Entries tagged helsinki

Swimming in a Finnish lake, after some (naked) sauna-time with my new brother in-law (lanko):

(Did I mention that it was cold? So. Very. Cold.)

And that concludes my annual tour of Helsinki, and the very beautiful surrounding scenery, which is largely water-based.

Tags: helsinki, travel, water | No comments

Previously I'd mentioned that we were moving from Edinburgh to Newcastle, such that my wife could accept a position in a training-program, and become a more specialized (medical) doctor.

Now the inevitable update: We're still moving, but we're no longer moving to Newcastle, instead we're moving to Helsinki, Finland.

Me? I care very little about where I end up. I love Edinburgh, I always have, and I never expected to leave here, but once the decision was made that we needed to be elsewhere the actual destination does/didn't matter too much to me.

Sure Newcastle is the home of Newcastle Brown Ale, and has the kind of proper-Northern accents I both love and miss but Finland has Leipäjuusto, Saunas, and lovely people.

Given the alternative - My wife moves to Finland, and I do not - Moving to Helsinki is a no-brainer.

I'm working on the assumption that I can keep my job and work more-remotely. If that turns out not to be the case that'll be a real shame given the way the past two years have worked out.

So .. 60 days or so left in the UK. Fun.

Tags: helsinki, newcastle, travel | 4 comments

So after living here in Finland for 6 months I've now bought a flat.

We have a few days to sort out mortgage paperwork, and assuming there are no problems we'll be moving into the new place on/around the 1st of March.

Finally I'll be living in Finland, with a sauna of my very own.

Interesting times.

In more developer-friendly news I made a new release of Lumail with the integrated support for IMAP. Let us hope people like it.

Tags: helsinki, life, lumail | 4 comments

For the foreseeable future I'm working for myself, as a contractor, here in sunny Helsinki, Finland.

My existing contract only requires me to work 1.5-2.0 days a week, meaning my week looks something like this:

• Monday & Tuesday
  • I work for the client.
• Wednesday - Friday
  • I act as a stay-at-home dad.

It does mean that I'm available for work Wednesday-Friday though, in the event I can find projects to work upon, or companies who would be willing to accept my invoices.

I think of myself as a sysadmin, but I know all about pipelines, automation, system administration, and coding in C, C++, Perl, Ruby, Golang, Lua, etc.

On the off-chance anybody reading this has a need for small projects, services, daemons, or APIs to be implemented then don't hesitate to get in touch.

I did manage to fill a few days over the past few weeks completing an online course from Helsinki Open University, Devops with Docker, it is possible I'll find some more courses to complete in the future. (There is an upcoming course Devops with Kubernetes which I'll definitely complete.)

Tags: devops, docker, employment, golang, helsinki, open university, sysadmin | No comments