As one of the most senior people in the company I work for, my job description includes also a task to participate in employer branding activities. Such activities include attending various events, giving presentations, etc. I have nothing against doing such things, but I have a couple of reservations with it.

The first and foremost ”problem” is that I am currently 100% allocated to a customer project. That means that all my work time is spent on doing work within that project and any work external to that scope, such as attending events and giving presentations, would need to happen outside my regular working hours. That, in turn, is something I currently cannot do as my free time is pretty much fully booked already. Also, I would rather spend the time outside of working hours by relaxing and unwinding from the actual day job.

Alternatively, I could do these external things as part of my regular working hours, but then I would need to take away working hours from the project. While we should have 10% allocation on non-project work in our company¹, which I could more than happily use for events and presentations, I would need a permission from the customer to use my time for such non-project activities.

The second issue I have with the whole ”employer branding” thing is that it can easily become a matter of personal branding. If you give talks at various events about a certain topic, you can easily be ”mistaken” as the expert in that topic, thus mixing up the employer and personal branding activities. This mix-up gets more prevalent in cases where you are the only person (or one of the very few) in the company who knows about that (niche) topic.

Also, participating events and especially giving presentations at the event may become opportunities for other prospective employers to target you as a potential new employee for their company. That, in turn, can amplify the confusion between the employer and personal branding activities even more if one let’s this attention to boost one’s ego.

You might have guessed what my take on the whole personal branding thing is. Yes, I find it actually rather awkward and cumbersome. But I will try to do that anyway. As a part of such activities, I have plans to write about some selected topics to my software blog. So stay tuned.

Tags: Employer branding, Personal branding, Blogging

The title of this post is a question I have been asking myself a lot lately. “Why?”, you might ask. That’s a fair question. Actually, I’m not sure. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I have been working as a software developer for 10 years,¹ a role that I jumped from the academic world where I had only done some small scripts and analysis tools² but no major software applications or tools. Even after all these years as a software professional I feel like I am still a total beginner. In other words, I am suffering from the impostor syndrome.

Here are some things I have done during these 10 years:

• I have developed (objectively) high-quality code using numerous programming languages.³
• The code I have written is used by thousands (or millions or even potentially billions) of users.
• I have learned dozens of new tools and plenty of new programming languages, platforms, and frameworks from scratch just to do the work I was asked to do.
• I have taken care of and looked after integrations within the applications, between different applications running in a multithreaded multi-application system, between the application and a backend, and between numerous backend services.
• I have lead teams and projects of varying sizes and mentored a handful of junior developers in their work.

Reflecting on these things, no wonder my job title is nowadays “Software Architect”. Also, based on these remarks I should definitely not have an impostor syndrome. But still I do. The most probable cause to this is that I feel like I still have a ton of things to learn to be an expert. Also, I don’t seem to have any time to spend on learning those things apart from the working hours that are already filled with other stuff I need to take care of. You probably are getting it now why I feel like a fraud.

So, to the original question: What I am good at? Well, of course this is a totally biased opinion, but I would say that at least in the following things:

• Handling complex projects⁴
• Managing dependencies between various parts of the project both on the code and the product management levels
• Finding (optimal) solutions to a problem
• Aiming of high-quality code
• Leading teams to succeed in their work
• Learning things fast

The last one is not a surprise. One can (and should) expect that from a person who has a post-graduate degree. Learning new things has never been a problem for me as I am inherently a curious person. If I want to learn something, I am willing to do a lot of work to learn the needed skill(s). This applies to, in practice, everything in I do in life, from reversing the car to a parking slot⁵ to learning a new programming language or a new musical instrument. Therefore, I can do whatever is needed, which makes me a pretty versatile employee in the IT business.

How about my previous career, academic research? Do I miss it? Yes and no. I do miss the idea of doing research, finding solutions to a problem, tweaking the solution and trying out what kind of changes it would produce. Also, I miss my research subject, audio signal processing, as I love music and musical instruments, and I am still very, very interested in how human hearing works. What I do not miss at all is the constant begging of funding. This lack of money was obviously reflected on the pay as well. It seemed that the researchers were required to work with a salary that is peanuts compared to what one can get from the private sector. Even though doing a work that one loves might be a good reason to accept a lower pay than otherwise, it is unacceptable how so highly talented people like researchers are paid.

Was I a good researcher? Yes, I think I was. One of my papers got awarded and my publications were considered to be really good by my peers. Was I among the absolutely best researchers? Obviously not, otherwise I would have gotten funding from everywhere. But as a rank and file researcher, I was pretty darn good. I came up with new ideas and I was able to expand existing knowledge with some new insight. I loved challenging problems and was not afraid of the complex mathematics that was needed to solve those issues. Based on these, I think I was a good researcher. Would I like to return to do research? It depends. With total academic freedom and a decent pay, why not. But with the scenario I described above, absolutely not. I might do some small research here and there, but that will happen on my own terms and, most likely, on this site.

How about my musicianship? Am I a great musician? Hell no! I am just an amateur who has played a variety of instruments. I have known some of them better than others, but I cannot say I am a great musician, a decent hobbyist at most. I have started practicing again but because there was a long break, I will be starting from the basics again. Luckily this time I do have some experience, which should translate to a faster re-learning process. What and how I will be practicing? That is a topic for another blog post…

Tags: Impostor syndrome, Professionalism, Skills

It has been almost 4 years since the last blog post on this site. Though I have had many, many plans for this site, I have not had time to do any of those. I have just been way too “busy”, thanks to life throwing a couple of things at me and squeezing my limited free time to even smaller than before.

But, I am back. And with a thing I teased about almost 20 months ago. Yes, I have now a blog for software things! As the first software blog post, I write how to write safe, re-usable, and testable Bash code. There is also a new RSS feed for the posts on that part of this site. The posts are also included in the main RSS feed, so if you want to get everything I write, feel free to subscribe to that feed. You don’t have to though, in the end I don’t give a damn how many users are subscribing to my feeds.

So, will this “regular” blog be abandoned after this change? No, not at all. I just wanted to have a separate section of the site for software things so that I can keep the Blog for other, more generic things and observations of the surrounding world.

Tags: Website, Blogging, Software

When I launched this blog, I made a promise to myself to not write about politics. The reason was obvious: my opinions are my own and they do not represent the ultimately correct alternative for that particular question/situation/country/whatever. But in this post I will talk about recent[1] development in the politics of the so-called Western societies.

The contents of this blog post have been stewing for a while. The final push to write this post was today’s (that is, November 8, 2016) presidential election in the United States of America. However, this post will not be about the election. It will focus on the rise of populism in Europe (and the USA).

The past times are not coming back

The major selling point of a populistic political viewpoint is during the “good times of the past” everything was better than now. Any progress in various areas of life (like healthcare, overall quality of life, etc.) can be ignored because some, most likely very irrelevant things (may) have changed to worse for some people. The populists pick such things up and blow them out of their real proportions. That is why everything seems to be really, really bad, and only they can Make Things Great Again™.

Similarly, when the world is changing in a big way, the populists oftentimes resist the change and they try to stop the change with legislation. If the populists happen to be in the position where they can make such a legislation, they will do that[2]. If they are not, they will use all their verbal (at least hopefully only verbal) power to attack the politicians in that position[3]. Because their cause always gets popular among their supporters, those people get alienated from the other politicians. This leads to a never-ending loop, where the people trust politicians and the political process less and less.

I have bad news for you who think the populists are right: the past times are not coming back. Life moves forward and dwelling in the good olden times makes more harm to you than embracing the change. Yes, the change may be painful, but if you get through it you will be better equiped for the inevitable future.

“No man is an island.”

That is a excerpt from a poem written by an English poet John Donne. It reminds me of the fact that no choice, personal or political, happens in a vacuum. The word “man” could be replaced by practically anything (a nation, a political action) and the excerpt would be still true. The populists often claim that a political action will affect only this one thing, only locally, etc., but they seem to forget that it has often wide-reaching ramifications they did not take into account, either deliberately or out of pure ignorance.

A common theme in populists’ agenda is a boost to a local economy that has suffered over the years because of global economic changes. Like we people, local economies just need to suck it up and adapt to the changing world. Sticking with the things that made the local economy boom 30, 40, 50 years ago may lead to worsening (local) recession when the world around thrives. For example, if a local mine was closed some time ago because its finances did not make sense to keep it running, it will not be financially viable in the future either. Unless the global economy takes a huge dive. The likelihood of that happening, though? Once again, I have got bad news for you. It is practically impossible to happen. The global economy survives. It will find a way. Always.

Similarly, a political action in one country can cause major global reverberations. Wars have been started because of seemingly minor changes in politics (such as in the attitude towards other nations, nationalities, religions, political opponents). Today, the larger the impact of the political actor to the global economy is, the larger the global ramifications of the action are. Yet, even a small actor can (still) start a world war if they so will.

The world after November 8, 2016

The terrorist attacks in the USA on September 11, 2001, changed the world in a dramatic way. In my opinion, today marks another major day in the history of that nation and, by the global economic proxy explained above, the history of this planet.

Why a Finn is so concerned about the stupid presidential election of a nation he is not a citizen of? For two reasons. First, if Hillary Clinton wins, Donald Trump has said he will blame the political system for crooking the result. If Donald Trump wins, who knows what will happen. Either way, the internal politics of that nation will be a huge mess for who knows how long. In the worst case, if the country gets severely divided because of this, I fear that they will end up having a second civil war. I truly wish the mess does not get that ugly.

Second, I fear the global ramifications when one of the major global political actors is incapacitated due to its internal fighting. How the global economy will be impacted? Will another major actor take a bigger role or will there be a fight for the leadership? What I fear the most is that nations around the world use the result of the election as a reason for boosting nationalism and intolerance. If such things happens, I see that we will be heading towards a new world war. For the sake of the future of humanity, let’s hope that will not happen. Ever.

Tags: Politics, Future

As promised in the Part 1 of this blog post miniseries, this second part will discuss the files this site consists of and how I manage them. As also mentioned in that post, all the pages on this site are static. This post will explain why I have chosen to use static files.

Because it is the year 2016, the technologies used on this site consist of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The content that is “dynamic” (like the latest updates section on the main page) is, in fact, parsed using JavaScript from other static files (that are JSON, XML, or HTML). That is the reason why this site appears to be fairly fast to load. For example, this page weighs only 450 KiB (with all associated fonts, and JavaScript and CSS files), meaning that it should not take long to load over a practical Internet connection.

Static site generator?

Now, the obvious question is which static site generator I use. The answer is simply none. The simple pages (like the main page) are handcoded HTML and I write all CSS and JavaScript by hand. Why I am such a pervert who does not use a fancy-pants WYSIWYG editor and the latest and awesomemest JavaScript wrapper framework? Well, first of all I want to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, not just the ins and outs of those tools.

The only exception to the write-by-hand rule is the blog. The pages for the blog are generated by few Bash scripts[1]. The actual blog post pages, like this one, I compile from (simplified) MultiMarkdown files. Once I am satisfied with the post content, I run one Bash script that adds some MultiMarkdown headers (that is, the common CSS and JavaScript files) to the original file, converts it to HTML using the multimarkdown command, and cleans up the HTML output a bit. That script also generates the needed data for blog subpages (for example the 2016 page) and blog tag pages using a pair of Bash scripts. The post generator script also adds the permalink of the post to the master permalinks JSON file (from which the permalink in the footer, see below, is parsed from) and to the redirect rules used on this site.

On creating the content of this site

As mentioned above, I do not use any fancy editors when I write the content and code for this site. I use just a plain text editor, mainly in Terminal[2] because I have a “coding” setup always open. I could try out some editors that have been designed to this kind of workflow, but I kind of like the simplicity of my current setup.

I try to write HTML5 compliant pages, but I have not fully validated the HTML code on all pages. Similarly, I try to write valid CSS3 cide, but I cannot guarantee 100% validity. I write pure JavaScript (not jQuery or anything like that), and it has been written so that it targets the use cases found on this site. I have written the functionality found in the code in the “minimum viable product” way by doing only the steps that are needed for this site to work as it is today.

As I mentioned in the Part 1 of this blog post miniseries, the RSS feeds are autogenerated using a Bash script. The JSON files that I use to store some data are mostly written by hand. The only exception to that rule is the addition of the permalink of a new blog post that gets added by the publishing script. Why I write my JSON files by hand? The data I store in JSON files is small enough to handle manually. Maybe one day when my site becomes big enough I need to reconsider my workflow and start managing the JSON data using a specialized editor. Yeah, right, like that day would ever come…

Ads, analytics, user tracking

If you have (ever) visited the site, you may have noticed that it is devoid of ads. While the terms and conditions of Kapsi (the Finnish non-profit for Finnish Internet users, that hosts this site) do not allow commercial activities[3], they would allow me to have ads on the site. However, I have decided not to have them. Why? Well, I personally dislike what online ads (and ad networks) have become. Furthermore, ads would never fit to the overall look and feel of the site.

Similarly, I do not have any analytics packages running on this site. I do not like what they do, and furthermore they would bloat the pages, which is something I do not want to do. I value speed and lean site size more than the information of what you do on my site. Besides, what would I do with that information? You came here to find something that you wanted, and you probably found it. If you did not, you most likely can send me an email where you ask about it.

The same reasons apply to social media sharing buttons. They bloat the site and do nasty things in the background. Besides, most likely your browser has existing share functionality built in. Learn to use it, it is really handy. Also, it is more flexible than a button I would need to add on my site.

That is it. This post concludes the miniseries on the technical implementation of this site. It also gives a glimpse of the workflow I use when writing for the site. Hopefully you have enjoyed reading about these technical tidbits.

Tags: Website, Blogging

After I announced my new microblog Blips, I was asked how I implement the feature. Because it is closely tied to the technical implementation of this site, I thought I should write about the complete implementation instead of that one particular subsection of the site.

Here is a blog post that describes the technical solutions used on this site. However, this post does not cover what files the site consists of are or how I manage them. That will be the topic of Part 2 of this blog post miniseries. For this post, it suffices to know that all pages of this site are static and that all the dynamic content is parsed from other static files using JavaScript.

I use the web hosting service provided by Kapsi, a Finnish non-profit organization for Finnish Internet users, included in the membership of the organization. Other services they provide include email hosting, disk space (for remote backups, for example), and IRC access. For technical solution of the web server, feel free to consult the Kapsi pages, where the relevant information is explained (only in Finnish, unfortunately).

Content management and automatic deployment

All the files for the site are managed in a Git repository[1]. That allows me to fix possible screw-ups by reverting individual commits and it lets me to work on the site from any device that has Git installed. Why Git and not something else? When I started this site I was learning Git and wanted to try it out also for this “project” of mine.

At the moment the repository contains both text and binary files. As you probably know, tracking binary files in a Git repository is not the best possible solution. Therefore, I have been planning to move the binary files to a Subversion repository. The migration of the binary files is currently ongoing, but it is not done when this post goes live.

How do I deploy my changes to the server then? The automatic deployment strategy I use was inspired by this blog post. I use a Git post-receive hook written in Bash[2] that pulls all changes pushed to the master branch[3] to the folder that acts as the root of this site[4]. The post-receive hook allows me to track the files that have changed, which is handy for the automatic generation of the RSS feeds of the site.

Automatic generation of the RSS feeds

Based on the files that have changed, the different RSS feeds are automatically generated. For the automatic RSS feed generation I use a set of Bash functions defined in a few files that are also tracked by the repository. The generated feed files are not tracked by the Git (or the upcoming SVN repository).

When there is a new blog post, the post-receive hook calls a Bash function that parses the necessary information from the HTML file and adds it as a new RSS item to the blog and main feeds of the site. However, if a published blog post got updated (or deleted, which is yet to happen), the feeds do not get updated.

Whereas any new blog post triggers the autogeneration of the blog and main feeds, I use a single text file for tracking the Blips. If it was modified[5], a new Blips RSS feed item is created with the contents of the tracked file. This approach publishes only the latest update, meaning that if I have created several commits that updated the file, only the latest version of the file gets published.

Similarly to Blips, the generic site updates are tracked with another text file. While the Blips file will use plain links because they are crossposted to other media, the site updates file will be parsed for Markdown-formatted links before its content is added to the main RSS feed. Also, only the latest update to that file gets published, similarly to Blips.

Crossposting site updates and Blips

As mentioned in the announcement blog post, I crosspost all new items in the Blips RSS feed to my Twitter and App.net accounts. I use IFTTT recipes that take the Blips RSS feed and create the needed updates on the aforementioned services.

The main RSS feed also goes to my Twitter account via an IFTTT recipe, similarly to the Blips. Unlike with Blips, I manually create an App.net Broadcast of the updates to my site using another account. I will then repost, manually again, the autogenerated post using my personal account. I could create an IFTTT recipe for that too, but I do not mind doing the thing manually, especially because the original post was also created manually.

This ends this first post in this miniseries. Part 2 will focus on the how I update this site, the Blips, and so forth. It will be published when it is ready.

Tags: Website, Blogging, Social media networks

This blog post is atypical to me: it is not a long-form essay. But it may be the most important post I will write in a while. Keep on reading to see why.

Relaunching the blog

First of all, I am relaunching my blog. And yes, you are right, this “relaunch” does not come with any major changes to the look of the blog. All the changes are under-the-hood changes that should make the blog more accessible and easier to browse[1]. Actually, some of these changes has been live for a while, so you may have noticed them already[2]. The most notable things are that there is now a main page for the blog that shows a summary of the latest few blog posts and that there are similar summary pages for the various tags I have used in my blog posts.

Furthermore, there is now an RSS feed for the blog that you can subscribe to. That feed will contain only the blog posts, but in case you want to subscribe to all future changes of this site (that are not necessarily announced as blog posts), feel free to subscribe to the main RSS feed. Note, however, that neither of these RSS feeds will contain all my blog posts but they will start with my previous blog post. That means that this blog post will be the second item in those feeds.

I hope this relaunch of my blog will posivitely drive me to write more on the blog. I have written maximum 2 posts per year since I started with this site, and in my opinion that is way too seldom. I am not giving any promises how often I will write, but I hope I can start doing it fairly regularly.

Launching my new microblog: Blips

Alongside with the blog relaunch, I am launching my new microblog, Blips. Why I am creating my own microblog when there are popular existing microblogging platforms, like Twitter and even App.net (that is still alive)? The reason is the very same as for Manton Reece and many other indie web people: I want to own all content I produce. That way I can ensure that everything I write does not go the way of the dodo when the latest and coolest microblogging platform goes belly up[3].

In addition to the main Blips page, the microblog posts will be available as an RSS feed if you want to subscribe to them that way. Unlike the blog RSS feed, the Blips will not be included in the main RSS feed of my site.

Blips will be short, max 140 characters long quick posts that will contain quick comments, questions, et cetera. Why do I call them “Blips”? Because they are short and most likely they are published fairly seldom[4] and at random schedule, they are something relatively small or inconsequential within a larger context[5]. Then why they are max 140 characters long? Well, I think you already guessed…

Reactivating my Twitter account

Yes, you read it right. I am indeed reactivating my Twitter account, @JussiPekonen and I have made it public again. However, you should note, that my tweets will be crossposted Blips and other updates of this site (I will be using the main RSS feed). Furthermore, like my bio says, I will not reply to @mentions nor I will be following anyone. I will, however, receive the mentions and I will read your comments. If you are behaving badly, I will block you. Furthermore, some of the Blips will be posted to my LinkedIn account too, but only when I choose to do so.

What does this reactivation of my Twitter account mean to my App.net account? Absolutely nothing. I will continue using App.net until the bitter end, and I will be replying to mentions there. However, I will be crossposting my Blips also to App.net, which means that my NiceRank may take a small hit, but I think I can live with that. I have not cared about these kinds of things before, so why should I start now?

In summary, this website will become my publishing hub for all kinds of content. Everything[6] I will write will be published here first and crossposted to other media after it has appeared here. If you do not like that, you can stop following me now.

Tags: Blogging, Social media networks, Twitter, LinkedIn, App.net

This blog post was originally meant to be released on my third anniversary on the social media network called App.net, which was on August 22. However, life got in the way and I did not have time to finish the post until now, 2 months after that date.

Unlike a year or two ago, I will not go through what has happened on App.net during the last year. Instead, this blog post was in part inspired by the following articles: Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) by Umair Haque and A Not So Short List of People to Blame for Internet Content Woes by Adam C. Engst.

As it is today, the landscape of social media networks looks depressive. There are a handful of services that have a lot of users and that are considered to be a part of the core Internet experience. Yet, only a couple of them have been able to make the service self-sustaining. The others have just pumped VC/investor funding to the service in the hopes of finding a way it could become profitable without being able to make a positive number under the line.

But there is one thing that is common to all these social media networks: they show advertisements to their users who, in return, get to use the service for “free”. How those ads are displayed to the users depends on the service. Many consider those ads and the intrusive user tracking they do to be annoying, and they blame them to be the reason why they do not find social media enjoyable anymore. I used to be in that camp, but I have found a much better explanation why these free services seem to suck the joy out of the whole social media experience.

In short, the reason is, as Mr. Engst suggests for the ad blocking controversy, we, the people. Because the services are free, anyone can join the service. And with anyone I mean literally anyone. And those people can have whatever agenda they want. And that has lead to situations where one can create anonymous accounts and use them to harass and attack against other people just because they did something the bully did not like. Having a civilized conversation online has become a difficult task and social media networks where one can expect to stay (mostly) safe from abuse are far and few between if not completely non-existent.

The obvious follow-up question for that previous paragraph is Why. I have no answer to that but I may have some ideas why we act like idiots online. One thing that, in my opinion, contributes to the bad behavior is the fact that we humans make everything a race. There is not a thing that we would not make a competition out of. Sports, business, life, you name it. Online we can see this happening with people trying to get the maximum reach (that is, the number of followers), to make the wittiest joke (counted by the number of retweets/likes/whatever, for example), to stir the pot the hardest (that is, result in the biggest number of follow-up posts), et cetera.

Another contributing factor to the horrible online behavior related to making everything a race is that people seem to have unjustly high expectations for everything. No matter what cool things others do and how fast the things become popular, there are always people for whom nothing is enough. This can be seen, for example, every time a new service is launched to compete against a well-established player. No matter how fast it grows, these people keep on comparing it to the 800-pound gorilla that have had a lot more time to gain its popularity. Also, even if people are getting a service/app/whatever for free, they will find any fault, missing feature, and/or lack/slowness of support to be a totally plausible reason to yell at the developer/service provider/publisher/whatever.

Finally, we people are also cheap bastards. That can be proved by looking at what is the dominant business model for online services and publications. Even if there were a paid alternative, let it be superior or equally good, to the free, ad-supported service, people tend to lean towards the option where they do not need to pay a dime. And because the services want to maximize their (ad) revenues, they are willing to get as high number of users as possible, which leads to the situation where the online bullies can run rampant on those services. And now we are back in the original problem.

The title of this post says cannot, not will not. That means that I believe that there is still hope. If we would start acting like civilized adults again, we could make the whole Internet experience much, much better for all of us, and especially for those who have been the target of abuse. Please, prove the pessimists wrong and make this hope come true.

Tags: Internet, Social media networks, App.net