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

If you don’t know what to do, pick up a chair

2026-06-24T00:00:00Z

Jon Banafato shared his older blog post Stacking Chairs in Mastodon the other day.

“Stacking chairs”, taken literally, is what it sounds like. You know those stackable plastic and metal chairs that they have in your local library’s community room or similar space? Grab one, add it to the top of the stack.

It’s a great concept. Throughout my community career, I’ve used it a lot. I’ve told people that my superpower is carrying chairs. One of the alumni groups for a community I used to hang out in is called Tuolinkantajat (lit. chair carriers) for this same reason.

Jon does an excellent job of saying everything I wanted to say on the topic so I’ll mostly refer you to his post.

I want to highlight another piece from that post:

It’s not particularly glamorous. There are plenty of exciting community volunteer roles that carry prestige with them, but this isn’t something that would end up on someone’s résumé.

In many communities, there are positions that can be glamorous for personal glory. They can often attract people who care not for the community but for using the community as a lever to gain personal advantage.

Carrying or stacking chairs is the opposite of that. It’s the type of contribution that is serving the community first and foremost.

I used to work as a community manager for a local entrepreneurship community. We had this co-working space from which were moving to a new place. I scheduled a Community Day for people involved in the community to come together to carry stuff.

I get there in the morning a bit before the scheduled starting time. All of the tables and chairs had been carried next to the doors, ready to be hauled into a van for moving. They carried the chairs both literally and metaphorically for the community. That was a big moment I knew I was involved with the right people.

In PyCon CZ 2023 in Prague, after the talks were over, we had a board game night. As soon as the last lightning talk finished, people started stacking the chairs away from the main area to make space for tables for gaming. It was an amazing community experience to witness.

The title is paraphrasing Ben Grimm from MCU’s Fantastic Four where he says “My father used to say: if you don’t know what to do, pick a shovel.” Chairs are our shovels.

Unexpected weekend with Pedro Pascal as a father figure

2026-06-21T00:00:00Z

Unlike with last month’s Saoirse Ronan Appreciation Week, this weekend’s Pedro Pascal as a father figure marathon was wholly accidental.

I ended up watching the newest Fantastic Four movie, The Last of Us’s first season and The Mandalorian and Groku.

Only when I was watching him as Mandalorian, I realised the common thread with all of these is him being a father figure: to his son Franklin, to his daughter Sarah, to Ellie and to his protégé Groku.

Here’s my spoiler free mini reviews for all three!

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

As a kid, I was obsessed with the Fantastic Four. Some of the more recent retellings have been better than the others. As a kid, I often related mostly with Ben Grimm as I was always a bit of an outcast kid.

This introduction of them to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the better ones. I'm not excited about the casting (other than Pedro Pascal who is fantastic, no pun intended) but over the course of the movie they all started to grow on me.

The 1960s aesthetics is fantastic albeit it could have been a bit more prominent as it's also easy to forget it's set in the 60s during certain parts of the movie.

One thing I particularly loved is how they didn't spend the entire movie going through their origin story because we've seen that a million times. Straight into action, I like that.

The Last of Us: Season 1

The Last of Us and The Last of Us: Part 2 are some of my all-time favourite video games, as you can read from the linked notes (spoilers there!). I saw the first episode of the tv series when it came out in 2023 but only now borrowed the first season DVD box from library to watch it.

It’s not exactly my genre of tv: I don’t particularly enjoy zombie horror but since I’ve played through the games multiple times, I figured I know pretty much what’s coming and wouldn’t lose my sleep like I would with other horror-y stuff.

The Last of Us is a very well made series but I have a few issues with it. First, the casting — while full of great actors — is different enough from the games that for a fan, it was hard to really immerse into their performances. Don’t get me wrong: Pedro Pascal does a great job as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie but when you’ve seen them look and act differently in the game, it’s hard to silence in my mind.

Second, most of the time I kept thinking “why wouldn’t I just play the games instead”. I chose not to because I just finished a replay in March but otherwise I probably would have. I think the story is so much better told through the game. The intensity of the situation and the relationships feel so much stronger when you’re an active participant rather than just a viewer.

The Mandalorian and Grogu

Before heading to the theaters to see this movie, I had seen a lot of negative reviews and press. I'm glad I didn't trust their judgement.

Mandalorian and Groku is a good scifi action adventure movie. Sure, it's no Empire Strikes Back or Rogue One when compared to other Star Wars movies but it holds on its own as a nice side story next to the main line movies.

It took me a couple of seasons to start liking the Mandalorian TV series that is leading into this movie but slowly over time I started to enjoy it. You don't need to have seen any of that to enjoy this movie. It answers a few questions about the main characters Mandalorian and Grogu that might arise from this movie alone but nothing is fundamentally missed if you just go watch this.

It's a relatively light bounty hunter story with stunning set design. Whether we talk about the planets, the cities or the interior of buildings, I was at awe most of the time. Nal Hutta is a lively swamp planet with lots of nature and wild life while Shakari's dark cityscape and nightlife offer an experience of tight interior spaces and streets.

This is the way.

Writing about it - approach to writer’s block

2026-06-20T00:00:00Z

You know that feeling when you feel like you’re gonna sneeze but then it never comes out? I sometimes feel like that with blog posts. I think I have a post coming out of me so I sit down to start writing. But nothing coherent comes out.

I recently joined a new writer group and we had a small discussion about this.

What I wrote there, verbatim:

When I run into a situation where I have a vague idea but writing it doesn't quite happen right away, I usually take my notebook and go to a pub to write about it (rather than write it) and that often helps move forward.

This happens to me more often than I’d wish. It’s unfortunate because when I sit down to write, I always hope it’ll be a smooth, flow-like state where my fingers dance on the keyboard, instructing letters to join the choreography on the screen, ending in something profound and beautiful.

When it happens, some kind of security mechanism inside me goes into effect. Alarms start to blare internally: “this thing is stuck, let’s not ever succeed in it”. No matter how many times I return to the one-sentence draft, it doesn’t seem to budge and move forward. The dreaded writer’s block.

I’ve learned one trick to make it flow again: rather than trying to write the blog post, I take my notebook, head over to the pub and write about it. I give up trying to advance the blog post itself but rather, I take a step back and write anything else about the topic. Like a detective solving a crime, I dissect the idea and interrogate it for clues.

My notebook is full of these notes where I just do a brain dump, move sub-ideas around and try to find better approaches than my failed one.

It really helps me find new structures, new ways to phrase it, new storytelling mechanics to make it interesting.

I really like how Rachael Cayley writes about writer's block:

When we diagnose ourselves as having writer’s block, we can start to believe that we aren’t currently able to write. If you find yourself with a sore leg, it may well be that avoiding walking is a sound strategy. If you find yourself unable to write, might it be a sound strategy to avoid writing? The answer to that question is almost always no. Not writing has little-to-no curative power, in my experience.

The writer’s block is a real problem but to get through it, you sometimes need to fool your brain into thinking you’re doing something else than actually writing something that advances your blocked work.

Chris Ramsey, Taskmaster and No way!?

2026-06-17T00:00:00Z

Alex Hsu is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival with a theme of No way!?:

Has anything ever happened in your life that felt like a movie plot twist? Something that made you go “No way!?” but turned out to be completely true?

When ever I hear anyone say “no way!?” with any kind of enthusiasm, my mind is filled with Chris Ramsey doing the task “Display the shoe Alex is thinking of” in Taskmaster UK’s season 13, episode 2.

The contestants had to display the shoe Alex was thinking of (a reddish open-toed left shoe), but could only ask yes or no questions. If they thought the shoe was not the correct one, the contestant had to throw it out the window. They had to say a phrase after each question.

Chris’ phrase was “No way!?” and he was so good at saying it.

Check for yourself — a clip compilation in Youtube.

Future Frontend 2026 Recap

2026-06-13T00:00:00Z

Mid-June we organised our 4th annual Future Frontend conference in Dipoli, Espoo, Finland. As the conference series was a continuation of our previous React Finland conference, this was my 5th as an organiser and before that, I had been to a couple as participant or representative of a sponsor. As always, it was a lot of fun.

I don’t know what happened to my recap from last year’s conference. It doesn’t seem to exist: not in public nor in drafts anywhere. But I have written one for 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021.

Welcome to my personal recap of the event. While I was part of the organising team, everything from here on are just my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the conference organisation.

The conference

This year’s conference, like last year’s, was organised in Dipoli at the Aalto University campus in Espoo, Finland. The building is a masterpiece of architecture and design from the 1960s and ranks very high on the most beautiful conference venues of which I’ve visited.

The building is beautiful both from the inside and the outside and the beauty is amplified by the surrounding nature of the campus. It’s especially beautiful during the summer.

Our conference visitors got the perfect Finnish summer experience: the first day was a perfect sunny not-too-hot early Finnish summer day and the second was a realistic pouring rain Finnish summer day.

The conference was structured as a single track, two day conference where the first day had a focus on design and the second on development. I’m of course a bit biased as it’s our conference but I really like the variety of topics we have.

We kicked off the event already on Sunday evening with a speaker dinner that was hosted at our sponsor Nitor’s office. I’ve been to many speaker dinners and they are one of my favourite parts of the events because you get to meet other speakers in a casual and cozy setting.

Many of the speaker dinners have taken place in restaurants where you often end up mostly talking to people who you end up sitting next to. Both last year and this year we organised it in an office with food catering and I really like it. There’s still food and good chat while eating but then there’s more space to roam around and end up in discussions with everyone present throughout the night.

As I tooted on the second morning of the conference,

The hardest part of organizing a conference is waking up at 6.30.

I’m definitely not a morning person. Absolutely not. It’s so hard to wake up so early, even if I went to sleep early enough on the night before.

This is in direct conflict with my desire to work the registration desk — where I usually need to be the first one at the venue each morning. I love the registration desk. I’ve been organising events since 2003 and I’ve always gravitated towards spending most of my time there.

Selfishly, it’s a great place because you get to meet most of the people who come to the conference. Everyone goes through the registration desk and everyone who lands on your spot, you get to have a chat with, learn their name and have a bit of small talk. I’m an introverted guy and having this “forced” interaction with people helps me continue the discussions throughout the event.

From the event’s perspective, it’s even more important. For most people, the registration is the first non-email contact with the event. How you handle that can have a big impact on people’s experience of the event. Website and email communication is important but it has a different psychological effect and it’s easy to build up an impression in your head from purely transactional correspondence and it’s valuable to chance that impression into a real human interaction as soon as they join the event.

We have a lot of people who return to the event year after year or who I know from other events and the tech community locally, I love being able to recognise someone as they walk in the door, have their badge ready before they pull out their phone to find their ticket and to be able to personally greet them.

A good experience at the registration also lowers the threshold to ask questions or advice later during the event because there’s already at least one organiser you “know” and had a good chat with when you arrived.

I like to chat with people about whether they’ve been to the conference before, what they are looking forward to in the day, if it’s their first time in the country and if they had a good night sleep — or a great party — last night.

If you like to see photos from the event, check the official album and Joakim’s album.

Talk recommendations

Every year, I pick a couple of my favourite talks from the conference. These are my personal opinions and I intentionally pick only a few even when I’d really like to pick all of them because it wouldn’t be curation otherwise.

All the sketches done of the talks are by Timo Leppänen and they were done live during the talks and the audience could follow the illustration progress during the talk from a screen.

You can find full livestream recordings of the conference from Youtube. Day 1 and day 2.

This is not the tech I signed up for! – An approach to permacomputing by Darío Gutiérrez Mori

Video (at 4:40:48)

Darío’s talk on permacomputing was one of the talks I really looked forward based on the abstract and it did not disappoint.

His talk on permacomputing lays down some of the issues of our current lifestyle of attempting to achieve hyperproductivity and living in a world of overconsumption and offers permacomputing as an alternative approach to a more balanced approach. The permacomputing wiki describes the approach as

There are huge environmental and societal issues in today's computing, and permacomputing specifically wants to challenge them in the same way as permaculture has challenged industrial agriculture. With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism.

Accessibility Adventures - The Lost Secrets of Forced Colors Mode by Daniel Yuschick

Video (at 6:47:10)

Daniel’s talks always amaze me. I’ve seen him talk in various events throughout the years and he’s one of the trusted speakers I’m always happy to invite to events I’m organising because he always delivers well crafted talks with high production quality and great practical technical learnings that are easy and enjoyable to follow.

His newest one on forced colors mode followed that pattern. I knew about the topic before hand but managed to learn quite a few new things and got some new todo items to my website projects as well as I tested them my sites out after the event to discover issues.

The Cake Is a Lie... And So Is Your Login's Accessibility by Ramona Schwering

Video (at 7:21:37)

Ramona’s talk on the accessibility issues often encountered in login forms was wonderful. As a massive Portal fan, her pop culture references to the game were a delight and the practical examples of going through a React component for login form and testing them with a screenreader was so well done.

Modern UI Patterns by Una Kravets

Video (at 14:46)

I love Una’s talks. They are always so well designed and crafted with love.

Her talk focuses on five key UX principles:

Respect user preferences
Maximize content, reduce noise
Implement natural interactions
Provide guided navigation
Adapt to the form factor

She goes through all of these through practical examples and demos, showing both the UX principles and the use cases that exemplify those principles and how to implement them with some new CSS features.

The hallway track

Even when the stage talks happen in a single track format, there’s always the hallway track — all the discussions and activities that happen outside the main program. It’s the part that I enjoy the most and remember most fondly years after.

It’s unique to every participant as the people you meet and discussions you have at the event vary person to person.

The world of LLMs and coding agents was unsurprisingly a common topic this year, both in stage program and in the discussions that followed. I have strong anti-LLM opinions and while others have a more positive outlook on them, we ended up having really good and grounded discussions of the merits and harm they do.

Thanks to Dario’s talk (see above) on permacomputing, I ended up having a couple of really good discussions around that topic. I’ve been following LOW←TECH MAGAZINE for a while now and there’s a lot of interesting ideas there and it was wonderful to be able to discuss those ideas with others who share similar interests in this conference.

And we talked a lot about my favourite topics: thinking and learning. One of the biggest things I’m flabbergasted by the LLM hype is how willingly people outsource thinking and learning to Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT or any other bot like them. For me, that’s the best part. Working through a problem by thinking, experimenting and learning so that the next time I’m better prepared not only for solving the same problem but more difficult problems.

As an organiser, there’s unfortunately bit less time, opportunity and energy for hallway tracks as a speaker or participant. Often practical things interrupt good discussions and after the event day I’m exhausted and escape to the merciful salvation of hotel bed.

To everyone I met during the event, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for the discussions we had ❤️. I enjoyed each and every one of them and I hope my duties as an organiser and having to jump elsewhere in the middle of a good chat didn’t bother too much.

And thanks to everyone who made this event possible! The speakers, the sponsors, our lovely organising team and volunteers and everyone who joined the event as a participant.

Other people's recaps

Notes from the last Future Frontend (2026) by Varya Stepanova

A sign of a good tool is that you don’t notice it - one year with wallabag

2026-06-10T00:00:00Z

A year ago in June, 2025, when Mozilla shut down Pocket, I took a look at the alternatives and ended up choosing wallabag. I’ve been using it daily ever since.

I recently received an email that my yearly subscription is coming to an end and if I’m still enjoying it, I should resubscribe. First of all, how awesome it is that they are not relying on people forgetting to cancel their subscriptions as a way to make money (as so many subscription services these days unfortunately do). Second, I realised how little I’ve been thinking about wallabag since last summer.

How I use wallabag

I was asked in Mastodon how I use wallabag daily so here are my main use cases:

First use case is to capture good articles I want to make notes about when I'm reading them on mobile or tablet — or when I’m too tired after a long day to think but I’m relaxing by reading. That way, wallabag offers me a good place to find all of them when I sit down on my laptop to make notes. Usually I clear up my queue of those once or twice a week.

Second is to capture interesting things I run into when I'm going down the rabbit hole on something else but don't have time to read them right away or reading them would be a distraction. I don’t have to leave them open in tabs to hopefully remember to go back to later. When they are stored in my wallabag list, I’m guaranteed to go through them during the sessions where I go through my list and process everything.

These two use cases are more of a bookmark service than read-it-later service with the added benefit of them being also often directly readable through wallabag’s interface if needed.

Third use case is to store articles for offline reading. I travel quite a lot and often I'm without an internet either while in trains in the countryside or if I take a ferry to mainland Europe which is often ~30+ hour trip without Internet.

When I'm without internet, I love to have a lot of interesting bits to read and wallabag is fantastic for that.

I keep my list clean: short-lived articles (use cases 1 and 2) I remove as soon as I've read and made notes about them and the long-term (case 3) ones I usually clear after a trip unless there are some bangers that I keep for a longer time and re-read on future trips.

Other than a small handful of exceptions, wallabag is a temporary location for stuff. My notes are the long-term storage for anything worth keeping because that’s where I can find them when I think and there I can link them with other articles on the topic and my notes are always at hand, stored locally in Markdown files so if a server has a hiccup or a service shuts down, I don’t lose them.

Not noticing the tool you use is a good thing

We’re (hopefully) at the peak of attention economy where everything and everyone is pushing themselves to your face constantly in an attempt to steal some of your attention for their financial gain. I hate it.

Wallabag doesn’t do that. The tool itself is very unnoticeable in a good way. I have a browser extension on desktop and mobile so I can save things with a single click. I access the saved articles from a web UI.

I’ve got two emails (not including the payment receipts) since I signed up for my 1-year subscription. One that was a reminder that my year is ending and second was an update on the development of the service.

It’s unfortunate how refreshing it feels to use a tool like this. It should be the baseline from which only exceptions pop out but these days it’s a super rare treat.

Wallabag is available as a paid, hosted version but you can also self-host it if you’d like. That’s another reason I really like it. I’m currently happy to pay it to support the development but I do enjoy the fact that if they decide to shut things down some day, I can switch over to a self-hosted version and continue enjoying using it.

Thanks Nicolas for building wallabag!

Junited is a celebration of the blogosphere

2026-06-06T00:00:00Z

In 2024, Robert Birming launched Junited which is a month-long event during which we focus on sharing great things other people have written. I love blogging for its social aspect and Junited is right up that alley so I’m excited to join.

I will be sharing one article a day and I keep an updating list in my Junited note in Garden of Learning. I keep it there rather than this blog for two reasons: first, it’s easier and quicker for me to update and second, it won’t pollute this blog’s RSS feed for those who don’t care about it.

I already have this week’s entries there so you can visit it now and learn about five new things and if that seems interesting to you, bookmark it and visit every now and then. I’m currently designing a per-note RSS subscription option but I haven’t built it yet so for this Junited it’s still a manual effort to go and check.

There are a lot of people participating this year so this is your opportunity to learn about so many wonderful bloggers and the topics they write about so go take a look.

And of course, join us! Create a page or a blog post on your own website and start sharing. It’s never too late to share an article you read and enjoyed.

An entire wiki in a single file? A look at Feather Wiki

2026-06-03T00:00:00Z

Imagine a wiki that is just a single HTML file. One that you can deploy anywhere: view locally, share in local network, put in any web server. No databases, no user management, no moving pieces that cause headaches.

Feather Wiki is a really cool project that I ran into a couple of weeks back. It’s a wiki project that fits the entire wiki, including all the content, in a single HTML file. You can upload it to a server (or use locally), make changes in browser and when you’re done with changes, you download a new version of itself with the changes and you can deploy that to update it.

Or like the project describes itself:

Feather Wiki is an HTML document containing a self-replicating JavaScript application for creating wiki-style websites whose content is also stored in the output.

You can edit the wiki in browser just like any other wiki but to permanently save the changes, you need to download a new copy of the entire wiki with new changes and upload that to your web server.

While this adds an extra step, I think the tradeoff is often a welcome one. To enable collaboration, you can have people submit pull requests to a git repository that gets deployed to a server.

I’m still experimenting with it myself and haven’t published any wikis built with it yet but I think it’s a wonderful choice for individuals or small communities that want an easy wiki solution.

Now available in Finnish!

Last weekend, I contributed to the project by providing Finnish translations. You can download the Finnish version from Downloads page. If any of the translations feels off or wrong, don’t hesitate to reach out or make a contribution directly to the project. Big thanks to existing translations of open source projects like WordPress that I was able to use for inspiration and checking if my translations made sense.

IndieWeb Carnival May 2026: Roundup of love letters

2026-06-01T00:00:00Z

Happy June 1st!

Last month, I hosted the IndieWeb Carnival where I encouraged bloggers to write a love letter to something they care about or are passionate about. 33 people (+ me) answered the call and published a love letter in their blog.

It's been an incredible month for me because day after day, I've got to read so many positive stories from people around the world and that has made the month extraordinarily fun. It's not just the love letters though. I've discovered many new blogs and had many wonderful discussions with people who submitted their entries.

I highly recommend checking out all of these blogs. Read their love letter and then check out what else they are doing and writing about.

This roundup post is a love letter in itself. A love letter to this wonderful community, to personal websites and blogs, to all the people writing and publishing their thoughts and experiences in the open web for all of us to read. To everyone who participated: thank you ❤️.

The day starts with a morning and Beto Dealmeida wrote a love letter to those magical moments that start a new day and shares their peaceful morning routine that lasts until the leaf blowers start.

Quite a few people shared their love to people — either specific ones or groups.

Brendan's love letter to the unknown discusses his cousin's impact on his love for Dungeons & Dragons. Andrei wrote a love letter to his younger self with wonderful life advice. Pat has great friends who deserved a love letter. Rasagy wrote a love letter to his local IndieWebClub community in Bangalore.

Christopher wrote an appreciation post to Francis Bacon, winther is a fan of Isabella Huppert's films and shared a few good movie recommendations while at it. Eula wrote a love letter to Air Groove from Umamusume: Pretty Derby.

The great outdoors received a few love letters as well. Both James and axxuy wrote about their love for walking outside. Shellsharks enjoys the outside in general and Frances confessed love to trees specifically. Thomas wrote a lovely letter to the joy, freedom, solidarity and love of bicycles.

It's not a surprise that many people who IndieWeb Carnival reaches are techies and that was well reflected in these love letters. Sometimes that journey can be bumpy like with Cesar who wrote a love-hate letter for coding. Both Dale and ThinkRoot expressed their gratitude to software developers who build open source solutions for everyone to enjoy. Sebastian wrote a love letter to RSS, a sentiment I can personally express as well.

Steve wrote about his childhood love for typesetting that started when he was 6 years old. Lesley's love letter was for flashcards and spaced repetition. For the past decade, Stefan has been building creative online bots and wrote about what appeals to him about building them and his bot that shares views from the South Pole.

Equally common group in the personal web are creatives. Ruben and V.H. wrote about photography from two perspectives: the love for old school cameras and the inspiration of other photographers, respectively. Britt wrote a love letter to creative spaces throughout her life. Sara's love letter was for doing things before you are ready and a great reminder that to become great at something, you need to start somewhere first.

Zachary wrote a wonderful piece about curiosity. Two people wrote about music: Ginny wrote a love letter to Chinese Music Shows and Daniel went down the mycelial musical rabbit hole. Leia's love is for cosplays as expressed in the love letter full of great stories and stunning costumes.

And then there's all the others that I couldn't find a good category for. I wrote about how I love the library bus that comes to my doorstep every Friday afternoon. Leandro wrote about the love for blogging and discovering your own way of writing. Ben said goodbye to autumn that's making way for winter. Tony wrote a love letter to Newcastle upon Tyne that's been his home for the past six and a half years. Tabitha wrote about her favourite mug, a broken handle and the Japanese practice of kintsugi.

Finally, Brendan wrote a love letter to everything. What a grandiouse and wonderful way to end this roundup post.

34 wonderful love letters. The amount of love expressed and shared is so wonderful.

If you wrote an entry and I failed to mention it and link to it here, please get in touch! I tried to double check everything but it is possible that through all this, something fell through the cracks and disappeared into the void.

June carnival is hosted by Alex Hsu on a theme of "No way!?":

Has anything ever happened in your life that felt like a movie plot twist? Something that made you go “No way!?” but turned out to be completely true?

Saoirse Ronan Appreciation Week

2026-05-30T00:00:00Z

Saoirse Ronan is one of my favourite actors and I decided to have my very own Saiorse Ronan appreciation week, watching ~~six~~ five of her movies. Two of them I had seen before and four were new ones. I was also planning to watch On Chesil Beach but I thought I had borrowed it on DVD from the library but actually had planned to watch it from the library’s streaming service and managed to use up all my loans for the month before watching it.

I also wanted to write about them because I enjoy reading other people’s posts and remarks about movies and discovering new films. Human curation at its best. But then I started writing and I have such a hard time figuring out what to write about them.

I don’t want it to be just plot recaps and I want to avoid any kind of major spoilers for sure. I’m not any kind of expert on filmmaking, so I don’t have big insights on how brilliantly some films are edited or colour graded. I can barely identify subtle larger than life undertones from the stories.

I’m just a normal, innocent man who enjoys watching movies and experience great stories. With that said, here are the movies I watched during my week-long Saoirse Ronan Appreciation Week.

Monday: Hanna

Hanna (2011)

6.7/10

3.4/5

66%

Directed by Joe Wright

Starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana

A sixteen-year-old girl who was raised by her father to be the perfect assassin is dispatched on a mission across Europe, tracked by a ruthless intelligence agent and her operatives.

Hanna is a movie I’ve seen a couple of times before. Since it’s the first movie of her that I’ve seen, I figured it’s only appropriate to start this week with this movie. Hanna is a CIA agent adventure that hits all the classic beats. It runs a lot of parallels with Bourne movies: an agent gone rogue, the agency hunting them down, the main character not knowing where they come from and a lot of turns and twists.

At the same time, it’s a story of young Hanna who for the first time in her life explores what it would be like to have a normal life as she spends part of the movie with a family with a couple of young children.

The story doesn’t cut quite as deep into its potential and at times, it feels there’s bit too many parallel things going on so that there’s not enough time to go even deeper into the most interesting bits. Regardless, it’s a solid action movie.

Tuesday: Brooklyn

Brooklyn (2015)

7.5/10

3.8/5

73%

Directed by John Crowley

Starring Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson

An Irish immigrant lands in 1950s Brooklyn, where she quickly falls into a romance with a local. When her past catches up with her, however, she must choose between two countries and the lives that exist within.

Brooklyn tells the story of Eilis, an Irish girl who moves to Brooklyn, New York to chase a better life. It’s a lovely story about growth, finding yourself, love, adjusting to other people’s expectations and how living abroad changes you and your relationship with your home town and people there.

While moving across the Atlantic must have been so wildly different in the 1950s than it was in 2010s, I found some interesting parallels in the story to my own journey moving to San Francisco and especially when coming home.

Saoirse Ronan showcases once again how expressive she is in portraying different types of person and how Eilis’ personal growth turns her from a shy girl to a confident young woman.

Wednesday: Lady Bird

Lady Bird (2017)

7.4/10

3.8/5

73%

Directed by Greta Gerwig

Starring Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts

A fiercely independent teenager tries to make her own way in the world while wanting to get out of her hometown of Sacramento, California, and to get away from her complicated mother and recently-unemployed father.

This movie was DARK. Not in tone or story but in lack of lighting. I’m not sure if that was my DVD copy’s problem or if every copy of the movie suffers from it. So many scenes that had no reason to be dark were so dark I had to focus really hard to see what was happening.

This is the first movie of Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet. They have such wonderful chemistry together both on and off screen.

Thursday: The Outrun

The Outrun (2024)

6.9/10

3.7/5

68%

Directed by Nora Fingscheidt

Starring Saoirse Ronan, Paapa Essiedu, Nabil Elouahabi

After living life on the edge in London, Rona attempts to come to terms with her troubled past. Hoping to heal, she returns to the wild beauty of Scotland's Orkney Islands where she grew up.

The Outrun is the movie that gave me the idea for this week. I saw it had come available in a streaming service I subscribed to so I decided to not only watch it but also a bunch of other movies of Ronan’s.

The Outrun is a great movie. It tells a heavy story of alcoholism and the pain it creates. The movie strikes a brilliant balance oscillating between contrasting tough moments with joy and recovery. All of that is magnified by Saoirse Ronan’s great performance as the main character Rona.

Friday: Little Women

Little Women (2019)

7.8/10

4.2/5

79%

Directed by Greta Gerwig

Starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen

In 19th century Massachusetts, the March sisters--Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy--on the threshold of womanhood, go through many ups and downs in life and endeavor to make important decisions about their futures.

I’m not usually a big fan of period drama but Little Women has such a stacked cast that it’s hard not to love. Saiorse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Timothée Chalamet and Meryl Streep are all such amazing actors and superstars.

The movie manages to stay on story even with its wide array of main characters and plot points.

Happy 10th birthday TurkuSec!

2026-05-29T00:00:00Z

Today, we celebrated the 10th birthday of a community very dear to my heart, TurkuSec.

The chair person of TurkuSec, Ismayil opens the evening

To finish the night, I gave a short birthday speech, which roughly went like this:

Dear TurkuSec, happy 10th birthday!

Some of you might know me, some might not. I’m Juhis and 10 years ago I was sitting in my office when Shamil came to talk about his idea for a cyber security meetup and wanted some encouragement and advice.

What comes to communities, 10 years is a holy shit scale. Most meetups die before the first event and of those who survive that, most die before the second event. Reaching 10 years is wonderful.

Benjamin talked earlier today about what AI can and cannot do and what we can do better than it. This is one of the things we’ll always do better: coming together, sharing stories, learning from each other and making friends.

The most impactful thing a community does is when 2 people come to an event and meet. Multiply that by 10 years, 100 events and 1000 people and we can see the magnificent impact this community has had in the local community.

Happy 10th anniversary and pystyy vetää!

Tame your pesky little scripts

2026-05-27T00:00:00Z

This blog post started its life as a lightning talk that I'm doing today at Aurajoki Overflow's afterwork. As I worked on the talk, I realised I had a more coherent story to tell than I had already planned so now it gets a new life as a blog post as well.

"Pesky little scripts" — a term I stole from Redowan Delowar — are all those shell scripts and fish functions and shell aliases you write to make your own life easier. I don't know about you, but I have quite a few of them and the collection keeps growing.

But they can get messy to organise, to remember and to run. Especially when you start to add more than just shell scripts. My collection is a messy amalgamation of bash, zsh, Python, Javascript and Rust scripts. Some of them I use daily, others maybe once every two months.

There are a couple of main ideas that have had a big impact on how I manage them and I've noticed that the amount of scripts and aliases I write has grown immensly after I adopted these.

Namespacing

In PyCon Argentina 2018, Brandon Rhodes delivered a wonderful keynote Activation Energy. In it, he talked about his journey to figure out ways to reduce the activation energy that is needed to do things with software.

One of the these things was prefixing his custom shell scripts so they would be easy to find.

He started by looking at all the characters he could start his scripts, eliminating A-Z and 0-9 as they are commonly used and then eliminating all characters that have special meaning in bash shell.

He ended up with 6 options:

@, _, + and : which all required using a Shift key
- which is a named command in bash
, which was the perfect prefix

-> , [tab]
,analytics      ,tcg
,bookmarklet    ,webmention
,confetti       ,webp
,ptest          ,zine

By typing , and hitting tab, I get autocompletions for all my scripts and aliases. As long as their names remind me what they do, this is a big improvement over having to think and remember what you called you script and then wading through autocompletions of all the built-in or 3rd party commands that have been installed in your system.

Shebang (#!)

Namespacing helps with remembering and finding your scripts but equally crucial bit are shebangs. A shebang is when your script starts with #! and it tells the shell which software you want to execute this script with.

You may have seen #!/bin/bash at the start of a lot of shell scripts.

It's wonderful because it allows me to have a uniform naming scheme for all my scripts (no script_a.py, script_b.js and script_c.sh) or having to run them with python script_a.py (and so on...).

Every script is called by its name as they would be any other commands.

#!/bin/bash
#!/opt/homebrew/bin/node
#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --quiet --script
#!/usr/bin/env rustx

In one of our Python meetups, Tero gave an excellent lightning talk from which I learned how to build single-file executable Python scripts with dependencies. Combining that with the correct shebang and suddenly we have a Python script that takes care of its own dependencies and is still runnable just as a single command.

Now I can utilize whatever language I feel most comfortable in when solving a specific problem. And as a user of my own scripts, I don't have to think about that at all. I recently built a ,bookmarklet script in Javascript that takes a filename as an argument, reads the file's contents and minifies the code into a bookmarklet.

Lil' bit of custom tooling

One last thing I had to figure out was how to keep my scripts managed. They may live in different parts of the filesystem and they may live in folders with other scripts that I don't want to or need to manage.

So I created a repository called pesky-little-scripts that has a single shell script (link.sh) in the root and a folder scripts/ where all my scripts live in. That way, I can have all of them in one place and under version control without having to do a lot of git excludes.

The link.sh script is my installer:

#!/bin/zsh

script=$1
scriptname=$(basename $script)

echo "Making $scriptname executable..."
chmod +x $script

echo "Linking $scriptname to /usr/local/bin...";
ln -s "$PWD/$script" "/usr/local/bin/$scriptname" # $PWD is needed since it requires an absolute path for the link to work.
rehash # Needed to update zsh cache for new scripts for autocomplete.

It makes the script executable (something I always used to forget), then creates a symbolic link to /usr/local/bin where my scripts live in and finally, it runs rehash to update the autocomplete cache so I can start to use the new script immediately.

Since it does not copy the file but links it, I can do all my future edits in this folder, keep track of its history and it will always be at its latest version when I run it.

11 more days time to write a love letter - IndieWeb Carnival

2026-05-20T00:00:00Z

Do you want to see more positive things in the world and the web? I’m hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival and I’m inviting anyone with a blog to write a love letter.

This invitation is for everyone with their own blog. As long as your love letter will be available to read without having to create any accounts or to log in anywhere, it’s welcome.

At the time of writing this, we have 18 wonderful love letters by people from around the world (I maintain an updating list in the original announcement post). I would love it if you’d join that list!

A Love-Hate Letter to Coding by Cesar Aguirre
Love Letter to Independent Open Source Developers by Dale Mellor
Love Letter to IndieWebClub by Rasagy Sharma
Love Letter to the Unknown by Brendan
A Love Letter to Flashcards by Lesley Lai
Love Letter to Bacon by Christopher Himes
A love letter to bicycles by Thomas J. Hils
A Love Letter to You by Andrei
A Love Letter to my Friends by Pat
Walking by James
A love letter to our library bus by me
Outside. by Shellsharks
Falling in love with photography again by Ruben Verweij
Re: A Love Letter To RSS by Sebastian
A Love Letter to Everything by Brennan Kenneth Brown
I Love Mycelial Musical Rabbit Holes by Daniel
A love letter to Air Groove by Eula
A love letter to cosplay by Leia

Even the dogs have started to notice

2026-05-16T00:00:00Z

The past three weeks, I’ve been shouting my good feelings into the aether. The other day, I tooted:

I have regained

happiness in my mornings,
clarity in my thoughts,
creativity in my writing,
passion for my projects
and kindness in my interactions with people.

It’s incredible how swift and complete 180 my life has been lately after making some drastic changes to it.

For the longest time, I thought I was mostly keeping the sadness and gloominess inside me but I guess that wasn’t quite through. When you feel good, you glow it to everything around you. I’ve found myself having great discussions with my neighbours that I haven’t really talked with in the three years I’ve lived here.

The biggest surprise has been the dogs though. Somehow, they have started to notice this shift. My neighbour’s dog that has been ignoring me for these years was jumping on my leg, wagging its tail in pure happiness the other day and got a well-deserved pat on the head. The day after that, two other dogs came to say hi to me when I was waiting for a bus.

They must be sensing something changing in me.

A love letter to our library bus

2026-05-13T00:00:00Z

I’m hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival and I invited everyone with a blog to write a love letter to something or someone they care about. In the turbulent times where the Internet is being bombarded by hate speech and negative news, I want to sparkle more kindness and positivity to combat that. There's still time to write until the end of month and I'd love to read yours!

Ever since I learned to read (or probably even before that), I’ve been a library geek. We went to our local library regularly and I’d always carry a big pile of books home to read and plunge into adventure after adventure. As a kid, I’d read multiple books a week and especially loved larger than life epic fantasy or scifi adventures.

As I’ve grown up and life has become busier with work, my reading habits have taken a dip worse the worse but I still try to enjoy reading whenever I can.

I love our library bus

Every Friday afternoon, a library bus comes visit our neighbourhood. It’s not an absolute necessity to me as the main library is a short bus ride away but I visit it every other Friday.

I love a library bus as a concept. A bus full of books, DVDs and CDs comes to my neighbourhood and I can pick up anything I want for free. The regular pace of two weeks between visits gives me a good boundary that leads to me reading more. The limited collection makes it easier to give into the randomness to discover new things.

Its schedule is perfect. Friday afternoon makes it a great break off point from the work week and start of a weekend. I finish whatever I’ve been working on, close my work laptop and shut down my work phone. I pick up my previously borrowed books and DVDs and head out. During warm enough months, I usually head out there 10 minutes before to just sit and enjoy the nature and mentally unwind from the week.

I see the bus turn from the main road to our area and settle in to its slot. There’s usually a small crowd waiting — I’m not the only one in the neighbourhood who loves the bus — and we squeeze into the bus to return our items and to browse through the shelves for new adventures to delight us.

The bus’s interior isn’t big but it packs a lot of books inside. You need to be conscious of other people in the space as there’s not too much extra space to move around. It’s a great place to meet people who live in the neighbourhood. From young kids to the elderly, the bus is a third place that comes to visit you rather than the other way around.

I often find myself day dreaming of the perfect library bus. One that in addition to being a place to borrow books from would have some sort of social space to hang out. In my head, I imagine a modified bus that, when parked, expands into a small terrace with chairs and tables to sit down and read and chat with others. Something that wouldn’t visit for just 30 minutes but maybe a few hours or half a day. A place that would be a great mobile gathering spot in a less busy life.

It might not be realistic right now but just like a lighthouse, it’s something I can experience in my mind when I need an escape from the capitalist hustle culture.

Practicing writing about games

2026-05-06T00:00:00Z

My favourite way to discover new things is by other people. I don’t want to find my next game through an algorithm that looks at what I’ve played and what others have played and by making weird conclusions that we must like the same things. I really enjoy reading or watching when other people discuss games they’ve enjoyed and why and explain or show the unique elements and what makes the game interesting.

I’m not interested in nor find much value in numeric reviews because they are so arbitrary. We have wildly different internal schemas of what “8/10” means for a video game but even if our scales align, we will like things for things reasons. That’s why writing about the games from different perspectives is so important.

I want to add my own contribution to this network of ideas. For the longest time though, I have strongly disliked my writing about games. Whether I call them “reviews” or something else, I have a tendency to think that I need to explain all the rules and mechanics and everything else with such detail that the outcome starts to feel mechanical, boring and something that doesn’t really offer anything interesting for the reader.

I started practicing last year after discovering a local library’s Helmet Gaming Challenge and continued with this year’s challenge. I wanted to bring attention to the fun challenge by not only keeping a checklist of games I played but by writing about them so that the list would actually be useful and not just an act of a completionist mind.

It has brought two things to my life: I’ve played games with more intention and I’ve written about the games in new ways.

With notes like Firewatch and Stray, I’ve explored the idea of talking about them more through emotions and experiences rather than information dumps. Others, like Wingspan, have more mechanics explanations which tends to come through more in board games when players are responsible for running the mechanics and that can be an important factor in choosing a game.

One thing I’d like to have more is screenshots of the games but I mostly play either on consoles or on Steam Deck and I haven’t quite yet figured out a good way to get screenshots from those into my blog in a way that wouldn’t be such a hassle than it currently is. So I’ve been using limited amount of images, mostly from company press kits or other sources that allow sharing them but there’s not always the ones that I would like to have. (The image above from Straw I took with my phone from the screen because it was too good to pass.)

In The Last of Us Part II, there’s one moment that I really wanted to talk about but to really get to the core of what I wanted to say required the reader to be able to see, preferably in a short video format, what I was seeing so I could talk about what my experiences were and why the experience was such an emotionally impactful.

I’ve also been writing really short bits about games and individual sub-pieces about games in my experimental board and card game zine Roll the Zine. The format sets its own restrictions and I’ve been intentionally trying to make this zine to be in a format that I wouldn’t normally write in to challenge my creativity and storytelling.

An unexpected outcome from this experiment has been how it has changed my relationship with gaming lately. I’ve been playing with more intention and focus. The gaming challenge’s categories have driven me to look for games that fall outside my usual categories (or to bend the meaning of words to make a game I want to play to fit into a category). Since I’ve decided I’ll write about the games I enjoy playing

When I was younger, I was part of a gaming forum where we played online sports game tournaments and wrote reports of the games. Back then, I loved going full on roleplaying on the concept. I wasn’t writing about me playing a video game with a fellow human. I wrote about it in-universe as if the virtual players were real and the games were real and I was a sports journalist. That was a lot of fun because adding that layer of storytelling on top of relatively bland platform allowed near unlimited imagination.

I tell about my blog to anyone willing to listen

2026-05-02T00:00:00Z

David at Forking Mad asked:

Question for the audience: Do you tell people you blog?

He talks about his adversity towards sharing their blog with offline friends.

I was reflecting on this recently, after I inadvertently mentioned to a colleague that I had blogged about a topic a few days earlier. That, of course, started the questioning from them: Oh, what's it called? What do you write about? Can I see it?

I reluctantly recited the web address. I have no idea if they did/will look. But then I wondered: Why was I so restrained to promote my blog to a real-life-person-type.

I’m completely the opposite. I tell everybody about my blog if they are willing to listen. And the fun part is that people tell me they read my blog. Latest this Tuesday I told my colleagues about my blog when we had a discussion about blogs.

It’s happened more than a few times that someone comes to talk to me in a pub or bar and tells me they enjoy reading my blog. I love it!

Two years ago, bacardi55 whose blog has since disappeared from the web pondered the same question:

But then I asked myself, who, In Real Life, knows that I’m blogging (or gemlogging)? Not counting people I met online first that knew “bacardi55 before firstname”, but only the opposite… Well, I think only one of my best friend (and now my partner, but my friend knew before) knows. The main reason he was aware is because I once shared with him a gemlog article I wrote… Not sure which one but not a technical one.

Both of them write their blog under a pseudonym and I wonder how much of a difference does that make since I write under my legal name. Thus, there’s no secret that this blog is my blog.

Alex shares David’s reluctance:

For me, the reluctance is similar to David's. This blog is my space to write what's on my mind in my own little vacuum. It's disconnected from the expectations of real life, and a more real reflection of myself versus the "masks" I wear IRL. It's a playground, a place to rant and a place to nerd out.

For me, a blog is not in any way disconnected from my daily life — quite the opposite. I often blog about the things that happen in real life and about things I learn at work or hobbies and those same topics come up all the time later so I share my posts to people when they are relevant.

I do something similar though as Kev

When people ask me about my hobbies, I tend to say "I enjoy writing" rather than "I have a blog." And I think that's because of the negative connotations blogging has with the general public.

For me, writing is definitely the hobby and interest of mine and blog is just one of the formats and mediums I use to write. I also journal, write notes, write a zine and occasionally dabble in fiction writing.

Kai chimed in with a similar story to the others:

Who knows that I blog? Of the people I know and interact with regularly in person I can think of exactly two people that know I have a blog—my missus and one of my closest friends who I share a lot of interests in common with.

Reading through all these stories, I wonder how my social circles are so different from others. Many mention that their friends don’t share the same interests as them and I’m pretty much exactly the opposite once again. Most of my friends are people who do share my interests and that’s how we’ve become friends in the first place.

Gordon wrote about how blogging is something people might not quite understand:

If asked very comfortable telling people I have a blog but it wasn’t always like that. There was a definite secret guilt about blogging, largely because it wasn’t really fully understood unless you were a blogger too. Like, “why do people spend all that money on cycling, I don’t get it”, says the person who then went on to try a better bike and fall involve with the child-like joy of cycling —that person is me, BTW.

These days my readership has grown to a size where it’s not feasible to know everyone but for many years in the early days, I think at least 90% of the people who read my blog — like my mom — were people who I knew in real life.

The same goes for the blogs I read as well. I love reading my friends’ blogs and out of all the blogs I regularly follow, I know a good amount of the people behind them offline as well.

IndieWeb Carnival May 2026: Write a love letter

2026-04-29T00:00:00Z

Hello internet friend!

It’s my time to host IndieWeb Carnival (again) and in these trying times, I want to bring more kindness and positivity into the web and blogosphere.

So, my theme for the month is a love letter. You’re free to interpret that as you wish — it’s your blog you’re publishing it in after all.

May is over, you can read my roundup post of all the entries.

The topic: A love letter

Is there someone or something that you appreciate but maybe haven’t expressed your love for it recently? A love letter could be an expression of appreciation for someone who’s had a positive impact on your life or sharing a piece of art, media, software or something else you enjoy so more people can discover it.

This is an invitation for you to unapologetically geek out about something you’re passionate about. I quote Roy Tang (emphasis mine):

Recently a friend who is a very serious figure in certain business circles started tweeting about one of her fandom "ships". Later on she mentioned that some people had suggested she set up an "alt" account for her fandom stuff because it "detracts from her image". Her response: "Thanks but I don't think any of my fandoms detract anything from my accomplishments. Normalize being true to your geeky fanfic reading die hard shipper self AND kicking ass.”

What is Indie Web Carnival?

Indie Web Carnival is a monthly blogging event in the Indie Web community where each month a different person hosts the month: they select a topic, collect submissions and write a roundup post at the end.

For an individual blogger, it’s a great opportunity to write more and explore topics you might not otherwise explore. It’s also a great way to find new bloggers and expand your views on topics as you get to read other people’s writing on the same topic that you just did.

Whether you are an active blogger or not, I invite you to join. Maybe this is the prompt that gets you back to your writing practice to write and publish more.

How to participate?

You can participate by writing (or recording) and publishing your thoughts about the topic and sharing a link with me. At the end of the month, I’ll collect all the submissions into a wrap-up post and you get to learn what other people around the globe think about the topic.

Your piece should be published in May 2026 and shared with me at latest Sunday, May 31st.

The format can be anything that’s shareable and accessible in the open web: blog posts, videos, podcasts, poems, short stories, illustrations, photos, you name it. It should be available for people to read without creating accounts or subscribing to anything.

To submit your piece, you can:

email a link to it to me at juhamattisantala@gmail.com
send a link to it to me in Mastodon at https://mastodon.world/@hamatti
send a web mention for this post to https://webmention.io/hamatti.org/webmention
send a link to it to me in any community we share
send a message in a bottle (although I can’t guarantee if one will find me in time)

Submissions

Once the submissions start rolling in, I’ll keep an updated list of all entries in the list below. If you’ve sent me one but it doesn’t show up on the list in a day or two, try reaching out again! It’s possible your message has disappeared into spam filters or fallen through the cracks into the void.

A Love-Hate Letter to Coding by Cesar Aguirre
Love Letter to Independent Open Source Developers by Dale Mellor
Love Letter to IndieWebClub by Rasagy Sharma
Love Letter to the Unknown by Brendan
A Love Letter to Flashcards by Lesley Lai
Love Letter to Bacon by Christopher Himes
A love letter to bicycles by Thomas J. Hils
A Love Letter to You by Andrei
A Love Letter to my Friends by Pat
Walking by James
A love letter to our library bus by me
Outside. by Shellsharks
Falling in love with photography again by Ruben Verweij
Re: A Love Letter To RSS by Sebastian
A Love Letter to Everything by Brennan Kenneth Brown
I Love Mycelial Musical Rabbit Holes by Daniel
A love letter to Air Groove by Eula
A love letter to cosplay by Leia
A love letter to mornings by Beto Dealmeida
A. Obsessed with Chinese Music Shows - May 2026 Indie Web Carnival by Ginny
Uma carta de amor aos blogs by Leandro Maciel
I love trees by Frances
O scrisoare de mulțumire pentru tehnologie by ThinkRoot
Curiosity As A Form Of Life-Giving by Zachary Kai
IndieWeb Carnival: A love letter to doing things before you are ready by Sara Jakša
Photographers who inspire me by V.H. Belvadi
A Love Letter To Creative Spaces by Britt Coxon
A Love Letter by Steve
A love letter to Isabelle Huppert by winther
A love letter to autumn by Ben Vidulich
Eight years of sharing views from the South Pole by Stefan Bohacek
My Love Letter to Newcastle upon Tyne by Tony
Around The Arrow by Tabitha
I Love Walking by Axxuy

I have been tempted by AYN Thor — but I have AYN Thor at home

2026-04-22T00:00:00Z

AYN Thor is a clamshell Android gaming device that’s been at the height of the hype cycle for a good while. Everyone in the web who keeps talking about handheld devices is raving about it. They have been tempting me.

First of all, I love a clamshell form factor. Nintendo 3DS was a big favourite of mine on its heyday. But like with so many older consoles, the hardware isn’t that desirable anymore. Especially the lack of USB-C charging port is keeping me from going back to 3DS. That’s why Thor is so interesting. It’s a modern take on a classic design.

Now, I already have Steam Deck as my handheld device and I’m really happy with it. The one thing that tempts me though is that Steam Deck isn’t exactly small. It’s fantastic for any longer trips but I don’t have it with me every time I leave home and I’ve been low key wanting something that would allow me comfortably play retro games on the go during trips where I don’t bring Steam Deck with me.

Luckily, before I gave up and ordered one, I learned that RetroArch emulation app had been published on App Store for iOS and after an evening of tinkering, I was up and running with RetroArch and 8BitDo’s SN30 Pro controller on iPad and seriously, it’s been fantastic.

I always keep my iPad with me already and its large screen is very enjoyable for gaming. For (3)DS games, I can turn it to portrait mode and have massive screen estate for the two screens. SN30+ Pro is a fantastic controller, maybe my all time favourite and with a 3D printed cover to protect the thumbsticks, I feel comfortable packing it with me wherever I go.

Internet services’ recommendation algorithms combined with a creator economy that’s constantly pushing us to buy the new shiny thing is a nasty combination. There’s no real reason why I’d need an AYN Thor. I have my laptop, iPad and Steam Deck that all can run the games I enjoy. But the constant barrage of videos about the device and people playing with it on their train rides starts to creep in.

The iPad + controller combo is not always the most usable because it requires a flat table space to put the tablet on but most of the time I’m in such environment anyway so it’s not a real problem.

I’ve been recently enjoying a few of my favourite Game Boy Advance games (mainly Advance Wars series and Zelda games) with this new setup and it’s been wonderful.

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.

Update 18.4.2026: I recently noticed two more sports broadcast that do this.

The Swedish Hockey League broadcasts do it

As do Ruutu's Veikkausliiga broadcasts!

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.