Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #121, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland.
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 to this mail. I am also posting on Mastodon.
Back when we were living in Matinkylä, the Iso Omena library was just across the road from us. The library was open on all days, including the weekends, though the opening hours were different. It was easy to get to the library. That meant I was there every week for one reason or the other.
The closest public library we have here is the Arabianranta Library. It is closed on Sundays, and on Saturdays it closes at 16:00. It does not have any meeting rooms or spaces to sit either. It is beautiful, mind you. But it is also more than a kilometre from home. And it has just meant that I have not used that library as much as I would have wanted to. Or had hoped to.
On Monday, I was close to having a panic attack, or that’s what it felt like to me. Prerna pulled me out of it, by literally pulling me out of my chair, and dragging me to the University library, which is in the Physicum building, which is across the road from our home.
It was my first time going to the library to work. Or do anything, actually. Prerna had shown me the library earlier, and I was under the impression that it was for university students and staff only. It’s not. Anyone can register. So I did, and got a library card as well.
Since that Monday, I have been going to the library almost every day. I like going to the office - going to a place other than home from time to time. I think it’s important to look at other people, talk to them. It’s easier too.
Going to the library has meant that I’ve made progress on the learning plan as well. Sometimes you tend to get inside your head and find yourself unable to move, to get out. Sometimes, all it takes is a change of scenery to fix that.
The last two weeks were full of meetups - four to be precise. I wrote about finding a mentor in NL120. This week I went to two meetups - one organised by the newly formed Platform and Infrastructure Group (previously HUG). I had written then that I had voted for them to be an IaC meetup group. They did! So yay.
The other meetup was organised by the Vibe-Coding Finland group. And like always, I had a great time there.
A common theme running through both these meetups - as expected - was AI. But not in the way you would think. I am recognising more and more the AI-generated slides. Claude mostly. I have seen speakers handle it differently. One speaker at the Vibe-Coding meetup mentioned that this is my slide and this is Fable’s slide. Which was refreshing.
There was an interesting idea that maybe AI-generated code belongs in the platform layer. Because that’s what the platform people have been doing these years - writing spec, getting things out of our brain and so on. It was an interesting thesis.
The other talk I loved was more on ways of working with AI. I loved the prose on that one. And maybe I’ve found a person I could go back and forth with on some of these things. I’ll report back, I guess.
Last night, we were in bed, trying to sleep. Prerna was in the middle on her phone doing something, flanked by Savya and me on either side. And somehow, I started singing. Then Savya joined in. And then we were both singing. Savya in his style, me in my own. And I thought - you are my everyday - both of you.
Savya is sick right now - autumn flu, I guess. The weather is changing, the leaves are falling, winter is coming. And so these things happen. I used to be so worried when he was little about Savya getting sick. The past year at his daycare has just hardened me a bit. Also, he can talk now. So my fear of him not being able to say if he was unwell, is not really relevant any more.
I finished reading Anxious People today. I loved reading it. It is a humorous book, ostensibly about a hostage situation in an apartment viewing after a bank robber tries to rob a cashless bank. But it is about so much more.
I loved the structure of the book - how it was written. I loved that each new chapter felt like peeling layers off of people. Of the author consistently surprising us, or me, at least. Of finding so many wonderful and beautiful love stories. Of so many wonderful and beautiful people.
Go read it!
Prerna is doing some work for an upcoming summit and so she was at Maria01 for a planning thing. When she came back, I had just put Savya in the pram - we were going to go out to walk soon.
It was late, so we decided to take a small walk. We made our way through the many houses in this area, then to our usual small route. As we got closer to the bridge, the underpass with the basketball court and the tram tracks, I could hear music. I told Prerna, “I think there is a concert going on. I had seen them prepare the stage maybe yesterday.”
There was a guard standing some distance away from the place, telling cyclists to slow down. I was worried that they would have blocked the way and we may need to take a different route.
But they hadn’t. They had just parked these big buses and trucks and blockaded the entire thing. There were lights and music and a big disco light hanging from the underpass. It was full of people - so full, in fact, that there were people standing outside the thing on the other side of the tram tracks with their phones out.
Today, we took our usual longer route. Nobody had gone anywhere. There were no events planned. Savya was ill after all.
And as I walked past the shrubbery and the trees, I came upon the calm waters of the bay area. There was a man fishing, a woman sitting on a bench and a couple on the farther bench. And I thought, how peaceful is this!
I would miss the peace.
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.
Subscribe to NordLetter
A weekly newsletter on living in Finland.