Happy new year
Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #86, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
To follow the series, you can subscribe here. A new NordLetter will land in your inbox every Sunday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read previous editions here. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed.
You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.
2025 recap
Good bye, 2025! What a year that was.
I am starting a new thing here (not entirely new), a recap of everything that I did and some things that happened to me. Everyone does it. So why not.
Work things
I am still at TCS. Toward the end of the year, my role has shifter a bit. I have tilted toward the dev side more. I am excited to work on new tech.
I don’t know if it is technically a work thing, but it’s work-adjacent at least. This was the year, I embraced Meetups (both the app and the events). I have written about them in the past, maybe I will create a tag for it. I have enjoyed the Vibe Coding events the most. I am looking forward to more of these in the coming year.
Writing
I published A year of mornings. It was a big thing, a big goal I had, since forever. I learned a ton - about self-publishing in general, about ISBNs, and getting ISBNs, about designing a book, the differences between formatting for a physical book vs an ebook.
I started hosting Shut Up & Write (on a hiatus because of our move and year end). It started as mostly a way for me to block an hour and a half each week to write. But I met some interesting people along the way.
I moved my blog from Ghost to Astro generated markdown files this year. I wrote about it while I was doing it. I started that in May and am still not done completely. But I guess I will never be done with it fully. I will change. I will have new ideas about how things should look and function. But it is done now - this version of it.
I posted a NordLetter almost every Sunday. I continue to write how I want to on my blog. I have a 31 consecutive week streak active right now! Writing helps me think. My website provides me a space to do that out in the open. It also leaves me a place to say hey, look at the books I read - they are so awesome! Everyone should read more. I read 37 books this year.
AI stuff
This was the year when AI started popping up everywhere. Why is it in my recap? Because the reason I decided to move my blog, because I felt I finally could outsource the coding to someone(something?) else and think about how I actually want things to be.
Claude is my agent of choice. I settled on it after testing everything. OpenAI has nice UI, but they seem evil. I don’t know why. Gemini has a bad UI. I could never make it work.
Personal things
I performed at India Day this year! Both the act of performing and the countless training that went into it was awesome.
I voted in a municipal election here in Finland. The person I voted for did not win, eventually but whatever, that was not the point. Voting was the point, for me at least.
We visited Manhattan. It was a great trip, other than the bouts of illness almost all three of us had, at different times. NYC is so damn massive - no city like it. But the public services are meh, especially coming from Helsinki.
Prerna started her Masters at the University of Helsinki. This is her news not mine. But there are no strictly my or her news in our household. Everything is shared.
We moved to the campus, thanks to this above bit of news. My office is 10 mins from here. Savya’s daycare is like a 5 minute walk from home.
Raising Savya continues to be at the same time so damn tough and so damn joyful. He has grown (starting to speak now) and every new day is a new day with him.
Closing notes
A funny thing about looking back at how the year went was that you realise you only truly remember like the past month or so. I guess a roundabout way to say I am thankful that I have a place to look back at, a place where I make notes, which allows me to remember. That and the photos library.
I had a good year. There were some bad things too. But that happens. Everything passes if you have good company. And I have the best company.
On new year
There were a lot of firecrackers going off during the new year celebrations, which was a bit surprising to me. It felt like Diwali for a brief 10 minutes or so.
There were people bursting crackers during the evening while I was walking. The next day there was a nice pile of burnt boxes and crackers kept next to the dustbin.
That pile is still there.
It finally snowed this week. I love it. I will not love it after it rains and the ice gets slippery. But December had not felt like December till this point. It finally does now.
/five things to share
1. 2025: The year in LLMs by Simon Willison
My tools.simonwillison.net collection of HTML+JavaScript tools was mostly built this way: I would have an idea for a small project, prompt Claude Artifacts or ChatGPT or (more recently) Claude Code via their respective iPhone apps, then either copy the result and paste it into GitHub’s web editor or wait for a PR to be created that I could then review and merge in Mobile Safari.
I have been doing this a lot this past year as well. Most of the site was done this way. First using cursor, then Codex and finally using Claude.
2. Art, Money, and AI - Hugh Howey
The writing brain is bemused or ambivalent. It finds joy in writing and sees AI writing not as a threat but as something completely different, not the same game, not in the same universe. So there’s no threat. If a person wants to create a book entirely with AI, the most a writer brain might feel is the confusion over why someone would want to deprive themselves of the unique thrill of noodling it on their own. But an enlightened writer might realize that not everyone is looking for that thrill. Some people just want to read a book that doesn’t already exist, and however it gets created is not important to them. The book is the thing. Not the process.
3. Elif on the How I write podcast
I absolutely loved listening to Elif on the How I write podcast. Maybe David should have more female writers on the podcast.
It was riveting. They talked about writing of course, and censorship and nature - there was this beautiful anecdote of nature being pregnant in April. It made me emotional for some reason. I loved it.
4. A ‘tediously accurate scale model’ of the solar system
Space is scary! The scale of it is mind-boggling. Sometimes, I catch myself looking up at the sky and wondering. Then I pull myself back from the edge of the abyss. Space is scary.
This is an accurate model of the solar system. I saw it on mobile and as you keep scrolling you realise most of space is just that empty space.
There is a button in the bottom right, click on it and something fun would happen.
5. I started reading Things become other things by Craig Mod
I had reserved the book at Helmet. I love hardcovers and this is one. I will have more to report once I have finished reading it. I have enjoyed all of what I have read till this point.
If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄
Until next week.