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Leon Mika
Software engineer in Melbourne, Australia.
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  • Found another 20 cent coin from Singapore in my washing the other day. I now think they did come from my 2023 trip to Singapore, as I checked my cash box to see if it was the same coin as last time and I found a $1 SGD coin in there too.

    Three Singapore coins are placed in a row on a textured surface, with one $1 coin from 2012 and two 20 cent coins.
    December 20, 2025 1:00pm
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • Dec 20 - Sparkle

    #12days

    Large blue lettering spelling Milk Bar is displayed on a window adorned with string lights.
    December 20, 2025 8:11am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • 🦆 Dialogue

    Good Banter Not Found

    December 19, 2025 1:52pm
    Reading Time: 4 minutes
    Leon Mika Leon Mika

    Long Form Posts

    Dialogue

    Why yes, I have been reading Gödel, Escher, Bach. Continue reading →

  • Dec 19 - Beard

    #12days

    Auto-generated description: A window advertisement for barber services, featuring prices for buzz cuts and beard grooming, along with reflection of a person taking a photo.
    December 19, 2025 9:54am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • If anyone out there finds me at the gym rocking my new ATP T-shirt, yes I am interested in a job. 😛

    Auto-generated description: A blue T-shirt features a logo of hands holding a hexagonal shape.
    December 18, 2025 4:02pm
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • Some Caution on Using ROWIDs for Primary Keys in Sqlite 3

    December 18, 2025 3:24pm
    Reading Time: 2 minutes
    Leon Mika Leon Mika

    Long Form Posts

    Screenshots

    Relying on ROWIDs in SQLite can lead to reused IDs, causing issues with foreign key cascading deletes, which can be mitigated by using the autoincrement feature despite its overhead. Continue reading →

  • Dec 18 - Evergreen

    Norfolk Island Pine trees on Churchill Island. #12days

    Auto-generated description: A grassy park with picnic tables and tall evergreen trees is bordered by a wooden fence, overlooking a coastal landscape under a cloudy sky.
    December 18, 2025 9:28am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • I just got an email to view my LinkedIn Year In Review.

    Why is that a thing....No one wants that.

    Greg Morris https://mastodon.social/@greg_morris/115735615183681546

    Got curious and took a look at my LinkedIn “Year In Review”. Well okay, I opened it. But when I found out it featured an animated slide show (is this how Instagram Stories work?) that I couldn’t quickly swipe through, I closed it again. Didn’t help that the first slide was “you joined LinkedIn in 2011”.

    December 18, 2025 7:03am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • Whenever I think about the obsticals to progress, such as whether there’s enough material to build the solar panels necessary to decarbonise, I cast my mind back to what experts say about the speed at which we’d get a Covid-19 vaccine. In early 2020, the estimate was 2 years to get a vaccine developed, tested, and distributed: those eggs need to come from somewhere. And what happened? We ended up getting the fastest vaccine ever made. Necessity always breeds innovation. You just need to find that necessity.

    December 17, 2025 11:29am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • Dec 17 - Firelight

    A lucky encounter that someone had a bonfire going when I was out walking a couple of days ago. #12days

    Auto-generated description: A small fire is visible through dense trees in a dark, wooded area.
    December 17, 2025 9:13am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • The results are in. Final tally of my work Obsidian vault:

    • Total notes in vault: 838
    • Daily notes for 2025: 226
    • Vault size: 74 MB

    Vault storage is up 850% from last year, mainly because I’ve started adding attachments.

    December 16, 2025 4:15pm
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • Halfway through my last day of the year, and quite frankly, I’m already checked out. Will try to get one more thing finished then I think I’ll call it.

    December 16, 2025 11:03am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • Dec 16 - Cozy

    One of the earliest photos in my library of our family dog trying his best to be cozy. Taken Oct 2009. #12days

    Auto-generated description: A dog is sleeping on a couch next to piles of clothes and pillows.
    December 16, 2025 9:10am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • Been thinking about the terrible Bondi shooting all day yesterday. Absolutely tragic. Clearly our gun laws are slipping: they’ve been one or two other shootings this year that have disturbed me. The bans put in place in 1996 have helped but I guess we’ve got complacent and let them erode.

    December 16, 2025 5:30am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • Dec 15 - Frost

    It’s summer here in the Southern Hemisphere so all the wintery submissions will have to be for photos taken six months ago. Here’s my entry for “frost”: a frozen puddle taken near “Tuggers” in the ACT. #12days

    Auto-generated description: Frozen ice crystals form intricate patterns on a textured stone surface.
    December 15, 2025 6:48am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • Using Pagefind in Micro.blog to Only Return Posts in Search Results

    December 14, 2025 10:44am
    Reading Time: 3 minutes
    Leon Mika Leon Mika

    Long Form Posts

    When I tried out Pagefind for the first time on this site, I was finding that the results were including more than just the posts, such as the post lists, the stats page, the archive page, and a bunch of other indexed pages. These were crowding out the posts themselves, and I expressed my wish for a way to control the indexing in some way.

    Turns out there’s no need to modify the indexing, you can do this using Pagefind filters. This enables faceted search in that the end user can configure which pages to show in the results, based on arbitrary key-value pairs you as the site author specify in the HTML (I’m not doing a great job explaining this, please click through to the documentation to see how it works).

    Continue reading →

  • Maybe writing code is no longer part of my “core offering” at this point in my career. Maybe it is the “judgement, tradeoffs, intents” and all the other buzzwords people throw around when describing a senior software engineer. Maybe the idea of physically typing out the code is considered a waste of time to some (is one simply “typing out” the code? Are you not planning, designing, verifying, testing? That’s what I’m doing while I’m “typing out”). So maybe you’re right in thinking that I should just throw out my keyboard and let the agents do the coding.

    But I didn’t get into software development to do the buzzwordy stuff. I came because I love to code, to convert lines of text into a living entity. I will use the agents — I find them useful for doing the rote, mundane stuff — but I don’t like the idea of offloading all my coding to them. I’ve seen how they code, and I know I can do better.

    December 14, 2025 7:24am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • 🖼️ Gallery

    Riding The Metro Tunnel

    December 13, 2025 4:15pm
    Reading Time: 2 minutes
    Leon Mika Leon Mika

    Long Form Posts

    Photos

    Galleries

    Checking out the new Metro Tunnel, and taking lots of photos in the process. Continue reading →

  • Been a while since I visited Melbourne University. Good seeing the old haunts again.

    Auto-generated description: A large tree provides shade along a paved pathway beside a multi-story building and a quiet road.Auto-generated description: A red brick building with multiple windows and an arched entrance stands along a quiet, tree-lined street.Auto-generated description: A cityscape with modern buildings, a bus shelter, and a construction crane in the background.

    December 13, 2025 8:59am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • Someone should roll out vending machines that sell pocket-sized tubes of sun screen. At this time of year, such machines would be more useful to me that the ones that vend rechargeable batteries.

    December 13, 2025 8:08am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • iPadOS 26 is still quite buggy. Safari shows visual glitches when I switch over to it, only for them to disappear when I start scrolling. And today, I spent a good few minutes fighting the horizontal scroll-panes in the share sheet to scroll to the bottom. They really need to polish this up.

    December 13, 2025 7:58am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • 🛠️ Doom Text Generator

    Looks like fun. Giving it a whirl:

    Text in Doom-like pixelated font. Message: Am I asking for too much to want obsidian to add multi-cursor support? (Press Y/N)

    Via: Martin Hähnel

    December 12, 2025 3:14pm
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    screenshots

    Screenshots

    tools

    Tools

  • I’ve been thinking about my career recently, wondering what my next step will be. Part of me is starting to feel a little entrepreneurial, actually. I do have an idea for something. May spend my upcoming leave exploring it a little.

    December 12, 2025 6:34am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • One of these days, I really should take a real look at Rust. Had a great conversation with a colleague about the language today and learnt some interesting tidbits, such as Rust being one of the few languages allowed in the Linux kernel (not even C++ can make that claim 😀).

    December 11, 2025 3:37pm
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • From Robb Knight’s most recent blog post:

    Why am I making a blog post with the same information as the Reddit thread? The reasons are twofold:

    1. I’ll probably need to reference this in the future.
    2. I can’t rely on a random Reddit thread (or two in this case) still existing in a months time, let alone a year or more.

    That’s pretty much the same reasons why I repost instructions I found elsewhere here too (with proper attribution, of course). I’d also add that explaining the information yourself helps, just so that you know you know it.

    December 11, 2025 8:37am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • TIL that the publishers of Wingspan has published a similar game called Wyrmspan. Similar mechanics except that instead of birds, you’re tasked with building habits for dragons. Looks interesting.

    December 10, 2025 8:09pm
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • I’ve yet to ride the new Metro Tunnel (hopefully this weekend) but I did get a sneak peek of State Library concourse. Looks amazing. Looking forward to seeing the actual platforms.

    Auto-generated description: A modern train station features digital screens, advertisements, and passengers near ticket barriers.Auto-generated description: An indoor view of a modern transit station features a long escalator with people ascending and overhead signs guiding commuters.

    December 10, 2025 4:09pm
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • All the recent talk about Warner Brothers and Netflix has got me wanting to listen to Paul Simon’s Graceland. Why? Because the vinyl record we had when I was quite young was published by Warner Brothers and had the classic WB logo on the label. I knew how to operate the record player at the time, and it was one of the few albums I put on myself.

    December 10, 2025 6:48am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • I wonder which is harder: learning everything there is to know about Kubernetes, or starting a successful business where you don’t need to use Kubernetes.

    December 9, 2025 1:16pm
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • Trying Out Pagefind in Micro.blog

    December 9, 2025 7:21am
    Reading Time: 2 minutes
    Leon Mika Leon Mika

    Long Form Posts

    Screenshots

    Setting up Pagefind in Micro.blog and some early thoughts using it. Continue reading →

  • 📘 Devlog

    Godot Project - Level 3-2 And Bobbing Water

    December 8, 2025 9:32pm
    Reading Time: 3 minutes
    Leon Mika Leon Mika

    Long Form Posts

    Videos

    Devlog

    Screenshots

    After some distractions, progress on a Godot game level is underway, focusing on design elements like a generator sprite and a dynamic water mechanic. Continue reading →

  • Pro tip: success in writing partly includes knowing your audience. Even if it’s an audience of just one (yourself) but especially if you know it’s for an audience of others. Some empathy in seeing how they’ll interpret your writing will go a long way.

    December 8, 2025 4:07pm
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • From the bridge.

    Auto-generated description: A modern city skyline with a river running through it features a pedestrian bridge and numerous high-rise buildings.
    December 8, 2025 6:21am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • The view from Violet Town.

    Auto-generated description: A quiet street features parked cars, bicycle lanes, clear skies, and leafy trees lining the road.
    December 7, 2025 4:04pm
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • Table legs: the natural enemy of knees everywhere. 😫

    December 7, 2025 7:03am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • Dug out my Flutter RSS reader project and worked on it a bit today. The good news is that the release build doesn’t have the janky scrolling, so using Flutter is viable. The bad news is that there’s so much more work to go to make this anywhere near usable as a replacement for Feedbin’s PWA.

    December 6, 2025 10:39am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • If I ever built an RSS reader, I can guarantee you that you’ll be able to follow my progress… on my RSS reader! 😛

    (Although probably not because it’d like be a slow, buggy mess that’ll see no work for a full year).

    December 6, 2025 6:42am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • It seems like my Autumnal cravings have shifted into early Summer.

    Two slices of fruit toast are on a plate next to a small bucket, with a coffee cup and butter packets in the background.
    December 5, 2025 6:08am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
    photos

    Photos

  • “Get out more” goal for December achieved. ✅

    Ending the year much like how it began: with a work event. This time it was the office Christmas party.

    December 4, 2025 7:14pm
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
  • I keep forgetting that Mastodon offers a way to follow posters via RSS. Gives me an opportunity to follow those that post way to frequently for my liking to follow them in Micro.blog. Strips out replies too, which don’t interest me, although I do loose the boosts (and maybe quote posts too?).

    December 4, 2025 9:47am
    Leon Mika Leon Mika
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