AWS Finland September Meetup at Knowit

After the summer break, the AWS User Group Finland meetup season kicked off on Thursday September 4th at Knowit’s Helsinki office on Kansakoulukuja. Doors opened at 17:00 and the event started at 17:30. RSVPs filled up quickly once we opened registration, and 68 people came out for the first event of the autumn season – a strong showing right after the holidays.

Rolf Koski, now CTO at Elexive, delivered a talk on AI-assisted development of business-critical workloads, focusing on a spec-driven workflow in AWS Kiro. It was a practical look at how AI tooling is starting to change the way we build and deploy on AWS, and the topic generated plenty of discussion and follow-up questions. Niklas Westerstrahle, AWS Tech Lead at Knowit, followed with a re:Inforce recap, walking through the highlights from AWS’s security-focused conference. Security topics always draw engaged audiences, and this was no exception.

There is always a particular energy at the season opener. People are rested, they have been tinkering with things over the summer, and they are eager to reconnect with the community. The conversations felt fresh and enthusiastic, and the discussions carried the momentum well into the evening past the official 21:00 end time.

September turned out to be a double-header month for the user group, with a second meetup already planned at SOK later in the month. The community clearly has no trouble maintaining momentum heading into the busy autumn conference season.