Koodihommia

Back in 2005-2006, when my friends were playing WoW, I got hooked on something much weirder. Some contemporaries may remember those as the start of their MMORPG careers. For me, those were the heydays of (anti) malware. It all started as I installed the first antivirus software on our family PC, and oh boy did it find a lot of stuff. Perhaps it was that incident that triggered my fascination with viruses and malware. It cannot be overstated how bad the malware situation was back then. Every home PC had some adware/spyware installed. XP was riddled with holes. Virus scanners were falling behind the latest threats. I began to read everything I could find about viruses. I lurked obsessively in Wilders' security forums and SANS internet storm center, which were the hubs for security-related news back in the day. Unsurprisingly, corporate security was not my focus point as a 15-year-old. I was solely interested in malware. Can't really remember was there something specific about it,...

Developers should read Ralph Waldo Emerson. By read, I mean listen to a 30-minute podcast and claim expertise. Emerson says being too opinionated is harmful. The cliche in tech is that the view from the window of kosher technologies shifts quickly. The result is that I've been mostly wrong about any given technical issue in my career. I'm not saying this to be unpretentious but rather a fact.  Given I'm wrong and write poor code at a given moment is not to be interpreted that something is left permanently broken. The great thing about having loose opinions is that I'm always open to implementing a better solution. It may still ultimately be sub-par but better than the original. Ralph Waldo Emerson says that we should not imitate others. That may not end up as a quote in a programming book, though. No one likes a genius, and a clever thinker can be an insult in a coding context. Seeing something you have seen thousands of times in your editor is usually desirable. Widen ...

The snowflake VM I run my experiments on has a serious flaw. I can't remember what I have installed there. It is embarrassing as some essential services to me run there. As an enterprisey developer, my attention draws naturally towards IaC solutions for this particular memory issue. The code of the experimentations is in git, so why not the infra. Some would say it is a major overkill since we are talking literally about one domain running on the puniest DigitalOcean droplet. I say I have a weekend to spare on silly stuff. The easiest choice is to write some Terraform. Yet come to think of it, is it still an obvious pick in 2022? I've never written anything too complex with it but having heard so much backlash against Terraform language, is it time for something new? The answer turns out to be a yes. The IaC solution for me in 2022 is Pulumi. It has a catchy name, a base for a good dad joke for a Finn. Besides that, Pulumi has some attractive qualities to it. It is declarative ...

A recent programming puzzle from Wunderdog caught my interest for one simple reason: it had the word wave file in it. Music and audio-related technology is something close to my heart. Besides, I have not had a DIY project related to music in a while, so why not look into it. The conundrum is straightforward. A wave file contains morse code, and one must decode it to dash and dot letters. The choice of technology is free. A pragmatic developer would look into some popular audio processing library - in my case, something written in go - and write a simple program. I had something different in mind, though. I've recently read The Art of PostgreSQL book and done some exercises in more advanced Postgres features. Why not apply the lessons learned in morse code parsing? The outcome is Endeavour , a no-frills Python wrapper + some exotic SQL window functions. It is neither fast nor pretty, but it proves that analyzing waveform files with SQLite is possible.

If you ask a random Finnish web developer to detail the projects they have worked on, I bet YLE (Finnish public broadcasting company) comes up. If you further ask to rank the projects, it would likely score high. The devs I've talked to and the Yle talks I've listened to have convinced me that taking a gig in Yle is indeed one of the most remarkable things to do in Finland. I'm not sure, but I think a US developer might not see working for the PBS as their career highlight. As a taxpayer, especially working in IT, it is fantastic that Finnish talent works on major, often publicly funded, megaprojects. The digital services are made well, robustly, and rate among the world's best. The developers enjoy working in such places because that all-knowing mentor colleague is sitting next to you. There are few Twitters or other desirable "web-scale" projects available locally. Not incidentally, this means that the barrier of entry is high to get these jobs. The Finnish ...

No recap of lessons learned this year. Instead, here is a collection of some of the best music from 2021. Proud to say that I succeeded in my goal of listening to more Finnish records! Shoutout to Radio Helsinki and its feature programs for keeping me on that path. Albums and EPs Handshaking - Garden Clogs Seeing Fedja Kamari perform live was one of the most memorable experiences this summer. The song "Näin kai taas lankesin" even in a formidable seven-and-a-half minute length, is a masterwork in tension-building and incidentally my most listened tune of the year. Richard Dawson, Circle - Henki Dawsons falsetto started to catch my ear while listening to the Finnish indie Spotify list. Slowly it began to grow on me. The rough, unpolished sound of the Circle with its unbridled energy makes me grin. Ichiko Aoba - Windswept Adan The soothing voice of Aoba's gives me the chills. Her impressive upper range combined with a dreamy flute produces a powerful emotional experience. T...

The Advent of Code in Elixir continues to be a humbling experience year after year. One of my weaknesses in programming puzzles and, in general, is a lack of intuition on which common collection operations to use. Or, to be more precise, since I don't know them intimately, I don't know when to apply them in code. It is way too often I get feedback on a code review on  why do you do this thing with a plain map or reduce while you could use this and that helper function . Often, one can replace a custom function with a more expressive composition of well-known "stock" functions. I think a recap is in order. I enumerate in this post the most useful ones for me - or at least those I get the most feedback from. These are indeed useful even in the basic CRUD app!  I took the names from Scala and Elixir standard libraries and checked that functions with similar names exist in Lodash and Ramda JS external libraries Chunk/Group/Split/Partition Make a list of lists based on a f...