I was pretty pissed off by that. I have been debugging why the hell that happens for quite a long time. Then it turns out that it’s not a) my nor b) platform’s fault. And apparently this is not the only string resource that is missing the localization for English and Swedish. Couple of them were actually quite relevant error messages.

Lovely. I was tasked to create a dialog that is shown when the user launches the app. For some reason, it didn't show the button I set it to have. I was seriously questioning my Android development skills until it turned out that the string resource I was using (fetched from a centralized repository where the localizations are managed) was empty for English (as well as for Swedish). Head, meet desk.

Oh dear…

We don’t have such a service. Our offices are located in the Helsinki center, so the company actually encourages people to use public transport as much as possible. But thanks to the strike, like nicely reminded, it would have taken a lot of time to get to work. I could have either walked 14 km or used 3+ hours to take some funky bus routes and walk a lot from a stop to another. Luckily we can work remotely if needed.

What a week. I worked remotely from home 4 days out of 5 (thanks to sick kids), and on that one day I was taking part in the field test and spent the majority of that work day in trains. The last time I didn’t work remotely was last week’s Thursday.

We don’t, but luckily we don’t need to clear a really large area. The snow shovel that is leaning against the storage room in the picture will suffice for that. Also, we will clear the snow only from the front side of the house from where we get to the door. We leave the backyard untouched simply because we don’t spend much time there now.

Had to clear some snow tonight. We got all that today.

…

Went to do some field testing for the app. Took a train to Tampere, watched the conductor to inspect the tickets using the app, and collected some notes and feedback. Now I’m heading back to Helsinki.

Oh dear, no. I will get mad if I need to stay inside with kids for more than couple of days.

There were several weeks last autumn when nobody was sick. But these first few weeks after holidays are always like these.