Author Archives: Sampo J.

Reverse-engineering old jewelry

Posted on October 23, 2021 by Sampo J.

Why was I up at 00:30 reading an ECMA spec from 1970 and a report from the Union Carbide Corp Nuclear Division? Because I found an old geeky bracelet from our summer cottage and of course I had to decipher it. Continue reading →

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Brace placement

Posted on October 23, 2021 by Sampo J.

Since the C language appeared in the 70’s, holy wars have been raged about how the code should be formatted.  Since then, these disputes have inherited also to languages borrowing the C-esque language style, such as Java, JavaScript and C#. … Continue reading →

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Why you need a localization tester tool

Posted on December 2, 2018 by Sampo J.

I’ve worked with four different translation agencies in different projects. In each case, we have occasionally received some faulty translations, where for example placeholders were missing or incorrectly formatted. This has occurred even when the translator has used a translation … Continue reading →

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UX Fails: Mac OS app switcher (and how to fix it)

Posted on March 25, 2018 by Sampo J.

A year ago, I did the switch from Linux to Mac OS at work. While the initial couple of weeks were painful, I’ve gradually grown to love the Mac environment. It’s a good balance of a Unix-like development environment with … Continue reading →

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Swearing in Unicode

Posted on March 12, 2018 by Sampo J.

Sometimes you just gotta swear, but don’t have the words for it. This is where grawlixes, or symbol swearing, comes in. Continue reading →

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Entropy of a MongoDB ObjectId

Posted on October 7, 2017 by Sampo J.

How hard is it to guess a generated MongoDB ObjectId? Continue reading →

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ISO certification for dummies

Posted on July 4, 2017 by Sampo J.

Wellmo recently received its ISO 27001 certificate, the primary standard for an information security management system (ISMS).  I was closely involved in defining the processes and policies to obtain the certificate, and will share some of my experiences in this … Continue reading →

Posted in Certification, ISO 27001, Security | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Complex plurals

Posted on March 21, 2017 by Sampo J.

Pluralization is a key topic in localization, but its complexity is very often overlooked.  Every localization library supports singular and plural forms, but many languages have more than two plural forms — some even have six different forms! We encountered this when … Continue reading →

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Continuous localization

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Sampo J.

In a lot of development (especially outside the US), localization is a must.  You can have people 100 km away that don’t speak the same language.  Unfortunately localization is often a significant hindrance in agile development and continuous deployment. In this … Continue reading →

Posted in Coding, Localization | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Benchmarking AWS t2 instances

Posted on January 9, 2016 by Sampo J.

A couple of years ago I did some benchmarking on the AWS t1.micro instances.  The t1.micro was AWS’s first performance burstable instance type, which are appropriate for non-continuous CPU usage. The CPU allocation of the t1.micro is not specified anywhere.  In practice the throttling … Continue reading →

Posted in Amazon AWS | Tagged , | 1 Comment