When we launched the Appsterdam Overwinter, we added to the organization a commitment to raising the level of quality and training of App Makers in the Netherlands and beyond. That included redoubling our efforts on existing infrastructure, like the Weekly Wednesday Lunchtime Lectures and the Appsterdam Guru Sessions. We also added things like designer retraining through the BNO.
It brings me great pleasure to launch another initiative in that vein. The International Genius Travel Grant Program is a joint venture between Appsterdam, local government, and the university of Amsterdam. The idea is to select the world’s most interesting technologists and bring them to Amsterdam to recognize their achievements and learn from their experience.
Normally speakers of such quality require lengthy notice, high fees, and other requirements. With our network and the pull of this glorious city, we’re able to break down barriers and bring costs inline to provide high bandwidth conversations to people, like students and healthcare workers, whose growth is good for society and of benefit to us all, but whose connections into our industry are otherwise sparse.
Our first International Genius is famed Twitter Co-founder and all around great guy Dom Sagolla. Aside from literally writing the book on Twitter, Dom is known for contributing to the Obama ’08 iPhone app, and for his founding and continued involvement with iOSDevCamp. He is a source of many great insider stories, dating all the way back to his adventures at the MIT Media Lab.
On a personal note, Dom is not only one of the smartest people I have ever met, he’s also one of the nicest and coolest people I know. I consider myself very lucky to call him my friend. I love this guy so much I want to introduce you all to him, to let you get to know him, that you might benefit from his insights, as I have. Don’t miss this opportunity to meet one of my favorite people.
Dom will be in Amsterdam from February 25th to March 2nd. He will receive formal recognition by the City of Amsterdam, and speak at a number of private and invitation-only events. If you’re a UvA student, don’t miss his talk to the schools of Humanities and Software Engineering on the intersection of those two fields.
Dom will also be making public appearances all over town that week. You can count on catching him at our usual Wednesday activities—the Weekly Wednesday Lunchtime Lecture and Meeten en Drinken at Bax. You can also catch Dom the night before, February 28th, at a special event at Pakhuis de Zwijger. Here’s a flier we made for that event:
Out of nowhere, Apple announces OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, and I must say, right off the bat, that I am disappointed.
No, the feature list is fine. It’s the name that disappoints me. I get that there’s a new pattern with iPhone 3G giving way to iPhone 3GS, and Leopard giving way to Snow Leopard. But Mountain Lion?
Right off the bat, there’s a problem with that name, as “Mountain Lion” (10.8), “Panther” (10.3), and “Puma” (10.1) all refer to the same cat: the common cougar, Puma concolor. It’s bad enough that 3 of the now 9 “big cats” are the same cat, but cougars are not even big cats!
Oh, they’re large, certainly, but the distinction is not actually made based on size, but on laryngeal physiology. The big cats, all members of genus Panthera, roar*. Small cats meow. Mountain Lions are actually the largest of the small cats—a group that notably also includes the oddball Cheetah (10.0).
Of course, if you actually research this, you will find that definition is far from universal. Many people just go by size. It turns out cat taxonomy is a surprisingly messy field. In fact, that whole Linnean classification system you learned in school has been turned on its ear by molecular genetics. But I digress.
I might as well just admit that, back in 10.5 days, I called “Ocelot” as the name for 10.8. That’s a long time to let a bowl of Claim Chowder sit before having to sup on one’s predictions.
*Snow Leopards being the exception. They are large cats and have the physiology to roar, but are apparently too polite to actually do so.
In case you haven’t heard, Burning Man completely mucked up their ticket sales this year. They have more demand than any server can handle, and there are so many people who want to come, that if you distribute the tickets randomly, there’s no way for the project camps to secure enough tickets to actually build the city everyone else is trying to come see.
Let’s solve this, shall we?
There are three problems that need to be solved:
- Ensuring project camps have enough tickets to actually build the city
- Ensuring equal and fair access to tickets to the extent possible
- Avoiding a first-come-first-served queue and resulting traffic jam
To pull this off, you have to split the tickets into two allotments, the corpus allotment for project camps, and the spirit allotment for general attendees.
Project camps will send in applications as usual, but in addition to their plans, they will include the number of tickets they will purchase at the group rate.
Once the city is planned, contact those camps and sell them their requested number of tickets.
The spirit allotment is then distributed using the standard lottery system.
Important: do not mess us this split. Overestimate the corpus allotment or delay the spirit allotment to after city planning if necessary.
For the current situation, the only thing that really matters is solving problem 1, because without that, Burning Man as we know it is over.
What has to be done, then, is to try to move things back inline with this general plan.
- Get the project camps to let you know how many tickets they absolutely require and plan the city.
- Use the tickets allotted for the secondary open sale (sorry holdouts!), and any tickets you can manage to buy back (if necessary), and sell them to the project camps.
- There is no step 3.
I hope they get it sorted, or ol’ “Pirate” Mike won’t be flipping breakfast your way at Pancake Playhouse this year, and that would suck for everyone.
Like this idea? Want some advice of your own? Hire me!
When I was younger, I bought into the idea that I deserved to be where I was, and that by extension, everyone else probably did too. I was one of those abused kids who practiced Kendo without armor. Mercy is for the weak.
Then one day I got into it with my parents and got kicked out—again—only this time, there was nowhere to go. Door after door was closed in my face. I ended up sleeping on my ex’s front porch in what is definitely one my top 5 lowest moments.
Laying there, shivering on the concrete, I reflected on how suddenly my world fell apart. The thing that eventually saved me was a friend who, when faced with my predicament, had the strength to overcome his own disdain for altruism, to give more than he had gotten.
True story: years later, I hired his company to do game design on what would become the #1 game on the App Store, giving him the ultimate bragging rights. With a history like that between us, I knew I could trust him with my baby.
Now I am self-made among the self-made, and the greatest friction between me and my peers is my commitment to beneficence in system design. Many people take my altruism as a sign of weakness or naïveté, and send me condescending email insisting I read books that I have long ago collected first editions of.
The advantage of dehumanizing philosophies is that they’re easy. The disadvantage is that they don’t actually work. The reason I am so nice to people all the time is that I’ve seen where “every man for himself” fails. In fact, it was abandoning that idea around the epoch of the lemurs that lead to our humanity.
On the other hand, my philosophy of “be kind, work hard” has been tested again and again, and has worked every time. In fact, it was just tested again, and I want to show you what a different world I live in now than when I was a selfish, narrow-minded child.
I ran out of money over the weekend. I was thousands of miles from home, attending the 360|MacDev conference in Denver. The out-of-pocket expense of international travel combined with giving the vast majority of my time to the community this past year finally sapped my reserves until I had overdrawn accounts on two continents and the Benjamin in my wallet was the last $100 to my name.
While quietly panicking over things like rent and bills, I spent 22 hours of each day working on my presentation and meeting the community. Finally I found the one I was looking for, the reason I go to these shows. I found my diamond in the rough, what we in the industry call a “Mike Matas.” Some undiscovered talent trapped in a life ripe for changing.
What does someone like that look like? They’re the one who had to take time off from their minimum-wage job to blow their savings on the chance to meet the people who they want to be. Someone who doesn’t flinch at attending a dinner that will take them a week to pay for, because that’s what it takes to hang.
That kind of thing impresses me, because it shows that they don’t just talk good game, but actually have the passion to do something about it. That’s what I and every hiring manager worth their salt is looking for. When you find someone like that you either hire them or you give them to a friend to hire, who will one day do the same for you.
But I went one further than simply giving him free advice and recommending him for a life-changing job. I also gave him my last $100. Before you start screaming at me, understand my reasoning.
- I only had that money because other people had picked up a couple of tabs
- It takes me an hour to make that much, compared to two day’s labor for him
- I genuinely believed it would work out better for me than selfishness
When it came time to check out and go home two days later, I realized that I had two problems. First, I had to get to the airport, which in Denver is an expensive cab ride. That $100 definitely would have come in handy there. Second, the organizers only covered two nights in the hotel, which meant I had an unexpected $400 bill to settle.
For those keeping score at home, I gave away my last $100 and was now $500 from home. The scientific word for this starts with an F and is not polite to say in mixed company.
I had one more thing, which I keep in my back pocket for things like this, and that’s karma. People often misinterpret karma as some cosmic bookkeeping system incompatible with atheism, but that’s typical misinterpretation. Really, it’s just phenomenology. If you take care of people when you can, they will inevitably take care of you when you need it, and vice versa.
I didn’t end up homeless this time. Instead, the conference organizers were more than happy to pick up the tab for the extra nights for a speaker who does so much for their attendees, and a kind soul on Twitter took the trouble to pick me up and deliver me to the airport.
We like to believe that there is something natural about the way things are, and that things will never change. The reality is, we’re all just playing the hands we’re dealt. Sometimes you get Aces and Eights. Other times you’re staring down the barrel of an inside strait. The only thing you can rely on is that things will change, and the next hand will be different.
Experience has taught me, and taught me well: be generous when you’re up, because one day, inevitably, you will rely on generosity. To believe otherwise is to believe a lie.
All that being said, today might be a good day to hire me.