Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #106, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
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I was at CITCON on Friday evening and Saturday. The meetups are usually blog posts on my website. But we are making an exception for CITCON. And there are so many things I have to talk about the conference.
Let’s dive in.
About CITCON
CITCON is pronounced Kitcon, like KitKat, with a K.
This was my first CITCON. I heard about it at a Devops event, maybe a couple of months back. I had checked out its website and it had seemed interesting then. So, here I was.
CITCON is a open spaces event, which means that there are a small set of rules and then the rest of the event is designed by the attendees.
I arrived at the venue in Helsinki, a little bit later than the start time at 18:00. I had walked from Hakaniemi station, as Prerna and Savya departed to a party in Espoo.
At the registration counter, I was given a choice to pick between a black or a white lanyard, based on whether I was OK to get my picture clicked or not. I picked black. I was going to click a ton of pictures. And also a piece of paper I could scrawl my name down on. I did. I also got two drink coupons. And then I moved to the basement.
I found a few familiar faces there already. We talked. I then moved on to the big room. There was a slide-show going on the two walls up at the stage, showing pictures from previous CITCONs.
We settled down eventually.
The hosts - Jeffrey and PJ started the event in earnest. They were charming, warm and funny. They explained what the event was, what the rules were, who the sponsors were and then we were off to the races.
We sat in a circle in the big room and one of the things they did after explaining things was go around the circle, as everyone did three things - give your name, how you came to the event and what was the one burning question you had.
My burning question was what would we do with the pile of cards at the centre of the convention. Would there be some fun thing to do with them. Turns out no, it was just flourish.
The rules of CITCON
- Every meeting will have three roles - the person who gave the topic, a scribe to take notes and put it up on the wiki and the people who are in the meeting.
- Anyone can propose a topic. You don’t need to have ppt ready before the talk, etc. You fill out the title on a post it note. Introduce the topic, answer some questions (if anyone has any) and then stick the note on the schedule.
- If you had more than one topics, you could announce one topic at a time and then went to the back of the queue and started again.
- After the topics were proposed, you would go and mark the talks you were interested in attending.
- Similar topics could be combined, the topics could be moving around even a hour before it was supposed to start.
- And finally, the law of two feet. If you did not like a presentation - for whatever reason - you could get up and leave.
I was not planning on presenting any topics. I had gone there as I usually do, just to listen to people and interact with them. But Antti talked about how juniors become seniors in an AI first world and I got in a line and proposed my topic - how to learn with AI.
There were snacks and drinks in the lobby outside. As some people went to find the topics that interested them. Some of us went outside and had some snacks.
I had salad with raspberry dressing and a few of the spinach thingies.
Then I went and marked some talks I was interested in - including my own.
About the events
There were five one hour events scheduled in five different rooms you could choose from. I did not really use the law of two feet, so I attended five events. People did move around and so their mileage may vary.
I reached the venue at 09:00. I had some veggie bagels and coffee, while talking about AI, writing, the parallels between SaaS apocalypse and what the music industry had already gone through.
Soon it was time for the first discussion of the day.
1. How AI Impacts Team Dynamics
- A sense of camaraderie from co-workers complaining about the tool
- Code is written by someone else, so people can talk about it without feeling like they are stepping on toes
- AI is accelerating whatever team dynamics existed - so where people used to discuss earlier, they discuss more. If teams were insular, they are more insular now.
- In a team, there seems to be a rising competition to build the thing that works.
- POCs can be built by a single person - so its more insular
- Roles are merging - kind-of - with designers pushing code to production - who gets woken up when there is a production issue
- what happens if you port your app to a new technology and no one knows it - if the junior dev picks it up fast, how would the senior dev react
- Do we devote more time to training/mentorship?
- One signal could be if the junior dev is in a loop - asking question to an agent - get an answer - ask a question again
2. Hands-on AI frameworks speedrun
There were a few options:
I picked Superpowers.
The new thing it did for me was build a local development server to show mockups etc. I don’t know if it was powered by this framework or not. I think it is. I saw the project structure and could see a directory with the relevant files. Interesting.
What I did was run till the implementation plan step in a single chat but then the implementation thing I started in a different chat using subagent driven deployment.
I could have maybe split the earlier steps as well. So after specs I could have created a different chat perhaps.
We broke for lunch after this. I had some salad, rice noodles and some tofu in peanut sauce. We ate outside as it was sunny outside. Just the perfect sort of weather. I gave some suggestions on where to do touristy stuff at, to one of the attendees, who was here with their family.
Then we were back for the third session of the day. I was confused between the one I went to and Don’t start with AI.
3. Your AI platform is missing 5 things
- Governance
- Who can create agents
- What can they access?
- How do you maintain control?
- Integration
- How do agents connect to systems?
- Where does work actually happen?
- Observability
- How do we understand what the agents are doing?
- Multi-agent collaboration
- What becomes possible when agents start working together?
- Deployment sovereignty
- Can the platform run where your business requires it to run?
Then the discussion.
4. AI learning
When interviewing how do you figure out if people actually know stuff and not just using AI to answer questions? Maybe a change in how interviews happen? Like these days people are put in front of an AI agent and asked to use AI to solve a problem.
Train on thinking models - system thinking.
Get a bigger picture explanation from the model then dig in as needed.
Challenge the junior during code reviews - whether they understand what they wrote. Helping them learn to think critically.
Figure out how can you add friction that causes the learning.
Set up feedback loops. Add instructions and agent sets up a retro. Explaining what it did so you learn something. Going back and forth with the model about the decisions to make.
We are moving up the layers of abstraction - maybe we don’t need to learn to code anymore.
5. Is true ownership dead?
Ownership should be shared - ideally with business. Technical implementation ownership could be with an engineer, but true ownership lies with business.
People will continue to have ownership because AI is a tool, it can’t be held responsible.
As in the earlier discussion in the morning. AI just accelerates the situation in the company.
What level of attention would you pay to the things you’re building. Like if it is a UI thing would you test the hell out of it when compared to maybe something like financial transactions.
Wrap up
We sat around in a similar circle as Jeffrey and PJ thanked the sponsors and us for making this event a success! We all talked about our Aha moment from the event. Mine was from the hands-on session. It was different from what I had expected it to be. There was no hand-holding. I just did this thing I was thinking about doing for the past few months and it worked out beautifully.
We went for dinner at The Train Factory after that. I walked to the venue with Peter. We talked about platform stuff, about the hands-on session he could not attend and some other things. We reached the venue but had to roam around trying to find the place. We eventually did.
The place was nice and charming, but still a bunch of it is under construction. There were a few eateries open - 4 - with one already closed and out of food.
There were two long tables reserved for our group. We ordered some drinks and then talked.
We talked about language, the etymology and history of it. We talked about the Finnish language and how or why it had survived. I asked Claude to help me learn Finnish - based on someone’s comment that Finnish was a language of rules. If you knew the rules there was little ambiguity after that. We talked about history in general. I asked about some recommendations for some channels which did max 20 min videos. We talked about which are the places where you learn the max number of languages as children. We talked about children. We talked about raising them. I heard wonderful stories.
Then the buzzer buzzed, my food was ready. I had ordered veggie momos and noodles. They were both very good. Or maybe I was super hungry.
I left feeling so full and happy. CITCON is awesome. I was glad to be a part of it.
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.
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