Blaugust 2024: Batteries included

Last year, I learned about Blaugust at the end of July, mere days before the month-long blogging festival started. Blaugust is a blogging event - hosted by Belghast - where the goal is to publish a blog post on each day of August. We have a lovely community of bloggers who all have their own blogs with unique styles and approaches. On my first attempt, I managed to write 31 blog posts, achieving the Diamond Rainbow Award for “beating the original challenge and posting 31 times or more during the month of August 2023”. You can find my last year’s posts here.

Introduction to this blog

For this year, Belghast asked us to introduce ourselves and our blogs in the first post of the month:

Something this year that I am really wanting to focus on is the community aspect of Blaugust even over the number of posts that are being made. That is the piece of Blaugust that lasts long after the final day of August has finished and all of the posts have been tabulated. We have created this community of bloggers and it gives us an interesting group of folks that we can rely on.

In order to support this effort this year I am creating the “First Post of Blaugust” initiative. The idea is that for your very first Blaugust post you take a bit of time and introduce yourself and your blog. Granted this can feel a bit odd if you are one of us who have been doing the same thing for a few decades, but realize that not everyone knows who the heck you are.

Hi! I’m Juhis, a community builder, technical writer, tabletop gaming & Pokemon enthusiast and a Saturday evening hobby software developer (and occasionally a professional software developer too).

I’m writing from the Nordic wonderland of Finland and outside Blaugust I blog normally a couple of times a week about software development and community building as well as about indie/personal web, my personal life and pretty much anything under the sky. Take a look at my blog index to get a taste of what I normally post.

In addition to posting to this blog, I’m active in Mastodon where you can find me at https://hamatti.org/@hamatti.

This year’s plan

This year, I’ve had a bit more time to plan for this month and I decided to embark on a journey to explore Python’s standard library. I’m calling the series “Batteries included” as that’s been the motto of Python:

The Python source distribution has long maintained the philosophy of “batteries included” – having a rich and versatile standard library which is immediately available, without making the user download separate packages. This gives the Python language a head start in many projects.

I’m a huge fan of Python’s standard library and this month I want to share with you blog posts about exactly that. I’ll reserve a few days for other posts: today’s introduction, last day’s recap, one day for IndieWeb Carnival and a few days for other posts if something time-sensitive emerges during the month. So there will be somewhere between 25 and 28 posts about standard library this month.

Let’s go!

Welcome along the journey! We start tomorrow with Python’s regular expressions library re.

If you want to make sure you don’t miss any of the posts, there’s an RSS feed available.