Futurice Tech Weeklies

Still remember mid March? Most people were still working at the office, and the national pastime was hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer? Me neither, seems a lifetime ago.

In the beginning of the lockdown, nobody had any idea how quickly the novel coronavirus was spreading in Finland. Many - including the Health Security Director of THL - were calling for an app to crowdsource symptom data from the general population, in the hopes that it could be used to track the spread of the epidemic. Futurice, in close collaboration with Helsingin Sanomat and medical experts, was one of those who answered the call. In this talk Jarno will go through the technical implementation of the resulting oiretutka.fi service.

Presenter: Jarno’s Oiretutka

Still remember mid March? Most people were still working at the office, and the national pastime was hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer? Me neither, seems a lifetime ago.

In the beginning of the lockdown, nobody had any idea how quickly the novel coronavirus was spreading in Finland. Many - including the Health Security Director of THL - were calling for an app to crowdsource symptom data from the general population, in the hopes that it could be used to track the spread of the epidemic. Futurice, in close collaboration with Helsingin Sanomat and medical experts, was one of those who answered the call. In this talk Jarno will go through the technical implementation of the resulting oiretutka.fi service.

Presenter: Jarno’s Oiretutka

Maybe you are familiar with using Content Delivery Neworks, or CDNs for short? Maybe you have even used them yourself? Or maybe this is all news to you?

Let’s have a talk where we look into CDNs under the hood. What are they, who are they, why should you use one (or maybe should not), and how do they work? The CDN landscape is also changing, so we’ll dive into that a bit.

And we’ll go through why you shouldn’t build one yourself.

Presenter: Jyrki Pulliainen

Maybe you are familiar with using Content Delivery Neworks, or CDNs for short? Maybe you have even used them yourself? Or maybe this is all news to you?

Let’s have a talk where we look into CDNs under the hood. What are they, who are they, why should you use one (or maybe should not), and how do they work? The CDN landscape is also changing, so we’ll dive into that a bit.

And we’ll go through why you shouldn’t build one yourself.

Presenter: Jyrki Pulliainen

Wikidata is a community project with the goal to store all of the world’s knowledge in a machine readable format. This data can be viewed, edited and -most excitingly - queried by everyone. In this talk I will show how the Wikidata Query Interface allows us to ask questions about the world around us and can help us explore these with automatic interactive visualisations.

To do so, I will introduce the Wikidata project and explain how data is modelled in it. With this knowledge we will go on to learn about the SPARQL query language which allows us to write queries to Wikidata. We can then use the Wikidata Query Builder which is an online interface that turns queries into timelines, tables and other interactively explorable visualisations.

What kinds of queries can we expect? The world’s biggest cities with a female mayor. A map of German election districts coloured by winning party (or gender, or age, …). An interactive timeline of politicians who became federal ministers. Handball player nick names… (Almost) everything is possible with Wikidata!

Presenter: Knut Hühne

Wikidata is a community project with the goal to store all of the world’s knowledge in a machine readable format. This data can be viewed, edited and -most excitingly - queried by everyone. In this talk I will show how the Wikidata Query Interface allows us to ask questions about the world around us and can help us explore these with automatic interactive visualisations.

To do so, I will introduce the Wikidata project and explain how data is modelled in it. With this knowledge we will go on to learn about the SPARQL query language which allows us to write queries to Wikidata. We can then use the Wikidata Query Builder which is an online interface that turns queries into timelines, tables and other interactively explorable visualisations.

What kinds of queries can we expect? The world’s biggest cities with a female mayor. A map of German election districts coloured by winning party (or gender, or age, …). An interactive timeline of politicians who became federal ministers. Handball player nick names… (Almost) everything is possible with Wikidata!

Presenter: Knut Hühne

Nowadays many projects do not use a traditional backend any more, but have moved their logic to FaaS (Function as a Service) like AWS Lambda. The core idea is that you don’t have to manage a server, but instead you just upload code and it will be executed on some event. Normally AWS only supports Nodejs, Python and a few more languages for this service. But with custom runtimes, we can deploy any language!

In this Tech Weekly, I will show how you can write a stateless service (in our case a telegram bot) in Haskell and deploy it to AWS Lambda with Terraform.

Presenter: Jan van Brügge

Nowadays many projects do not use a traditional backend any more, but have moved their logic to FaaS (Function as a Service) like AWS Lambda. The core idea is that you don’t have to manage a server, but instead you just upload code and it will be executed on some event. Normally AWS only supports Nodejs, Python and a few more languages for this service. But with custom runtimes, we can deploy any language!

In this Tech Weekly, I will show how you can write a stateless service (in our case a telegram bot) in Haskell and deploy it to AWS Lambda with Terraform.

Presenter: Jan van Brügge

Have you ever ended up in a situation where you need to do a small change to an old TS/JS app that no-one has touched in months? Quite often, in these situations, the app does not work anymore, because of a change in a dependency or a dependency of a dependency. This is why http://npmplease.com/ exists. The JS ecosystem is inherently broken. There are cases where malicious packages have made thousands or millions of projects stop working.

In this presentation, Olavi will talk about how to avoid ending up in a huge mess with your node_modules, and how to handle dependencies in a future-proof way without loosing your time and energy waiting for “npmplease”.

Presenter: Olavi Haapala

Have you ever ended up in a situation where you need to do a small change to an old TS/JS app that no-one has touched in months? Quite often, in these situations, the app does not work anymore, because of a change in a dependency or a dependency of a dependency. This is why http://npmplease.com/ exists. The JS ecosystem is inherently broken. There are cases where malicious packages have made thousands or millions of projects stop working.

In this presentation, Olavi will talk about how to avoid ending up in a huge mess with your node_modules, and how to handle dependencies in a future-proof way without loosing your time and energy waiting for “npmplease”.

Presenter: Olavi Haapala