Mike Lee is a product engineer in the Netherlands.
Follow @bmf on Twitter. If you have comments, email bmf@le.mu.rs.
For more information about Appsterdam, check out http://appsterdam.rs and follow @appsterdamrs.
Another of our Summer of Appsterdam initiatives are Appsterdam Approved Hangouts. These are places where you are free to come and get some work done, knowing you will be both welcome and surrounded by your fellow App Makers.
Imagine a cafe where you are welcome to bring a laptop, have power and WiFi, and sip a beverage of your choice while you get some work done. And, all your friends are there. That is an Appsterdam Approved Hangout.
In addition to cafes, businesses with extra space who’d like to have a bunch of smart, creative people around can become Appsterdam Approved Hangouts. We’re even working up some nice vinyl stickers with the Appsterdam logo to put on your door or window.
By the end of summer, we intend to have five spots picked out, distributed throughout the city. We will also be opening places in other cities in the Netherlands, and eventually throughout the world. This ensures that on any day and in any city, you can find Appsterdam.
Our first location, Appsterdam Noord, is at the NDSM-Werf. This trendy industrial space turned artist’s colony is on the north side of the river IJ, reachable by free ferry, and located conveniently close to the ferry station.
Appsterdam Noord opens for beta testing today. We’re easing into the space, so for the next couple of weeks we’ll be open on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11:30 to 15:30. There’s a limit of 8 people, so you need to reserve your spot.
From the ferry dock, turn right and walk east for one block. You’ll see some blue portable buildings in a fenced in area amid piles of building materials. The sign says Stichting NDSM-Werf and has a logo with two ships on it.
Come around to the back of the building, where we have a terrace with picnic tables. Find a seat, and start building the future.
The title says it all, doesn’t it? In my time in this industry, with the things I’ve worked on, the stories I’ve heard, and the apps I’ve seen, I’ve found certain patterns, certain themes that recur, as fast routes to failure. If you’re doing, or planning on doing, one of these things, be warned.
Make a game.
When people tell me they’ve made an app, I say, “great!” but when they tell me it’s a game, my face falls. I hate giving people bad news. I hate telling people their app is going to fail. I hate having to tell people their games suck, and they always suck. You have a game? Sorry.
Games have to be fun, and game makers have to be brutally honest with themselves about whether their games are fun. If that were easy, the world would be crammed full of great games, instead of being crammed full of crap and copies.
This is why I warn people from writing their games in OpenGL. It just makes it even harder to code a game that is fundamentally unplayable. You should be writing your game on index cards, and playing with your friends, before you ever write a line of code.
Once the game is fun, whether you’ve developed an original concept or are remaking a classic, and once you have the thing coded, you’re maybe halfway there. There is so much extra work that has to go into making a game. So much polish. So many details.
Did you work with a team of people, including character designers, game designers, level designers, and play testers? Of course you didn’t. You probably didn’t even think about it. That’s why your game sucks.
Making games is hard. Everyone wants to be a toymaker, but few people have what it takes to actually pull that off. One of these days I am going to sit down and write down everything I’ve learned on the subject of making games, but it’s more like a book than a blog entry.
Start a social network.
Did I say everyone wants to be a toymaker? That’s only half right. The other half wants to create social networks. Ten years ago it was search engines, but now it’s social networks.
That’s because incorporating social networking has been the easiest way to make your idea sound fundable. The problem is, there is only room for three social networks in the world, and they already exist.
Don’t believe me? Here they are: There’s the realtime social network, which used to be the telephone, then ICQ, IRC, AIM, and eventually Twitter.
There’s the scrapbook social network, which morphed into the personal homepage, then Geocities, then Myspace, and now Facebook.
Then there’s the other social network; the only one properly called “the” social network. That is your actual social network: all the people you know, and the people they know. This remains pretty well locked up in your address book.
Nobody wants to sign up for another social network. Nobody wants to be part of your social network. Your social network has nothing to offer them. No, it doesn’t. The existing social networks are generic services that do not focus on, but are good enough at, your specific area of interest, and everybody is already on them. Nobody wants to switch.
This is good news! You are freed from having to do this odious, server-heavy task. Build your social features on the existing social networks. Go beyond the drop-in “share” button. Get clever with it.
The Appsterdam.rs member site is all backed with Twitter lists. At a previous company, we built a Twitter client that used a middleware layer to add features to Twitter, including the now-standard location, and the then-tenuous uptime.
That architecture was designed so that nobody had to sign up for a new account, and if Twitter went away as we all feared it might, our users would just go on tweeting. It was a good strategy then, and it’s a good strategy now. Don’t replicate, encapsulate. Don’t subclass, compose.
Run a server.
Speaking of running a server, the easiest mistake for you to stumble into is getting screwed on the backend. That’s because most people on the app side of things, which is to say the client side of things, don’t even think about the server.
If your app is touching the server, and you own that server, you are now running an enterprise backend. Yes you are. I don’t care how lightweight or simple your use cases are. If customers are touching a server, it’s enterprise.
You cannot and should not be doing this yourself. You need an enterprise team. These guys are hardcore specialists, and expensive. Requiring a server is the fastest way to require funding.
If someone hires you to make an app for them, and it touches a server, consider any statement about that server to be a dirty, dirty lie until you see it yourself. I won’t take a job with a server until I meet the backend team and convince myself they are not a bunch of yahoos. Never again.
My advice for servers is the same as my advice for social networks—use somebody else’s. Leverage data and services across the network. That’s what the Internet is all about.
Let me stop you.
There’s a kind of hypocrisy in my telling you not to do things that I myself have done, sometimes successfully. It’s the same way I tell people not to become engineers. It’s because I firmly believe if you are meant to do something, you will do it no matter what I, or anyone else, tells you.
If you don’t have the passion to ignore naysayers, you certainly don’t have the passion to succeed—especially at building something as difficult as a hit game, stable backend, or viable social network.
Eighty percent of the people working on these kinds of projects don’t have the passion. They think they do, but they don’t. They don’t have the patience to take as long as it takes to do it right. They don’t have the humility to get help in fixing the things that are wrong. The don’t even have the critical eye it takes to be honest assessors of their own work.
And there are real opportunities out there. You just have to be prepared to go into a project you may never come out of to pull it off. Want an example? I often say ideas are worthless, so here’s one of my most prized:
There is still room for a server-backed social network based around games. Think chess by mail. Now think chess by Twitter. Now think every great game being played with your friends asynchronously over the network.
This future empire is still ripe for the building. I thought Words With Friends would pull this off, but they ended up pretty much sucking in the long run. There are a lot of players trying—Plus+, Game Center, and Facebook off the top of my head—but nobody has managed to be the standout in this space.
We have a basic human need to communicate with each other. We start conversations, not because we have something to say, but because we want to keep in touch with each other, to reach out to our loved ones to say nothing more than “ping.”
When you think about it that way, isn’t a game a kind of conversation? Rather than inventing something to talk about, we break out a board game. Now make that asynchronous, and inject it into online social networking.
This week’s winner of the “Who can be more like Apple?” award is HP, which has had some success with its HP Touchpad, because it looks enough like an iPad you can almost forgive it for not being an iPad. But let us make one thing abundantly clear:
As I have pointed out before on this blog, the problem with following Apple is that the furthest you can go is up Apple’s ass. If you want to compete with Apple, you have to do your own thing, which might just enable you to out Apple Apple.
Instead what you get is Apple’s slogan with hippyish “Apple” replaced by the inhuman “HP,” which sounds like the name of a robot, or to the British, the name of a tangy sauce.
Back when HP had a soul, it was called Hewlett Packard, because it was started by two guys named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, classmates at Stanford, who started the business in their Palo Alto garage.
These were the guys Steves Jobs and Wozniak were emulating when they started Apple in a garage. These are the guys everybody is emulating when they try to frame their company as having been born in a garage.
You know the way all pilots sound the same? That’s because they are all trying to be like Chuck Yeager. You know how every technology company says they were started in a garage? That’s because they are all trying to be like Hewlett Packard. Not HP. Hewlett Packard.
You know why its fans put up with Apple when they’re bad? Because they make quality products. But aside from that, it’s because when we look at Apple, we see that picture of Steve and Steve in the garage.
Where’s the picture of Bill and Dave in the garage? Why don’t you take that picture, simplify it a bit, make it look like a woodcutting, and laser engrave it on the back of your new toy. Remind people where you came from. Remind yourself where you came from. Then live up to that.
That, my friends, is how you compete with Apple.
* The actual father of the iPod being Tony Fadell.
When we talk about Appsterdam, we talk about App Makers, but what is an App Maker? And what exactly are these “apps” they are making? Common misconceptions are that “apps” refer to “Apple” or are something specific to mobile. The real answer is more interesting and more complicated than that.
To understand apps, you have to understand machines—not just the current state of machines, but the complete timeline of machines, from their inception, to their foreseeable future. I have a nice Keynote sequence I use to demonstrate this in my “Product Engineering” presentation.
Machines are actually older than mankind. They were invented by some clever ape who used a stick to fish a termite out of a rotten log. Thus was the world introduced to the first machine, and with it the meme of using tools.
At first tools were simply repurposed bits of nature, but when hominids took to the task, they specifically modified these bits to create better tools, chipping off bits of stone, for example, to create a better knife or arrowhead.
When we skip forward again to the dawn of recorded history, we see complex machines, purpose-built from smaller, interoperating parts. With this we have the introduction of craftsmanship, of artisanship, as tools are expensive, and prized, and the people who make them are valuable to society.
With the advent of the industrial age, and the introduction of interchangeable parts and assembly lines, tools became cheaper and more accessible. We gained the economies of scale. Machines gained the notion of configurability. By changing the machinery that produced new machines, new types of machines could be created.
Then a brilliant mathematician named Alan Turing had the realization that, with a large enough number of fast enough switches, we could create a universal machine, which could be reconfigured, or “programmed” to be any number of tools. Thus was born a new class of machine, which we now know as “computers.”
Computers eventually became small enough to fit on a desktop and cheap enough to fit in a family budget. Rather than something for governments, they became something for people, and the era of the personal computer signaled a new era for machinery—a universal machine in more ways than one.
That trend has continued to the point where computers are things we carry in a pocket, or in the crook of an arm. Beyond merely being personal, we now bond with these machines, as they become not just features of modern life, but a part of ourselves. This is the era we live in, the age of apps.
Looking into our wildest imaginations, we see a time when we are engineering on the molecular level, when machines are themselves made of nanomachines. Hardware and software cease to be distinct concepts when we can change not just how a machine behaves, but what a machine is.
We do not yet have the ability to turn a book into a piano, except that we do. In the context of the entire timeline of machines, something like an iPad becomes less like the Colossus and more like a poor man’s nanocolony.
This represents a fundamental shift from old-school “applications” running on a computer to the new software: “apps” that transform hardware to provide a complete experience. An app is an experience encapsulated in a product, the magic necessary to turn a piece of glass and metal into anything we need it to be.
Apps are transformational not only to hardware, but also to the way we do business. App production lends itself well to an artisanal economy of small businesses that cooperate with each other. We can proffer explanations of this, such as freedom from the demands of physical manufacturing, but it is largely phenomenology.
It seems not to matter so much what an app runs on as where an app comes from. Great apps come from great artists, who tend to be part of a great community. To a large extent, Apple’s success in this field is attributable to the community of developers who work on their platform.
But Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on quality, nor on culture. The things that make great apps are universal, and meant to be shared. Everyone deserves great apps. It is a firm belief in that idea that has Apple veterans joining with App Makers of every stripe to share their knowledge with anyone who will listen.
And I do mean anyone. We talk about App Makers, rather than developers, or designers, because it takes more than development and design to make a great app. Making, selling, and maintaining an app also takes businessmen, project managers, marketeers, lawyers, domain experts, and a very big sacrifice from our families.
Something has happened over these last four years. We’ve done an about-face, stopped looking toward the past, and started the business of building the future. That’s what it takes to be an App Maker, and that’s who it takes to make an app.
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.
