2023

It was a year of wrapping up a major project I've been working on for several years. Nothing is, of course, ever truly finished in software, so "fully released" is maybe a better choice of words.

In 2023, I was also part of starting a new, presumably soon-to-be megaproject. This led to me switching jobs.

See this tweet

My new employer is an early-stage startup. I have never been on one, so I wanted to know what that is like. We are a close-knit team, quite different from the 100+ member projects I began my career with.

Before fully committing to the new one, I juggled two jobs for six months. I was a (primarily) mobile developer by day and transformed into a web developer by night (actually, I did most of the coding on weekends). My first assignment was related to setting up the frontend, which I ended up doing with NextJS + Tailwind + shadcn/ui combo.

My working days have changed dramatically. Earlier in the year, I worked on a reasonably stable and mature organization with an established process providing the basis for us in the software team to do sufficiently good quality work without too much time pressure.

Now, the pace and focus are different, and for good reasons. We keep the iteration speed fast to try out new ideas rapidly. We gradually understand more what our product should be like and adjust accordingly. Fortunately (or unfortunately 🤔), we do not yet have to satisfy groups of customers, each calling after diverse features which give us an edge on the competition against the giants.

My new role is pleasantly varied. I do not work exclusively on the frontend anymore. On a given day, I might work with Terraform in the morning, K8s helm charts after lunch, and finish the day with some UI polishing work. Sprinkle around a couple of one-to-one sessions with team members where we bounce ideas around, and that is my day!

Some highlights include the experience of building a GitOps way of working. We are still in relatively early phases, but most of the infra and deployments are managed declaratively in git.

As a final pat on my own back, Turso CTO Pekka Enberg tweeted the tech talk I held in April about SerenityOS, and the YouTube recording got a nice amount of views for what it is.

Some non-work-related highlights.

I attended four jazz festivals. The most memorable was Valtteri Laurell's "Tigers Are Better Looking" record, which I had on repeat and enjoyed live not only once but twice!

Another unforgettable performance was from Ronald Langestraat at the Odysseus festival in Helsinki, set against stunning seaside views.

I bought (or technically leased) an electric bike for the winter, and while it is a bit of a luxury item, it has been pretty nice. I plan to write about my experiences with it as a winter commuter later in the year.

Comments

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful. Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...

PydanticAI + evals + LiteLLM pipeline

I gave a tech talk at a Python meetup titled "Overengineering an LLM pipeline". It's based on my experiences of building production-grade stuff with LLMs I'm not sure how overengineered it actually turned out. Experimental would be a better term as it is using PydanticAI graphs library, which is in its very early stages as of writing this, although arguably already better than some of the pipeline libraries. Anyway, here is a link to it. It is a CLI poker app where you play one hand against an LLM. The LLM (theoretically) gets better with a self-correcting mechanism based on the evaluation score from another LLM. It uses the annotated past games as an additional context to potentially improve its decision-making. https://github.com/juho-y/archipylago-poker

Careful with externalTrafficPolicy

On a project I am working on is hosted in an EKS cluster with the NGINX ingress controller (the one maintained by Kubernetes). It is deployed using it's official official Helm chart, which I realized, after a lengthy debugging session, was a mistake. The initial setup I aimed to improve had several flaws. Firstly, we were using the AWS Classic Load Balancer in front of the nginx ingress in the cluster, which has been deprecated for some time (years?). Continuing to use it makes little sense to us. The second issue was that we were only running one(!) nginx pod, which is quite sketchy since the exposed web services had essentially no high availability. I switched to the Network Load Balancer (NLB), which was straightforward - I just needed to change the ingress-nginx service annotation to specify the load balancer type as NLB: service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-type: nlb However, increasing the replica count turned out to be tricky. When I bumped it up to two, I began to ...

Koodihommia

Search This Blog