I went to Kochi for my first Dev Sprint. A week of working together, learning from each other and doing the things that are hard to do remotely. Then a few days later, the org sprint in Bengaluru with the wider team. That was the plan.
What I actually got was two weeks of sessions, cafes, alleyways, stamps, a beach, a ferry, several board games and a genuine paranormal investigation.
Sessions at Aikyam: learning things I didn’t know I needed to learn
Our day started at Aikyam Space with a session on AI orchestration in Glific and the new Ask Glific feature. We heard about the use cases the team had identified, the problems they hit along the way and how they thought through them. The bit that stayed with me was the “golden question” using one well-chosen question to check whether the thing you’ve built actually works.
Then came a session on AI evals and Langfuse, which was almost entirely new territory for me. I’d heard of AI evaluation but I had no real picture of what happens behind the scenes to check an output and learn from it. An hour later it went from intimidating to something I could at least hold in my head.
What made it work was that it wasn’t a presentation. Everyone was in it, asking, disagreeing, working it out out loud. It’s so much easier to learn something when you can watch other people think through it too.
As a designer, this was one of the most useful parts of the week. Not the demos themselves so much as the chance to see how everyone is actually working. AI has crept into almost every team and every workflow over the past few months and I keep circling the same question about my own process: where does it fit?
I realized it’s trial and error for everyone. Most process improvements for me don’t come from writing the perfect process down somewhere. They come from trying something, seeing where it breaks and changing it. And when you’re remote, you miss all of that, what someone tried, what broke, what question they’re stuck on. The sprint put it all in one room and gave me space to actually do that.
Meeting the NGOs at Aikyam
The session I enjoyed most had nothing to do with our products.
We spent an afternoon with the two organisations sharing the Aikyam space with us — Olimalar Foundation and Thudippu.
Olimalar works with school students on empathy, feelings and emotions, and on helping them recognise and sit with those feelings. Which, listening to it, struck me as genuinely hard work. Most adults I know can’t name what they’re feeling generally. Explaining anxiety to a 10 year old in a way that actually lands is a real skill.
Thudippu works with dance as a form of expression and a way of learning about the body. Their belief that everyone should have access to dance stayed with me. They also work on reviving dance forms that are slowly disappearing and creating stages for them to exist on.
Both were a long way from the product and technology conversations we’d been having all week and that’s exactly why they landed. It reminded me how many different ways people use creativity, movement, education to solve problems and that you can get so deep in your own field that you forget the others exist.
Sometimes being shown work completely outside your own changes how you look at your own.
Kochi, wonder after work
Almost every evening, we went somewhere.
We’d find a café, walk the neighbourhood, look at old buildings and alleyways, and pick up bits of the history of the place. I don’t even drink coffee and I still somehow ended up invested in coffee, purely because everyone else was talking about it.
I was lucky to have my own unofficial guide. Akansha basically became “Miss Kochi” for the week, she’d prepared an entire map of places to go and things to do, which is the only reason we saw as much as we did.
One afternoon we found a tiny shop selling stamps and coins, and lost almost an hour in it. Completely insane over the stamps. There’s something very satisfying about picking through hundreds of tiny pieces of history, each from a different time and place. We also made it to the beach and took a ferry one evening that turned into the best hour of the week. On one side, the sun going down over the Arabian Sea. On the other, people dancing and singing.
And now, the paranormal activity
On the first night in Kochi, I heard a laugh.
Not a normal laugh. A cackle. The kind of sound that belongs in a film I would never willingly watch, because I hate horror with my whole heart. I told the team the next morning. Nobody believed me.
Some said “It’s a horn.” “It’s someone’s alarm.” “Maybe someone’s just watching youtube.”
Extremely helpful, everyone. Thank you.
I let it go. Mostly. And then on the last day, by pure fate, I heard it again and this time I wasn’t alone. So instead of the several theories, we(others) did the sensible/stupid thing and went looking for it.
A full search party. Grown adults, hunting a ghost, at the end of a work sprint.
And we found the source.
It was a turkey.
A turkey. One week of low-grade anxiety, resolved by a bird with poor vocal chords. I felt relieved and extremely silly at the same time.
(P.S. shoutout to Anusha, my rational roommate for predicting it’s a bird)
Team Sprint – Bengaluru
A few days later came the org sprint. Four days and a completely different kind of energy. We traveled from Kochi to Bengaluru via train. Throughout the journey, there were beautiful landscapes and all I could do was draw to capture their beauty.
Kochi was a small group going deep on one set of problems. Bengaluru was the whole org in one room, which meant a lot of faces I’d only ever seen in a grid of video tiles. That difference matters more than I expected. In Kochi I zoomed in, on process, on handoff, on the specific things I wanted to fix. In Bengaluru I zoomed out. You start seeing the shape of the whole organisation: what other teams are carrying, what they’re worried about, how the pieces fit. It’s very hard to get that from a status update.
One of my favourite moments of the whole trip was designing the celebratory banner and board for Erica’s celebration and having a lovely conversation with her afterwards. It really inspired me on what I want to focus on in my career.
We also had a game night, played The Mind, which will make you feel psychically connected to your colleagues one second and utterly betrayed by them the next. And Codenames, which turns out to be an excellent way to learn how people think. Nobody is being formal while they’re figuring out how WordPress relates to “wind” and “plate.”
What I actually took back
The agenda was only one part of it. Yes, I worked on the things I planned to work on, also learned about AI and how different people are experimenting with all of it.
But I also came back with a lot of small things.
Lessons from each team member, smell of freshly brewed coffee, a tiny shop full of stamps and coins, a visual diary of inspiration, walks through unfamiliar streets, a ferry ride, and a gallery full of sunsets.
This was my second sprint, so I came back knowing people a little differently, not just what they work on, but a bit of their journey, how they think, what they care about. There’s something different about meeting the person behind the messages and the meeting invite.
I came for the work. I left with the work, the learning, the people, a city I’d never been to before and one very loud bird.
