Development

section tag HikinGrounds: A website for outdoor people

| Pekka Helenius |  November 27, 2020 
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I recently opened website HikinGrounds.com. The website is for people looking for various outdoor activities in multiple parts of the world. Currently, the website is in an early stage of its development cycle.

The website is powered by modern Java back-end technologies: Spring framework and Thymeleaf template engine.

First development phase of HikinGrounds.com took a month, and implements user sign up & access control and a SQL database with nearly 30 tables. Although I heavily focused on back-end development in the first phase, I also use some front-end technologies such as JQuery & Bootstrap to provide necessary UI functionality.

section tag OpenNTPD - now with OpenSSL support

| Pekka Helenius |  August 2, 2020 
Updated:  January 21, 2021 
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For a few weeks, I've been working on implementing OpenSSL support and vastly improved configurability to OpenBSD-based NTP daemon OpenNTPD. Both of which I have done now. OpenNTPD is written in C. See the implementation on GitHub - openntpd-openssl.

I run a Linux server infrastructure with time-critical daemons such as Kerberos and Bind9 DNS server. Therefore, I see it's essential to have a local, secure NTP server software.

section tag TinyForest - Self-developed automation system for home

| Pekka Helenius |  April 9, 2020 
Updated:  April 20, 2020 
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Home automation is a large field with many market products available. TinyForest is another home automation system, developed and designed from scratch for various target environments, written in Python 3 and ReactJS. In time writing this article, TinyForest core system is fully functional, and further improvements are planned. It adapts to multi-sensor and multi-device configurations, and can handle everything from irrigration and heating to light controls.

section tag SQL database planning, development & usage

| Pekka Helenius |  February 2, 2020 
Updated:  February 11, 2021 
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Excel spreadsheet data processing is a familiar approach for everyone to handle local client data sets. However, for server-side data handing, centralized SQL databases are used. More modern NoSQL techniques are even better for big data due to horizontal server scaling possibilities.

In this post, I cover a basic SQL database lifecycle from client requirements specification to detailed database use and data analytics, using a fictional game tournament service as an example platform.

section tag Automating Windows Active Directory deployment

| Pekka Helenius |  October 8, 2019 
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Have you ever wanted to take a cup of coffee while installing Windows Active Directory?

I recently had one this kind of task which is why I decided to give control for semi-automated PowerShell modules & scripts, written from scratch. System administrator should supply parameters for the installation process to use. Otherwise, deployment of the whole AD: fully automated.