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

"You are a friendly breadwinner"

A recent blog post by Pete Koomen about how we still lack truly "AI-native" software got me thinking about the kinds of applications I’d like to see. As the blog post says, AI should handle the boring stuff and leave the interesting parts for me. I listed down a few tasks I've dealt with recently and wrote some system prompts for potential agentic AIs: Check that the GDPR subprocessor list is up to date. Also, ensure we have a signed data processing agreement in place with the necessary vendors. Write a summary of what you did and highlight any oddities or potentially outdated vendors. Review our product’s public-facing API. Ensure the domain objects are named consistently. Here's a link to our documentation describing the domain. Conduct a SOC 2 audit of our system and write a report with your findings. Send the report to Slack. Once you get approval, start implementing the necessary changes. These could include HR-related updates, changes to cloud infras...

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