About

I'm Tom, a data engineer and software generalist based in Finland. I spend most of my time building tools that collect, structure, and make sense of data — usually the kind of data that doesn't come in a neat format to begin with.

My background is in software development, but over time I've drifted toward the intersection of data engineering and systems thinking. I'm drawn to problems that involve tracking things that change — entities that have histories, records that need to stay accurate over time, datasets where the naive approach works until it suddenly doesn't.

How I got here

A lot of it started with personal projects. At some point I had an old Android phone collecting dust and decided to turn it into a security camera rather than buy a dedicated one. That led to writing motion detection on top of the MJPEG stream it exposed, which led to thinking about how to log and store the events, which led to a database schema question, and so on. Most of what I know comes from following a thread like that until it runs out.

I'm comfortable across the stack in the sense that I'll reach for whatever tool fits. That usually means Python, SQLite or PostgreSQL, and a VPS running whatever I've built. I tend to avoid third-party platforms where self-hosting is reasonable — not for ideological reasons, just because having control over the runtime environment makes debugging a lot easier.

What I write about

This blog is mostly documentation of projects I've built or problems I've worked through. The topics rotate between home automation and DIY hardware, data collection and scraping, database design, and personal productivity tooling. The common thread is that they're all things I actually built and ran into real problems with, rather than tutorials written from first principles.

Consulting

I take on occasional consulting work, usually for small teams or founders who have a data problem they haven't had time to solve properly. If you're dealing with a messy scraping setup, a schema that doesn't handle change well, or a pipeline that works until it doesn't, feel free to reach out.