutes long so it's really easy to adjust based on how much time you have to play. In Lonely Mountains: Downhill, you're descending mountain trails with your bike, finding new routes, enjoying nature and trying to beat your previous personal bests. In the sequel Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders you switch the bike to skiis and enjoy the snowy mountains.

Slay the Spire is a deckbuilding roguelike where your goal is to use your cards to beat monsters in three, increasingly difficult act and gather new cards and relics to improve your deck. A single, completed run lasts around an hour but most of the runs don't finish successfully so in reality a single run is way less than that.

Into the Breach is a turn-based strategy game where you are controlling mechs in an 8 by 8 grid, trying to defend the world from alien attacks. You control three to five war machines and alternate taking turns with the opponent. Each run has five different areas, each split to smaller sections for individual fights with individual goals. After each area, you get to improve your mechs based on how well you performed.

The 2025 hit game Blue Prince operates on day cycle where the mansion resets each night. Every time you walk through an unopened door, you get to draft a new room from a small selection of randomly selected rooms and your goal is to figure out the mysteries the mansion hides.

PokéRogue is a fan-game set in the Pokémon universe that focuses solely on battling. Each run, you select a starting party and go through a battle after battle against wild Pokémon and fellow trainers. You catch new Pokémon, level up and evolve your party members and purchase items from the shop to keep your party going.

Shogun Showdown is a turn-based, puzzle-esque roguelike fighting game. You are a samurai equipped with a few starting weapons and you battle opponents in small, tight 2D-space moving left and right and queueing attacks you unleash to your opponents. It's a really neat game: the mechanics are simple but have enough depth to be interesting. Compared to many other games on the list, there's less variation between individual runs, especially in the early sections but it's still a fun game that I haven't ran out of replay value yet.

I added BookLore to my homelab

2026-01-07T00:00:00Z

Happy 2026!

Update: In March 2026, there was drama around BookLore and eventually the developer either deleted or privated the repository and all accompanied materials. There's now a fork called Grimmory that is aiming to continue on the footsteps. I haven't looked into it yet so can't vouch for it yet but if you wonder why the links below take you nowhere, check out Grimmory instead.

First of my holiday projects was to set up BookLore to my homelab to manage my e-books. It’s a pretty nice full system that allows you to manage your collection but also provides an interface to read the books and an OPDS server that can be used for example with KOReader to sync your reading progress across different systems.

I don’t yet use KOReader on any of my devices and I don’t intend to read my books in browser so at this point, it’s mainly to gather all my e-books from various sources like my NAS, iPad, Kindle and laptops to a single location.

For example, I recently purchased Martha Wells’ Murderbot series from Humble Bundle and I’m planning to read through them next year, maybe taking a head start already during the holidays. BookLore allows me to easily check what book’s coming next, keep track of my notes and reviews and so on, even if I still manually download the books to my devices for reading.

I’m willing to be that some time next year, having access to this system will motivate me to maybe get a Kobo reader to make it easier to read from my own collection.

The best part of BookLore is that it’s running in my bedroom so I own my data and it’s open source so I can add things to it if I find a need for something it doesn’t provide out of the box.

Year in Review 2025

2025-12-31T00:00:00Z

Introduction

In Big Fat Quiz of The Year 2016, Mel Giedroyc described her year as:

It was absolutely cracking. Marvellous. Every month rolled by better than the last. May, May was really good. May was a cracker. August, even better than May. September, it was so brilliant.

I want to have even 10% of her positivity.

It’s time for another end-of-year reflection post. I started writing these in 2016 after a friend of mine had started doing the same and they’ve become not only a nice habit to wrap up a year but also a nice time capsule for me. Years go by and over time they meld together and it’s hard to remember what life has brought to me.

So here’s my review of 2025, a year that finally brought some positive hope into life after a few ones I’d rather wish had gone differently.

Sprinkled in are some pictures from throughout the year from important moments.

What I hoped for 2025 last year?

Rather than set up new year’s resolutions, I like to set a few hopes or goals for the year — some of them I complete and others not so much.

I want to become a better writer. I haven’t quite figured out the metrics for that yet though. It’s hard to know if my output improves in quality. Over a lunch with a friend, we brainstormed this a bit and one outcome we came up with was to write more long-form stuff this year. Something akin to a book - but probably not an actual book.

My writing goal for this year was not one to be easily measured. The previous year, I set my goal to publishing 100 posts and reached that but I didn’t feel it would be meaningful to raise it from there as that wouldn’t really benefit me.

Instead, I wanted to become better at writing, whatever that would mean.

Recently, over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed more and more that I actual enjoy my own writing and feel proud of my pieces. And I don’t seem to be the only one.

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on my writing too. During the year, my readership has more than doubled: the monthly views have gone from around 150k to 300k and visitors from roughly 20k to 45k per month. What I love more than those numbers going up is meeting people in events and even in the pub every now and then who come talk to me and telling me they enjoy my writing.

And sure, the main goal of 2025 is to find a job. But I hate setting up goals where the outcomes are not in my hands. I can do things to increase the odds but eventually, getting hired is in someone else’s hands and if those hands are not kind, I cannot reach the goal. I don’t have particularly high hopes about 2025 either since the market hasn’t shown much improvement towards the end of this year.

I managed to find a job — or more accurately, a job found me — this year. I was reached out by a recruiter, we talked for a bit, I went through a couple of rounds of interviews and in the end of April, I joined Reaktor as a full-stack developer. I got to join an office with a lot of fantastic people that I knew from before and have been having a great time so far.

In a society where having a job is how people’s worth is measured, it sure is nice to have one.

If I think about the communities I run, they are pretty much in good shape and I’ll keep running them for years to come but they are also reaching the limits of what makes sense in terms of growth or doing more. They need to be at a capacity where they can be run whilst doing everything else in life so I can’t go overboard with them just because I now have more time. I also don’t want them to end up in a situation where nobody else would continue after me because the amount of free labour is too much.

We had really a good year with both Turku ❤️ Frontend (with which we celebrated 10 year anniversary in December) and archipylago.

I also want to have more good discussions with people. To experiment with that, I’ve crafted and designed a year-long project. I want to keep the details still secret but if I succeed in sticking to it, I’ll write about it in-depth towards the end of 2025.

I started the year with a project I called “One email every day” where I wanted to start more discussions with wonderful people. I emailed replies to blog posts, said thanks to people who maintain movements, communities or software that I enjoy. Even though that project didn’t last very long, the spirit of it stayed with me the whole year. I started a ton of great discussions via blogs, emails, social media and in person and I’m so glad I did. I also added a box at the end of each blog posts that reads:

If something above resonated with you, let's start a discussion about it! Email me at juhamattisantala at gmail dot com and share your thoughts. In 2025, I want to have more deeper discussions with people from around the world and I'd love if you'd be part of that.

That got me quite a few good emails as well which started nice discussions.

All in all, I’m really glad with all the four goals for the year.

General thoughts of 2025

Looking back, 2025 was a better year than many of the few previous ones but still at the back of my head, I feel I’m nowhere near where I’d like to be in life. I feel like I’m still not in a driver’s seat of my own life but rather trying to hang on.

Doing this reflection exercise helps notice all the good stuff.

Writing

I published something every week — a streak I’ve managed to keep going since July 2023. Like last year, all but one Wednesday got a blog post.

This year, I started two new main writing projects to accompany my blog: From Juhis with Love newsletter that, once a month, gathers together what I’ve been up to and has links to wonderful, joyful things I’ve come across in the Internet that month and Garden of Learning, my digital garden where I publish my notes.

In this blog, I published 107 blog posts. I wrote and published 12 newsletter issues and published one guest post. I published a bit over 350 notes in the digital garden, 12 of them being my Advent of Code solution explanations.

In August, I took part in Blaugust and despite not having a plan to write that much, ended up with 31 posts in 31 days once again and had a blast. Made a bunch of new writing friends this year again.

Some of my favourite blog posts from the year:

Human curation over algorithmic recommendations (Jan 2025)
Be careful with introducing AI into your notes (Jan 2025)
Explaining it helps you learn it (Feb 2025)
Redesign and rewrite of playtest printer (Mar 2025)
“Shrink designing” board games (Mar 2025)
How I write and publish blog posts in April 2025 (Apr 2025)
Notifications about (almost) anything with ntfy.sh (May 2025)
As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook (May 2025)
IndieWeb principles and I (Jul 2025)
Build the forum you want to see in the web (Aug 2025)
Static sites enable a good time travel experience (Aug 2025)
My favourite bird Pokémon TCG card arts (Sep 2025)
PyCon Finland 2025 recap (Oct 2025)
Improve your programming skills with Advent of Code (Nov 2025)
I built a tiny RSS generator for my Advent of Code solutions (Dec 2025)

I also had writing projects that got scrapped or postponed: in the spring I had plans to write a small book but then I got a job and that got sidetracked. I started writing a technical guide that is still on my holiday backlog, maybe I’ll get to start the new year with it. About 50 blog post drafts didn’t see the light of day but they live in my notes and might resurface.

I’ve learned to let go of old projects that never became anything. I used to stress about them and see them as failures but now I’m just happy I have a lot of ideas and that the best ones come through and the rest can be let go.

Communities, events and speaking

This year was a great one for communities I was involved with. With Turku ❤️ Frontend we organised 8 meetups and one official afterwork and with archipylago we ran 5 meetups and 3 sprints. I stepped down from admin position at Koodiklinikka but remained active and ran some community projects like our annual NHL Bracket Challenge where I finished 3rd. In May, we organised another Future Frontend conference which was a blast.

I got on stage 18 times this year to talk about debugging, Django, documentation, blogging, prototyping, building developer portfolios and building communities. And I hosted a pub quiz in our company winter party which was fun.

Due to early year unemployment and then starting a new job, I didn’t have the opportunity to visit any conferences abroad but my highlight of the year was speaking in PyCon Finland in Jyväskylä.

Seth Larson launched Fedi Donut Friday initiative and I ate donuts and pastries every other Friday and invited others in Mastodon to join me to celebrate their weekly wins. I made a couple of new online friends through that.

I played more Pokémon TCG in person this year, participating in leagues and retro nights but also ran a Progression Series for our group playing through all sets of Scarlet & Violet block. In 4.5 months, we opened 16 sets, built 15 decks each and battled against each other after each set.

Projects

Garden of Learning

As I mentioned in writing section, in January I started publishing my notes in Garden of Learning, my digital garden. It took a bit of time to figure out some of the technical bits but I managed to end up with a flow that works really nice.

I’ve really enjoyed having a place for writing that is not quite blog-like. Notes like 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, Scarlet & Violet Progression Series and 2025 Christmas Movie tracking are good examples of notes that I’ve updated over time.

There has been a lot of moments when I’ve considered building my own tool for building websites from Obsidian. So far, I’ve managed to get by with Quartz but there are a few things I would wish to customise and maybe clean up some of the output code.

It’s one of those projects where it feels like a “quick weekend project” in my head but I’ve been around the neighbourhood enough to know that they never are such. Let’s file that into the “one day” part of the backlog.

Progression Series website

In September, our local Pokémon TCG play group started a Progression Series and to keep track of matchups and scores, I built a website for us. Using Eleventy’s custom data file format, I managed to build a nice scores website that I was able to update directly via GitHub. Once people reported their match scores, I could open the repository on GitHub’s mobile app, add a line to the data file and the site would recalculate scores and update it.

At one point, I started adding deck images (for the future, I need to figure out a better way to provide them in accessible way by asking players to submit decklists and not just images) for each set.

Advent of Code

My usual December joy is to solve Advent of Code puzzles and write explanations of my Python solutions to help people learn programming. This year had 24 puzzles in 12 days and the new shorter calendar was a great thing. I was able to get all the stars for the first time and didn’t have to make difficult decisions about how to spend the few last days leading into Christmas.

I wrote a retrospective of the month and the wonderful new people who I discovered through their solutions.

Playtest printer

One of my beloved hobbies is playing TCGs and prototyping board games and I redesigned my playtest card printer to finally give it some polish and new features.

It’s one of those small apps I enjoy to use and occasionally work on. Over the years, I used it to also print a lot of card sized info cards. I printed a double-sided reminder card for chess board starting assembly and the Cow opening and a couple of rule-reminder / custom player aid cards for other games I own but don’t want to carry manuals with me.

I play chess rarely enough to remember whether A1 is black or white and in which order the Queen and King are placed at the start.

Pokémon Toolkit

Over the year, multiple things led me to start building a self-hosted Pokémon TCG toolkit: a collection of tools that enable me to do all sorts of things. It’s running in my bedroom for local access only because I don’t want Pokémon Company’s lawyers knocking on my door.

PokemonTCG.io API started having problems early on and I had to figure out a backup plan so I started building a custom API to power up my hobby projects. It’s still missing some key features like a really good search but it’s good enough that I was able to start building the other bits.

I used to have my collection inventory in pkmn.gg but they started to have more and more features behind a paywall and their focused seemed to move to a direction I don’t want to follow. The final trigger for building my own was when I realised they didn’t have a way for me to export my data. I knew I needed to start building my own sooner than later, otherwise it would be a massive undertaking to rebuild the collection later. With that, I’m in a stage that has all the features I needed from the site but has some added features like a trade feature and changelog.

As we started playing the Progression Series, I realised the amount of cards grew really fast and I needed a better way to manage my card pool than having an evergrowing list of cards. I built a script that takes an export from the virtual booster opening simulator and stored the cards in a database. I then built a UI that shows the cards I have, sorted by card type (Pokémon, Items, Stadiums, Supporters and so on) and displayed by evolution lines.

Finally, I started building a tool to manage future Progression Series. It’s still a work in progress but it allows league admins to create a series, select which sets are part of it, invite players by email and track scores and card pools.

In the future, once everything else moves forward a bit, I’ll integrate my earlier deck builder project into the toolkit.

Building this has been some of the most fun I’ve had writing software in ages. I’ve built it with Django and htmx which has turned out to be an excellent tech stack for a project like this.

Homelab

I have two Raspberry Pis and a NAS running in my bedroom that I’ve configured with a few self-hosted homelab projects: Home Assistant to run my smart home, paperless-ngx to keep my digital documents in order, Jellyfin for my personal media collection, a VS Code Server for editing my projects on the Raspberry Pi and the aforementioned Pokémon Toolkit.

I also have a couple of RSS proxies running there. Either to take an existing RSS and modify it before it reaches my reader or to run custom RSS builders for sites that don’t provide RSS themselves.

I also have some scripts there that I can trigger from my iPad with a Shortcut: for example, I can choose an action from the iOS’s Share menu to send the current page URL to my homelab and depending on where that link points to, the bash script does different things.

It’s a growing collection as I discover new services. One of those is BookLore, an ebook manager that I had been looking at for a while. I installed it and added most of my collection over the Christmas holidays.

Games, books, podcasts and so on

Games

I wrote a separate review post about some of my favourite games I played this year.

Books, podcast and other media

Most of my recommendations are scifi or solarpunk adventures. I finally read Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot duology and it was brilliant. I loved both books: I read the one in English and the other translated to Finnish as it was translated by my favourite translator and both were excellent.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti was another excellent scifi story.

This Is How You Lose the Time War had a lot of good in it but it was bit too abstract and dragged along a tid bit too much to find a permanent spot in my bookshelf but it had its moments.

Katja Kontturi’s Ankkalinna - Portti kahden maailman välillä is a Finnish book about Don Rosa’s comics. It’s a casual reader’s version of Kontturi’s PhD thesis and I got to meet the author in October and got my book signed as well. As a comic book geek, it was really nice to peek into the more analytical side of how Rosa crafted his stories.

My #1 podcast of the year was once again Tom Scott’s Lateralcast because it’s just that good. Some new, interesting ones were Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio which is a fictional sportscast of baseball games spoken in slow soft tones, perfect for falling asleep. Breaker Whiskey is a lovely daily microfiction audio drama / podcast that I enjoyed in the fall. Individual episodes are only a couple of minutes long and they follow a story of a woman in a post-apocalyptic USA.

To my Finnish speaking nerd audience, find Lohikäärmeradio wherever you find your podcasts. It’s a monthly podcast about fantasy and scifi books.

Towards the end of the year, I discovered PagedOut! magazine. It’s a experimental one page == one topic technical magazine and I’ve enjoyed reading through the archives and have started drafting an article to submit there as well.

What’s up with 2026?

Over the past years, I’ve enjoyed setting up goals for myself, just to give some structure. This year, I don’t feel like having any. I don’t believe that goals are really needed for good things to happen. Especially in personal life: I’ll work on things that I enjoy and believe will lead to good things, goals or no goals.

But there’s one major thing I want to do next year.

I want to decide it’s gonna be a good year.

Ever since the pandemic started, I’ve been struggling with how life has turned out. The pandemic and what followed kind of destroyed my career, took a huge toll on my mental and physical health and social life.

I’m tired of waiting.

Maybe it’s not up to some external factors to change but rather my look on life.

It’s time to take action and decide it’s good and focus on the positive aspects of life and make the most out of them.

From Juhis with Love #012 - For a happy new year

2025-12-31T00:00:00Z

In December issue of From Juhis with Love, I share updates of my projects and lovely bits from the internet.

Read #012 - For a happy new year.

We played a full Scarlet & Violet Progression Series

2025-12-27T00:00:00Z

I’m a big fan of Pokémon TCG Progression Series (or Evolution Series as some call them). In such series, players open booster boxes of consecutive sets and after each box, build a deck with cards they’ve pulled so far and play games.

Azul GG Garcia and Chip Richey are currently in the middle of their Scarlet and Violet series in Youtube, some years back GamingLair started from the very Base Set and what got me originally excited in the format was Omnipoke’s Sun and Moon series that unfortunately never finished.

I’ve always wanted to play one but with physical cards, it’s so freaking expensive especially these days to purchase a booster box for each set that it never seemed doable. Last summer, I started putting together an idea where we’d open virtual packs using PokemonCard.io’s Pack Opening Simulator and Pokémon TCG Live. Scarlet and Violet block had just finished and it was relatively cheap to craft missing cards in Live so for the first time it felt doable.

I sent a message to our local game group’s Discord and in total, five people were interested in starting such series and in September, we opened the first packs starting with Scarlet and Violet base set.

This week, just before Christmas, we finished our 15th round and thus completed the series. It was so much fun!

Everyone seemed to enjoy the series enough that we’ll be playing a different block early next year. My hopes are with HeartGold & SoulSilver block but let’s see what we decide as a group. If you’re interested in seeing how that goes, keep an eye on the Pokémon tag page on my notes as I’m going to keep track of it there.

Deckbuilding challenge

I consider deckbuilding to be the biggest weakness of mine when it comes to TCG. There’s so many options and building a balanced, focused and consistent deck is hard. That’s why I welcomed this challenge with open arms as I wanted to get better at building decks.

Did I? Probably not.

I had a great start to the series, finishing with strong 3-1, 3-1 and 2-2 records in the first three sets. I’m used to playing jank rogue decks rather than meta decks so I think I had a bit of an advantage over the others in the early phases.

Once others started pulling better cards, especially ones with energy acceleration, I fell to the bottom tables. 1-3, 1-2, 0-3, 1-2 in four consecutive sets. Cards like Baxcalibur, Gardevoir ex and Electric Generator started to dominate the field and I had not pulled anything with proper energy acceleration to keep up with these new decks.

Midway our series, I managed to get a set of Electric Generators from compensation packs (after each set, you’d get to open extra packs from previous set based on your ranking) and got my hands on Iron Hands ex and got a 3-0 sweep.

I had another clean sweep victory in Stellar Crown with a Terapagos ex/Pidgeot ex deck that was really strong thanks to Crispin. After a nice streak of positive records, I made the biggest blunder in Journey Together set where I tried to put together a Raging Bolt ex deck despite only having one Professor Sada’s Vitality. My deck played one draw supporter and bricked completely in all three matches.

In Destined Rivals, my Ethan’s Ho-oh ex/Crustle deck was massively dominant picking up easy 3-0. I got so excited about the deck that I made a commemorative Tag Team GX card out of it

In the final combined set of Black Bolt and White Flare, my Cinccino deck fell short after 3 excellent and most fun matches in the entire series.

I had a lot of fun playing a wide variety of decks and always trying to come up with something new, especially after sets when I had won 3-0. I decided early on that I’d retire decks that do too well because otherwise the format can have a tendency of staying with just a couple of decks and new sets having little to no impact.

I finished with a positive 25-24 record and 2nd place which was a big surprise for me, especially given how good the other players in our group are.

If you’re into Pokémon TCG and have accumulated some recent cards in Live, I recommend finding some friends to play this format. It’s super fun!

Software

I kept notes of my own progress with remarks on pulls, decks and matchups in Scarlet & Violet Progression Series and built a website to keep track of series scores, decks and matchups. A lot of these ideas evolved throughout the series as we learned what was fun.

Originally, my idea for keeping track of what we’ve pulled was to print the page to PDF (and I believe that’s what most others kept doing throughout the series) but I quickly came to the conclusion that it was gonna get out of hand real fast.

So first I built export-pack-sim, a bookmarklet that extracts the card pool information for each set into plaintext and then started building my own selfhosted homelab solution for being able to add the cards to database and view them on a website. This turned out to be a great solution because it helped me brew new decks and think about my growing collection of cards even when I wasn’t logged in to Live.

It’s still in its infancy as software as I just had to get something up and running while we were playing. It’s tightly connected to my own toolkit software that has its own card API, personal collection info and bunch of other helpful Pokémon TCG tools. I’ll try to see if I can find a way to open source them eventually but due to the fear of Pokémon Company lawyers, I’ll likely never be able to publish it as a web app.

One of its strengths is that it shows Pokémon by their evolution lines regardless of which set they came from. And it separates trainer cards by their subtype (Item/Tool/Supporter/Stadium), making it easier to find what you’re looking for.

I did start building a management tool for a Progression Series however. In it, you can invite players, select which sets to include in a series and how many boosters to open per set. Players could then open the boosters, have cards automatically added to their pool and in the best case scenario, even build the decks directly in the app. The goal with the deck builder portion especially is that it could use your pulled cards pool as the source from where to search and pick cards so you wouldn’t accidentally add cards you don’t have.

And then submit and confirm match scores so everything could be done within the app. Some parts of it I have working but it’s not quite ready yet for our next series. Maybe for the one after that.

Merry Christmas!

2025-12-24T00:00:00Z

It’s Christmas Eve today and that’s when we in Finland celebrate Christmas. If you’re reading this when it comes out, I’m likely sitting at the Christmas table, feasting on wonderful food that our family has set up and enjoying watching my siblings’ children enjoy the wonders of Christmas season.

Thus, I reserve this week in the blog to wish you all merry Christmas and happy holidays.

2025 has been a year full of wonderful people and encounters. If our paths crossed this year, whether in personal life, through communities, at work or online, I’m thankful for that and I’m happy you’ve been part of my life this year ❤️.

While the last few years since the pandemic haven’t been exactly smooth sailing, I’ve been blessed to have so many great people in my life through all that and in the grand scheme of things, that’s really what I’ll remember from these times and what really matters.

I will take a deeper dive into my year next Wednesday with my annual Year in Review post but for now, it’s time to enjoy good food and company and rest and relax.

I played some games this year

2025-12-20T00:00:00Z

It’s been another year of gaming and I wanted to highlight some of my favourites from this year. Games I played this year, not necessarily games published this year. These are not in any kind of order really.

I’m sharing these in the spirit of more human curation over algorithmic recommendations.

NHL 21

The list may start with a bit of a surprise. I’ve been playing hockey games ever since I learned how to hold a controller or smash a keyboard. Since the early 1990s. It all started with the Face Off!, then with EA’s NHLPA Hockey '93 and NHL ‘94 on Super Nintendo, then NHL 97 on PC that I played for years. At the same time, I played Olympic Hockey ‘98 on Nintendo 64 and my mind was blown when NHL 2003 on Xbox came out.

Around 2006, I switched to 2K series for a while until in 2010, I got the demo of NHL 2010 and the skill stick experience changed the way of playing virtual hockey forever.

People always talk about these sports games as just annual roster updates and that’s why I’ve usually been updating around 3 years as there usually is enough small incremental changes that accumulate in a few years so that the new ones feel fresh and usually better.

I’ve been sticking with NHL 21 for over 5 years already and I’m still enjoying it.

“Enjoying it” might be an understatement. Every year since its release, it’s been my most played game on Playstation by quite a distance. In 2023, I played 134 hours of it. In 2024, I played 124 hours. This year? 168 hours.

I’ve been thinking about maybe updating next year to get some of the newer teams and rosters but I’m in year 12 or something of a very nice GM run and it would be a shame to stop that now.

If I were made to choose only one game I could play from here on, I’d pick this one. I’ll never get bored of it.

Stardew Valley

ConcernedApe’s masterpiece Stardew Valley isn’t a new game either. I purchased it for my birthday in 2017, a year after its launch and have racked way over 1000 hours in Steam — and that’s only counting the hours I’ve played when online so the real number is even higher.

In the world of microtransactions, shutting down servers, DLCs and all the other crap, Stardew Valley is what I wish more games would aspire to be. It’s been almost 10 years since the launch and it still receives updates. Not just bug fixes and stuff but actual story content. The team is working on the seventh update, 1.7., that’s been rumored to maybe arrive for the 10 year anniversary.

It’s not just the official updates either. The modding community is wonderful and there are so many great, very deep content mods that brings new fresh life to the game just when you thought you’re getting bored of it.

If you’re not familiar with it, Stardew Valley is a cozy farming game with elements of relationships with villagers, mining, fishing, combat and making a shit ton of money by selling wine in a town with 20 or so adults. Who’s buying and drinking all this wine? Millions worth of it, every month.

Blue Prince

I have a love-hate relationship with puzzle games. I mean, I love them and if it was up to me, I could spend hours every day solving puzzles. But I’m also very bad at them and they mess up my sleep with horrible nightmares really easily so I need to ration my intake.

This year, I gave Blue Prince two opportunities.

Blue Prince is a mansion drafting puzzle rogue-lite. Every day, you wake up in the courtyard of a mansion and try to make your way through it to solve its mysteries. Whenever you open a door to a new room, you get to draft a new room from a selection of (usually) 3 different rooms. There are a lot of mysteries and I have barely scratched the surface so I don’t know what they are yet.

I first got it in the spring when it came out and internet was raving about it. Most likely after watching this Game Maker’s Toolkit video on the game. I played it and after a ton of attempts, I finally got through to one of the mysteries of the game — around day 70 or so. Only to find out, it was not a permanent upgrade but something that had to be solved EVERY TIME. That broke me and I abandoned the game.

In November, I got back to it and equipped with better understanding of the game, started a new fresh run and made quite a lot of progress in just a fraction of the days spent. I still haven’t gotten back to the point where I was in the spring but I have a bit more permanent upgrades and goodies unlocked so I’ve been enjoying it a bit more this time.

Cyberpunk 2077

Thanks to this summer’s Mac release, I finally got to experience Cyberpunk 2077 properly. I had borrowed it from the library for PS4 before but at the first fight scene, it turned into a slideshow and I couldn’t ever get through that forced moment.

I’ve been wanting to play this game for so long and it’s been great. I’m a big fan of cyberpunk genre and I feel the game has captured many aspects of it brilliantly. I love roaming the city, interacting with the characters and hacking away.

At the same time, I feel like it’s not gonna be a game that I’ll return over and over again in the future. It’s more of a one-off (or two, or three off) experience and that’s fine too.

Marvel’s Spider-Man

I might be a bit late to the party with this one but I finally played Marvel’s Spider-Man that’s been highly praised especially for its web-slinging movement mechanics. And yes, they are fun. But also, there’s a lot of it — too much to my taste. The first few hours it’s so much fun. After 12 hours, it gets boring because all the missions are spread out in a way that you need to cross half of New York to get to the location.

Despite that criticism, the game is great. Definitely worth all the praise it’s gotten. The story is your run of the mill Spider-Man story but it does its job well. Occasionally, you get to play as MJ and while usually these types of gimmicks are poorly done in games, I actually enjoyed these as well. While Spider-Man flies around the city and kicks and punches his way through the bad guys, MJ takes a more stealthy approach as a good journalist does.

Hoop Land

I don’t play a lot of games on mobile but there are a couple of games I’ve been enjoying on my iPad that I want to share. After years of enjoying Retro Bowl, the game became bit too repetitive and I was looking for something new. I ran into Hoop Land, a basketball game with surprising depth.

Retro Bowl’s simple controls and mechanics made it a perfect game to play on a tiny breaks but Hoop Land essentially requires a controller so it has filled a different type of void. But when you sit down to play, oh boy is it fun. It has a bit of a learning curve and in the beginning, I got smacked in the head every game but eventually started to get the ball into the basket.

For those moments when all I have with me is the iPad and a controller, it’s real good entertainment where I can put hours into.

Tatami

Tatami is a lovely puzzle game by Kaylee Calderolla. The mechanics are simple: you need to group tiles on a grid into rectangles based on the rules imposed by each level. The levels get more difficult as time goes on.

As it’s a puzzle game that I need to ration to maintain a healthy-ish sleep cycle, I’m limiting myself to maximum couple of levels a day and early in the morning. I’m currently at level 231 and the puzzles are starting to get real difficult here.

The first 200 levels are free but it’s a single purchase game that’s built with such care for the users that I recommend purchasing it right away.

Pokémon TCG

Moving (partly) away from the digital realm, my number one game this year was Pokémon TCG. I played a ton both in-person as well as digitally. One of the highlights of the year was running a Scarlet & Violet Progression Series that we started in September and finished just before Christmas.

I played in a bunch of Leagues and Prereleases, even won a tiny GLC tournament and continued growing my collection of Eeveelutions whenever I could pick up new cards I’m still missing.

I also spent a good chunk of timing building my own tools to manage my card collection (moved away from a service that provided no export and started to paywall and enshittify aggressively), built my own card API (when one I had used for years started to have issues), built a bunch of tooling to manage the progression series (a public website, a card pool viewer and I’m mid-way building a platform where one could manage a complete progression series with opening packs, building decks and recording scores. None of that will likely ever be publicly available because I don’t want their lawyers on my ass but I’m self-hosting for myself and the growing toolkit has been wonderful so far.

Magic the Gathering

I have been following Magic the Gathering for years but never really got into it to play. Mainly because my money already goes to Pokémon TCG and can’t afford two TCG hobbies simultaneously.

Then last year, they published Bloomburrow and I was sold. This year, I actually started playing. Not a ton but more and more as the year progressed. I built my own Battle Box for easy pick-and-play at the pub, I built a Dandân, Forgetful Fish deck for similar type of game play.

And when a friend asked if I’d like to join their group of casual Commander, I purchased my first Commander pre-con deck Family Matters and we started playing regularly.

Parks

I didn’t get to play as much Parks as I would have wanted this year but it has slowly climbed up the ranks of my favourite board games. It has such nice aesthetics, great gameplay and it’s the type of game that provides depth but is still kind to beginners and as such, can be a great gateway ~~drug~~ game to get new people into the hobby.

In Parks, you and your friends are hiking at national parks, gathering resources, taking photos and experiencing the great wild nature.

NHL 94/25 romhack

While NHL 21 has been my main way of enjoying virtual hockey, Adam Catalyst’s NHL25 romhack for NHL ‘94 has been a delight. NHL ‘94 is one of the most iconic hockey games ever and one I played a lot as a kid. So whenever there’s a way to return to that iconic experience with something new and fresh, I’m all for it.

This romhack brings modern teams and rosters, alongside with gameplay tweaks and graphics refinements. It’s a perfect nostalgia trip while still getting to enjoy all the benefits of the most recent roster updates.

It’s funny that if I want to play with Seattle Kraken or Utah Mammoth, I need to abandon my modern PS4 experience and play the game from over 30 years ago.

PokeRogue

PokéRogue, a fan-made rogue-lite Pokémon game continues to entertain me. I have an offline-version on my Steam Deck that I haven’t updated since I created it (I should check if my documented workflow still works).

PokéRogue is a game where you have 10 points to use to pick your starting party: the better the Pokémon, more expensive it is to add. Then you fight randomly generated opponents, catch wild monsters to add them to your party and as new starting Pokémon and try to get through the game.

It’s a lot of fun!

Factorio

Factorio is one of those games that I had to put on a shelf in April when I got a job. I couldn’t afford booting it up, blinking my eyes and noticing it’s 5 in the morning. I’m kind of looking forward to the Christmas holidays and dedicating a few days to just getting lost in the world of Factorio.

Every time we talk about video games with friends, Factorio comes up. It has a devious lack of cycles, if that makes any sense. There’s never a “now is a good moment to stop playing” moment. You just keep on going and going and going, solving the next optimisation puzzle. Until you notice you haven’t eaten or slept in ages.

I always play it on a safe mode, ie. turn off the aggressive creatures. The game is complicated enough to try to solve without the constant worry of someone wrecking my base.

In Factorio, you’re stranded on a strange planet and need to make the best out of the bad situation. You start by collecting some copper and iron ore and coal by hand and little by little build a massive automated factory with the aim to conquer space.

I’d love to recommend the game to everyone. If you care about your sleep though, maybe give it a pass 😅.

Advent of Code 2025 retrospective

2025-12-17T00:00:00Z

It feels weird to write an Advent of Code retrospective a week before Christmas. For years, it’s either been one of the last or first posts of the year. This year, the creator of Advent of Code, Eric, decided to limit the amount of puzzles to 12 days instead of the previous 25 and I really liked that.

This year, for the first time I reached the end credits. I got all 24 stars in 12 days.

I had a wonderful time as usual. I solved all puzzles with Python, using nothing but standard library for everything except day 10, part 2. My favourite part is writing about my solutions, explaining my thinking process and teaching how wonderful language Python is.

Over the past weekend and change, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’d like my explanations to be helpful in learning puzzle solving, iteratively building solutions step-by-step, debugging and Python.

Sometimes I feel though that my refactoring and cleaning up process polishes the solutions too much and I reach too eagerly to what is available in Python’s standard library, especially itertools and collections modules. They are very good things to learn about if you want to write good Python code but many of them are “if you know to reach for them” level of things rather than something you might organically figure out.

Hence, I’m not anymore sure who the audience for them is. Maybe next year I’ll really focus on writing beginner-level step-by-step guides rather than just beautiful Pythonic solutions. I especially felt this when I organised an in-person jam on the 11th and went through one of the puzzles with a student.

I did make new friends and reconnected with old ones through the writing and it was a highlight of the year for me.

This year, I learned a lot from the following people who shared their solutions in a lovely variety of programming and human languages:

Mina (Perl)
Paul (Go)
Dr. Neil (Haskell)
Adrien (Python, in French)
Antti (SQL, in Finnish)
Dan (Python)
Christopher (Python)
Marcos (Python)
Abhinav (Janet)
Stephen (Java)
Kirsty (Python)
Erlend (Lean 4)

Big thanks to Eric for once again building these puzzles for us to solve and to Koodiklinikka, TurkuDev, Asteriski and Reaktor communities for solving these with me and discussing the solutions.

I’m a tool builder at heart

2025-12-13T00:00:00Z

Two things in the past week made me think about tools and how I enjoy building them — often more than doing the things those tools enable us to do.

A follow up on my latest IndieWeb post

Earlier this week, I published my submission to IndieWeb Carnival and as part of discussion that sparked in Fediverse, Khleedril commented:

I would argue that we don't need to talk about tools at all. They are a concrete implementation detail completely hidden by abstraction.

This was a great comment as it touched on something I discussed in the original post: to me, IndieWeb as a community is primarily a community of tool builders. At least that’s who I want to find there and that’s what I want to geek out about with them.

Somebody needs to build the tools we use. The only way we can ignore them as implementation details is to let others — often corporates whose incentives don’t align with ours — to decide what tools we have and how we can use them.

That’s a core value in IndieWeb community for me. It’s difficult to take ownership of data and content and the control of them if we don’t build tools that allow that.

Often when I talk about the non-corporate, non-commercial web, I prefer to talk about personal or small web instead of indie web (or IndieWeb) for this particular reason. I’m a strong believer in that side of things too. To me, those are communities or approaches that cover much wider group of people: users, creators (as in, artists, writers, etc) and builders (as in, technology).

I’m especially excited about building those small indie tools: things that would never be commercially viable but that can solve problems of individuals or small groups. Hobbit software, if you will, or home-cooked, situated software.

A wild tool idea appeared

A few days later the question popped into my head again.

I was rewatching Chrism360’s and Shenanagans’ old Pokemon Randomizer blind bingo race from 2018. In it, the players compete in achieving certain goals while playing randomized Pokémon Red. The catch is, they don’t know what those goals are and there’s a third person keeping track of the bingo card.

As I was watching it, I realised many of the goals can be quite challenging to keep in mind and make sure the person keeping score catches them all.

Immediately, my mind went into a “what kind of software could be built to help make it easier” rabbit hole. I started thinking about how those goals could have data attached that define Pokémon, moves or items that satisfy the criteria.

Then, the scorekeeper could just keep a log of actions and events (like catching a new Pokémon, learning new moves, etc) and the system would take care of all the difficult parts: matching the actions and events with the goals and would update the score as things happen.

I’m much more interested in building those kinds of tools than I am of participating in such races as a player.

I’ve always been like this

I became a community organiser because I realised at one point that I’m almost always more interested in the organising and being behind the scenes making stuff happen than I am with doing the thing itself.

Organising shares so many same traits as tool building. Both are about creating structure into chaos and making it easier for people to enjoy the thing they enjoy. Being able to tame that chaos into something easier to understand and deal with is what makes me tick in life.

On the first day of my current job, I introduced myself to sales people as someone who likes to build tools for professionals.

Where are we going, IndieWeb?

2025-12-10T00:00:00Z

My dear internet friend and intellectual sparring partner V.H. Belvadi is hosting things month’s IndieWeb Carnival and is asking us: where do you see the IndieWeb in 2030:

Welcome to the last IndieWeb Carnival of 2025. Having been a part of this wonderful community for years now and having thought about the IndieWeb from various perspectives, I have plenty of ideas about where I hope we are headed in the near future. And I am sure you do too. So tell us, where do you see the IndieWeb in 2030, just five short years from now?

My relationship with the IndieWeb community has been rocky and ever-evolving and it was pretty much this IndieWeb Carnival thing that finally brought me into the community and got more excited about it. Even then, I think “indie web” as an alternative to building your online presence outside from commercial platforms is more important than “IndieWeb”, the specific community.

One of the related key questions that I’ve been pondering a ton lately is what does the categorisation of “IndieWeb” mean so let’s start there.

Category through belonging or focus

Whenever we build a community (or one forms accidentally by likeminded people gathering together), there are some sort of borders around the community. There are people who are part of it and people who are not. This definition then often influences what actions are taken, who is accepted into the community and where the community wants to go.

A lot of the discussion related to IndieWeb happens around this definition too.

I see two ways of defining a community’s boundaries: 1) who gets to be part of it and 2) what the community’s focus is on. In public discussions, these two ways unfortunately mush together.

Belonging: who gets to be part of IndieWeb

I want IndieWeb to be a community that’s welcoming everyone who wants to be part of it — regardless of their current situation. It’s really difficult to draw the line between “Indie” and “non-Indie” for example in case of a personal website.

For example, where would you draw the line in this spectrum of options with blogs as an example:

Writing a blog in LinkedIn or Medium
Writing a blog in hosted WordPress, Pika, Bear or other
Writing a blog in self-hosted WordPress
Writing a blog in hosted service but with your own domain
Writing a blog with static site generator and hosting it on Netlify
Writing a blog with static site generator and self-hosting it on a VPS
Building your own blog engine and self-hosting it on a VPS

IndieWeb wiki defines itself as

We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.

I like those principles (and have written my thoughts on all 12 principles) but even then, they are more aspirational than gatekeeping. You don’t have to own your own domain to get started with the community, you don’t need to implement Webmentions or microformats or many of the other technical wonders us IndieWeb folks rave about.

I want IndieWeb to be and to remain an open community where people can decide to be part of, regardless of how their website is built or hosted. I want the community to be inspiring and aspirational with its ideas and technical possibilities rather than limiting or gatekeeping.

Focus: what is the community about

Focus and belonging can sometimes be at odds with each other on a face value. The tighter the focus on a single topic is, less open it would have to be to new people.

I often hear opinions that “IndieWeb is too technical” and that it’s keeping non-developer folks out.

I think that’s okay.

First of all, IndieWeb is not the one and only option to corporate web.

I’ve been thinking a lot whether we can have the “Indie” part without the “you need to make it yourself” part. At what point, does it turn from indie to commercial when we build tools and services that reduces or removes the technical portion.

I don’t mean this as a gatekeepy “you need to be this technical to get in” or “only real developers can be part of indie web”. Not at all.

I see two main technical challenges one needs to overcome to build and host their own website: they need to build the site and they need to deploy it somewhere. It’s really difficult to reduce these to a minimum without turning the entire thing into a commercial-ish service — and we have a lot of those ones already.

If you just want a website and not worry about the technical bits, you could buy WordPress hosting from someone who sets WP up and start writing.

I don’t consider that any less indie in the terms of beloging (as I discussed in previous section) but there seems to be a big desire to have some options that would be “more indie” without being any more technical.

I like the technical parts of IndieWeb

I’m a technical person and I love building my own tools and tinkering with stuff on Saturday evenings. For me, IndieWeb is a community that encourages that and helps me find other people who care about the same things.

It’s more of a mindset than a skill check.

I hope to invite new people into the community who want to learn how to build websites, to learn programming through building the websites and tools to run them and have an interest towards learning new things in general — and to share what they have learned.

The best outcome is when the people involved in the community build better tools for everyone to use to make it easier to build and run their own sites.

5 years from now?

I don’t know what we’ll be specifically in five years as Belvadi is asking. My “membership” of it is so loose that I don’t have strong opinions on anything practical.

I hope that the community stays open and welcoming.

I hope it continues to encourage and inspire people to learn how to build the tools they need.

I hope it doesn’t take itself too seriously as the only or best option to commercial web.

And I hope I’m still as excited (if not more) about building websites in five years.

Thanks V.H. for hosting this month’s Carnival!

About writing and audience

2025-12-03T00:00:00Z

Would you still write if you had a single reader? And do you appreciate the readers you do have?

Richard Griffiths asked these questions in his post Why niche blogs and Small Rooms still win - even in the age of technofeudalism. I read the post when it came out as it appeared in my RSS feed and was reminded about it again when Daniel Miller responded to it in Why Write Online?

I love having discussions about the audience we write for. Because I think we worry too much about it.

To answer Richard’s original question: 100%. For most of the time I’ve had a blog, I’ve written to a basically non-existent audience. These days, my readership is way bigger than I can comprehend. I even have a second blog out there that I haven’t shared with anyone yet but I still enjoy using it as a creative outlet.

The readers of this blog are people who like to read my stuff. Plain and simple. I don’t have a prescribed audience that I analyse and write what I think they want to read. I write what I have to share and people who like those things, join to read.

Writing about professional topics

Earlier in my blogging journey, I did worry about it a bit. I knew that if I had written for a specific niche, I would have had a higher chance of attracting a larger audience, faster. A couple of articles that helped me realise it was a silly worry are Rach Smith’s To be whole is the goal and Nat Eliason’s Be Yourself, Not a Niche. More recently, I’ve been introduced to Roy Tang’s You Can Write About Anything that discusses similar topics.

I have recently been talking about blogging to developer audiences in a bunch of events and I often get questions about my thoughts on the audience. One of my key messages is that you don’t necessarily need an audience for your blog posts to be powerful. If you document what you’ve learned and share what you know, you’ll have access to those posts when you need them.

You can share a link to such post when someone asks for help or when you apply to a job. Building such body of work can be very powerful in building credibility and trust as an expert, if you blog about your professional interests. I have expanded these thoughts in Why developers should blog? with links and quotes to other’s thoughts.

Writing for yourself first

In Notes are a tool for …, I wrote about different ways writing notes help me in daily life. Similarly, writing itself is a powerful tool to process and communicate ideas.

Even if nobody reads your posts, your writing improves your skills as a writer.

You don’t have to dream about becoming an author to benefit from writing skills. In this day and age, communication is one of the key skills in many industries. Not only will you spend a larger share of your work day communicating when the higher up you are on the career ladder but becoming a great communicator can help you ascend the ladder faster, if that’s something you’d like to do.

As a software developer, most of my technical posts are written for myself. I document what I learn so that I can find it later — sharing it with the world is a nice bonus benefit. If one person reads a post of mine and gets inspired by it or learns something new from it, it’s a massive upside. It makes me genuinely happy.

I built a tiny RSS generator for my Advent of Code solutions

2025-12-02T00:00:00Z

RSS/Atom feeds are one of the great technologies in the open web. They allow me to follow other people and them to follow me.

This week, I started solving Advent of Code problems and this time I’m publishing my explanations as part of my Digital Garden and that doesn’t support separated RSS feeds for a subset of notes.

Two IndieWeb principles that I love are Make what you need and Use what you make. In that spirit, I built a tiny tool today afterwork to enable people to follow my Advent of Code explanations via RSS.

A bit of background: my personal website at https://hamatti.org is built with Eleventy (and a bunch of custom scripts) and my digital garden at https://notes.hamatti.org is powered by notes in Obsidian and Quartz that turns them to a website.

To build this tiny RSS generator, I combined a Node.js script with Eleventy’s Global Data Files and templating.

const fs = require("fs");

function addEntry(entryUrl) {
  // Read existing JSON in
  const data = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync("_data/aoc2025.json", "utf-8"));

  // Extract Advent of Code puzzle day from URL
  // URL looks like this:
  // https://notes.hamatti.org/technology/advent-of-code/2025/day-1
  // so capture the number from `day-1` part.
  const day = entryUrl.match(/day-(\d+)/)[1];

  const today = new Date();

  // Add new feed entry
  data.entries.push({
    url: entryUrl,
    title: `Advent of Code 2025, day ${day}, explanation and solution.`,
    created: today,
  });

  // Update metadata
  data.updated = today;

  // Write new data to JSON file
  fs.writeFileSync("_data/aoc2025.json", JSON.stringify(data));
}

if (process.argv.length < 3) {
  console.log("Usage: npm run aocfeed [url-to-note]");
  process.exit(1);
}

addEntry(process.argv[2]);

It’s a tiny script that reads existing JSON, adds a new entry and writes it back.

Unfortunately I don’t yet have an easy way to add the full content since it’s not tied to my digital garden publishing pipeline but that can be an exercise for a day when I have more time.

The data it writes looks like this, at _data/aoc2025.json :

{
  "entries": [
    {
      "url": "https://notes.hamatti.org/technology/advent-of-code/2025/day-1",
      "title": "Advent of Code 2025, day 1, explanation and solution.",
      "created": "2025-12-02T15:17:43.981Z"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://notes.hamatti.org/technology/advent-of-code/2025/day-2",
      "title": "Advent of Code 2025, day 2, explanation and solution.",
      "created": "2025-12-02T15:17:58.315Z"
    }
  ],
  "updated": "2025-12-02T15:17:58.315Z"
}

and I have a feed template like this

---
permalink: feed/aoc2025.xml
excludeFromSitemap: true
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title>Advent of Code 2025 - Solutions and explanations by Juhis</title>
  <link href="https://hamatti.org/feed/aoc2025.xml" rel="self" />
  <link href="https://notes.hamatti.org/technology/advent-of-code/2025/advent-of-code-2025-landing-page" />
  <updated>{{aoc2025.updated}}</updated>
  <id>https://hamatti.org/feed/aoc2025.xml</id>
  <author>
    <name>{{ metadata.author.name }}</name>
    <email>{{ metadata.author.email }}</email>
  </author>
  {%- for entry in aoc2025.entries | reverse | limit(30) %}
  <entry>
    <title>{{entry.title}}</title>
    <link href="{{ entry.url }}" />
    <updated>{{ entry.created }}</updated>
    <id>{{entry.url}}</id>
    <content type="html">
      {{entry.title}}
    </content>
  </entry>
  {%- endfor %}
</feed>

Which reads data from the aoc2025.json file and populates a feed whenever I call Eleventy to create a new build.

Once I’ve published a new note, I run

node _scripts/updateAdventOfCodeFeed.js [url-to-note]

and push changes to my website.

Once that deploy is done, users can follow my Advent of Code via https://hamatti.org/feed/aoc2025.xml.

From Juhis with Love #011 - November of learning

2025-11-30T00:00:00Z

In November issue of From Juhis with Love, I share updates of my projects and lovely bits from the internet.

Read #011 - November of learning.