Rihards Steinbergs

The day after Talkoot can go many ways, but usually it’s more relaxed, and in some cases might require some recovery and relaxation.

Which was the case for me.

I did however end up going for multiple and lengthy walks (some of them with our dog). Got to practice my car driving (only got my license at the beginning of this year), and most importantly setup a home (remote?) office that isn’t at home to reduce distractions and yet still not to have to travel all the way to the physical office.

Now there’s home office, remote office, and office office. Productivity!

Talkoot, as defined by Wikipedia, “is a Finnish expression for a gathering of friends and neighbors organized to accomplish a task”. In practice this means that housing associations, club houses, parishes, and other groupings organize together for a day of voluntary work. The work can be anything from raking leaves, minor repair work, cleaning & organizing, to bigger tasks like renovating common areas or even construction.

Many countries across the world have this concept, of course under a different term, for example Meitheal in Ireland, Dugnad in Norway, Mutirão in Brazil, and so forth.

In Finland it was where I experienced it myself for the first time.

In our housing association it typically includes the usual Talkoot tasks. Getting common areas ready for winter or summer, cleaning, organizing, moving furniture indoors for winter and outdoors for summer, pruning and trimming bushes, but also bigger, and as we call them “special projects”. This could be things like fixing outdoor stairs, planting trees, fixing and renewing garden furniture.

What I really like about it though is that not everyone can contribute to the actual work for whatever reasons it might be, but people are always welcome to contribute in other ways and they are just as valid and appreciated as the actual work. They may contribute food for the talkoot party, or act as a baby-sitter, or take care of other things that would otherwise be left undone because of Talkoot taking up time.

Once the tasks that were planned are either completed or postponed until next Talkoot, it’s time for a gathering which usually involves BBQing sausages (or at least food, snacks, and drinks), followed quite often by communal shared sauna. Which might or might not be your thing, but it certainly brings the community together.

Most of Saturday was spent at Talkoot and it’s one of many things that I love about Finland.

Today started as most days tend to, wake up, get ready for the day ahead, take Ahto for a walk. Business as usual wasn’t meant to last though, as reports from a client at work starting coming in that their site was slow and was even showing time out errors. We’ve seen this happen before so I know what to do and how to fix it.

So it gets fixed.

Only to be followed by another set of same error messages, but this time for a different client. Luckily the errors were coming from a third party and there was nothing we could do, and they did end up getting resolved by the third party.

Two rough, stressful, and annoying instances on a Friday, but you get used to that kind of thing.

What you don’t get used to though is using Excel and Word, especially when you have to use them both. Moving data from one to the other. My ears are getting hot from just thinking about it. How absurdly horrible those two things are, and just how frustrating it must be for a person who isn’t tech savvy to fix those issues, and it’s not just formatting issues. Random invisible character and cell divisions that appear and you can delete them by deleting the content… I’ll stop there. ARGH!

On a more positive side of things, I’ve been updating and improving this site in the evenings, and even have an idea for a blog post that I really want to write. It needs some research and thought first though.

Warning: this is less of a journal entry, more of a tech related rant about documentation and documenting. Back to usual style entries tomorrow.

Does it still count as a journal entry for today if I intend to talk about yesterday’s frustration? I suppose since I’m still thinking about them today, it does.

Running your own infrastructure, be it just a simple Raspberry Pi server in your closet, a cluster of Kubernetes in a cloud, or a virtual machine somewhere on the other side of the world can be exciting and worthwhile. Think of all the things you’ll learn and all the costs that you’ll save.

Until you don’t.

I’ve been running and maintaining my own server now for close to twenty years. The very same server that hosts this journal, and all of my other projects like UploadPie, multiple WordPress installations, an analytics platform, etc.

Has it saved me time? Most certainly not. Has it been fun? Sometimes. Has it been cheaper than managed and purpose built hosting? Maybe a little bit. Have I learnt important life skills? Yes, and no.

Would I do it again? Hundred percent.

But knowing what I know now I would do it differently. The biggest difference I’d make is to document everything. Every single thing and change that I make.

Every year — or if we’re more realistic every other year I decide to make some changes. Add a new domain, install some new platform to test, host my latest private project. And that’s where the trouble begins.

How have I configured certbot? What’s the process of adding a new site to my nginx configuration? When and how is logrotate setup. What kind of dependencies do I have in place and how do I even install them? Is it systemctl, service, or something else? apt-get or snap.

And this is what leads to still being awake at almost midnight, trying to make a small change from which path your webserver serves the site from without breaking automated certificate renewals, making sure automated GitHub deployments still work, and that security guidelines are still followed and implemented.

Anyway.

Document your projects as you go, even the small private ones, or you will pay for it every single time.

It has been a long, frustrating, yet ultimately a rewarding day. I’m writing this at half past eleven on a Wednesday. So it best be kept short.

Towards the end of work day, I received an email from a person I hadn’t interacted with or even heard about in quite a while, Derek Sivers. It was regarding my “What I’m doing now” page. He had re-built the functionality behind them and wanted to now if my profile and information was still accurate.

While updating said information, I found myself looking at other “What I’m doing now” profiles and stumbled across a fellow developer in Finland who has been writing journal like entries on his own site for years now.

Every single day.

Journaling is supposed to have a great many positives, and perhaps in one of these journals I’d like to talk about it, but not before I’ve done it for a substantial time myself.

I’d also like to talk about why today was such a frustrating day, but I’ll leave that for tomorrow.

Is this a promise, or an attempt at keeping a daily journal? We’ll see.