Blog on Taavi Väänänen

Wikimedia Nederland organised a new type of event this year, the Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026, which was held last weekend in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

I created the latest Wikipedia language edition, the Toki Pona Wikipedia, last month.

Rumour has it that I might be a bit of a train nerd.

The Wikimedia Cloud VPS shared web proxy has an interesting architecture: the management API writes an entry for each proxy to a Redis database, and the web server in use (Nginx with Lua support from ngx_http_lua_module) looks up the backend server URL fr…

It's that time of the year again: the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 happened last weekend in Istanbul.

Inspired by some friends,1 I too wanted to make a tiny website telling which event I am at this exact moment.

Some parts of my infrastructure run on Hetzner dedicated servers.

The shared web proxy used on Wikimedia Cloud VPS now has technical support for using arbitrary domains (and not just wmcloud.org subdomains) in proxy names.

Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia project for freely licensed media files, also contains a bunch of photos by me and photos of me at various events.

This year's Wikimedia Hackathon was held in early May in Tallinn, Estonia.

I've returned from (very hot and humid) Singapore where Wikimania was held this year.

With Puppet, it's fairly typical to have a directory where all files not managed by Puppet will be automatically purged, as that helps to ensure consistency between servers.

I attended my first in-person technical event last month: the 2023 Wikimedia Hackathon in Athens, Greece!

Wikimedia's Beta Cluster (aka deployment-prep) needs to be replaced with something competely different.

I've been working for a while to make it possible to use Terraform to manage Wikimedia Cloud VPS, and I'm finally happy to announce that for the most part, it's now possible*.

The Wikimedia Cloud VPS platform is powered by the OpenStack platform.

UPDATE: I was a Runner-Up for Wikimedia!