As part of the Summer of Appsterdam, we’re starting a weekly lecture series where developers from here or abroad can share with their fellow Appsterdammers what they’re working on, or what new thing they’ve mastered, and receive speaker training to boot.
For those who’ve worked at Big Fruit, this is based on the Spotlight On program at Apple, with our inevitable Appsterdam twist. It’s meant to facilitate the free flow of technical information between App Makers, while at the same time creating a pool of people who can speak about technology.
Once Appsterdam is full of articulate technologists, we’ll be the place for journalists looking to interview someone, conferences looking for presenters, and universities looking for lecturers. I’ve helped Apple’s engineers get their presentations ready for primetime, and look forward to doing the same for you.
Here in the Netherlands, lunch means sandwiches (broodjes). In the spirit of togetherness, we’re going to do the same thing we did for our hangover lunch and say bring your favorite broodje toppings. Bread, drinks, and that sort thing will be provided by our sponsor.
Which brings me to the part with the details. Lectures will be every Wednesday at 12:30. You’ll come in, make a sandwich, and settle in for an hour long presentation, which will begin at 13:00. There will be 30 minutes of open discussion afterwards, and you’ll be on your way back to work by 14:30.
Appsterdam’s Weekly Wednesday Lunchtime Lecture series will be held at the offices of SourceTAG on the 4th floor of Vijzelstraat 20. They are hosting and sponsoring the event as their way of contributing to the movement. Truly, we are Appsterdam.
I’ll be kicking things off with an introductory lecture entitled “The Appsterdam Way.” The intent is to record these and make them available, so the Appbroaders don’t miss out.
At some point during our volunteer meeting, after announcing the organization had grown too large for all-hands meetings to be our default mode, and after people had broken into groups to work on our Summer of Appsterdam initiatives, I had a really good conversation about that most basic of questions: “What is Appsterdam?”
It, like the question, “Why Amsterdam?” is a hard one to answer, because there are a lot of answers, and the best one depends on who you are. Our movement grows organically according to the talents and passions of its members. We have a lot of initiatives that go in a lot of different directions.
For example, our website serves as a “concert calendar” of events in and around Amsterdam, but we also plan events. We get App Makers together for Meeten en Drinken, but we also offer free work spaces and education. We help people go indie, but we also have a venture fund.
If you try to define the Appsterdam movement by its initiatives, you will quickly run out of words, and the only thread that seems to connect them is Appsterdam itself. Therein lies the greater truth. As a meta-organization, we are not doers, but facilitators.
One good metaphor for Appsterdam is the folk tale of Stone Soup. In a time of famine, when nobody had anything to share, one family put out a huge cauldron of boiling water with nothing but a stone inside, then explained to passersby that it was stone soup, and that there was plenty to share.
Each person who sat down for a meal of stone soup threw something in the pot—a carrot, a potato, a bit of meat—and when the soup was done, they took out the stone, and everyone had a nice meal. We are that way. We take what people are willing and able to contribute. We combine, coordinate, and engineer, and we end up with something nice for all of us.
The purpose of the Appsterdam movement is to bring App Makers together. Our goal is to serve App Makers around the world, and we’ve started that by building a capital in Amsterdam. This is not meant to set off a series of pissing contests over who has the better city. That is the opposite of Appsterdam.
Pissing contests are our biggest enemy. As a developer, I say with the greatest love in my heart, that developers are dicks. Oh, we’re nice to each other, sure, but we’re dicks to most people. Think about it. We insult people who use different languages, different platforms, or even different coding styles. iPhone versus Android. VI versus EMACS. Spaces versus tabs.
Then there are those jerks who can’t even code. We call them biz dev douchebags, marketing douchebags, new media douchebags, the list goes on. We bemoan the dearth of women in our industry, while refusing to hang out with the industries where women actually are.
Our inability to stop picking on each other is holding us back, when threats like patent trolls are looming ready to pick us off one by one. We need to rediscover what we should have learned as lemurs—that if we’re all going to survive, we’re going to need to stick together.
Appsterdam is the first organization that brings together programmers, regardless of implementation detail, marketeers, businessmen, entrepreneurs, scholars, the government, newbies, and anyone else willing to pitch in and be part of a new way of doing technology.
It’s no accident we chose a city with a diverse population whose name stands for tolerance. If you think you get Appsterdam, and you want to have a pissing match about it, you don’t get Appsterdam. We don’t like conflict, and the one thing we don’t tolerate is intolerance.
And we don’t care. We’re bulding a haven for App Makers in the Netherlands because we want to live in that haven. People who have been looking for that, and who are capable of getting along with other people, are welcome to join us here. If you want to fight about it, don’t bother.
The people who get Appsterdam, who will find a first or second home in Appsterdam, are the people who understand that Appsterdam is not a company or a person or a service. Appsterdam is an idea, which has blossomed into a movement, that we are better together—whether you join us here, and build your own little Appsterdam at home.
We don’t care about the naysayers, the haters, and the crabs who would hold us down, because those are the people who make things suck. They’re the ones we’re leaving behind. Appsterdam is what we make of it, and so far what we’re making of it is pretty good, growing really quickly, and attracting a lot of people to this grand experiment.
“What is Appsterdam?” “We are Appsterdam!”