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.
Among the many things that make Amsterdam the world’s most livable city is the fact that it’s relatively inexpensive. That’s not the same thing as saying it’s cheap. If you want to live in a cheap city, move to Taipei. If you want to go even cheaper, look at Buenos Aires.
But first be warned—if you live in a city below the median cost of the Western world, you give up a lot. Taipei is amazing, but a bit harder to navigate if you don’t speak Mandarin and read Hanzi. Buenos Aires is wonderful, but you can’t walk down the streets alone at night, and I wouldn’t want to raise children there.
On the other hand, if you are the kind of person who insists on living in a city like San Francisco, London, or Tokyo, you’re going to find things cost 2 or 3 times what they cost in most places. Moreover, because wages have to keep pace with the cost of living, every person you hire is going to cost 2 to 3 times more.
When you start to look at things this way, not as a tourist, but as a businessman, Amsterdam does really start to look cheap. Aside from lower rents than the aforementioned cities, there are other cost-saving factors as well.
Cars are expensive. Gas is expensive. Insurance is expensive. If you can cut cars out of your life, your living expenses decrease dramatically. Amsterdam is that rare city where the bicycle is the dominant form of transportation.
The city is designed in such a way that everything is close enough to bike to. There is an impressive bicycle infrastructure, going beyond bike lanes to include freeways and parking garages. Bikes have right of away over cars, of course, but also pedestrians.
I love cars, and I love my car in particular. I will always treasure the memory of driving Toru Kumagai along 280 with my windows down and my radio up. But what I love even more is not having to have a car. Total cost of ownership for my bike, including maintenance and the possibility of being stolen, is less than the insurance on my car—and I have 19 spotless years of driving.
Then there’s healthcare. The healthcare system is fundamentally broken in the United States, and every attempt to make it better seems to focus on increasing the burden on employers. For huge corporations, this is great, because it makes it harder for people to work for themselves. We don’t have that problem here.
Then there is that intangible thing we call quality of life. As the most livable city in the world, Amsterdam is filled with happy people who don’t need to make a ton of money to be happy. If you move here from the valley, you can make half the money and be twice as happy.
Again, from the perspective of a businessman, which an App Maker certainly is, lower cost of living means lower cost of employees. As purveyors of virtual products, our revenue is not tied to the local economy, but our expenses still are.
Of course all of this has nothing to do with Appsterdam. It’s just a feature of the city, like personal liberty, open data and net neutrality are features of the city.
Appsterdam is also a feature of the city. App Makers who come here are plugging into a network of passionate and like-minded people. The knowledge exchange, free and low-cost workspace, and vibrance our movement brings make Amsterdam’s value proposition unbeatable.
So, yes, in that sense, Amsterdam is a very cheap city indeed!
In addition to the announcements from @appsterdamrs and the schedule that will be posted on the upcoming site, I thought I would give you a detailed idea of what to expect this weekend. All events are open to RSVP’d attendees and their partners.
Getting here
We have a crew of volunteers ready to meet people at the Schiphol airport and the Amsterdam Centraal train station. If you’d like someone to meet you, let us know by filling out the arrivals form.
Friday night
Friday night is all about getting here. There’s no set time or anything formal like that. The idea is that, as people trickle into the city, get checked in, and head out for the evening, that there be a place to go where they will meet other developers. This is like flying in the night before a conference, and sending the shout out: “where are people drinking?”
Pubs in Amsterdam tend to be clustered into groups (which I call “bar pods”). There are several such pods in the city, usually centered around a square (usually denoted in Dutch as “plein”s). The choice of pod, and the choice of bar within that pod, are arbitrary.
The current plan is to head over to Nieuwmarkt at 18.00 on Friday night and figure out who has room. You can show up any time after that. Just look for the Appsterdam logos or check Twitter.
If we fill one bar, we’ll overflow into the next bar and so forth. As this is an informal gathering, plan to bring money for drinks and snacks: around €20-50.
Saturday midmorning
During the day on Saturday you’ll go on a walking tour of the city. Local Appsterdammers have put together some really nice tours according to several areas of interest. Plan on meeting your tour group in the late- to mid-morning and being on your feet until the late afternoon.
With 7 tours planned all over the city, you’re sure to find something that interests you. For more information, including including times, places, and expected expenses, visit the tour RSVP form. Hurry—space is limited!
Saturday night
The big event! The Appsterdam Launch Party, sponsored by Igluu and Vodafone, will be at Panama at 18.30. There will be a keynote at 19.00, lasting about an hour, wherein we’ll introduce all the great things we have planned for the Summer of Appsterdam.
Drinks and snacks are provided by our good friends at Igluu and Vodafone, so you don’t need to bring anything but your sweet self—though if you have an app, bring it along as well. The party lasts until 22.00. I don’t think the restaurant will throw you out at 22.00, but you’re on your own for drinks past that point.
Sunday midmorning
If you’ve done the weekend right you should be completely exhausted by this point. We’ll stumble into the late morning sun and find our way to hydration and nourishment.
What better place to have a picnic than at our new Appsterdam Official Hangout at NDSM-Werf, featuring a traditional Dutch breakfast of bread and things that go on bread.
We’ll provide drinks, bread, and our favorite sandwich fixings, but if you’re a local, plan on bringing your favorite broodje toppings as well—the more the merrier!
There is a free ferry to NDSM-Werf behind Centraal Station. We will stage a volunteer at both ferry docks to keep you pointed in the right direction.
If the sun is shinning, we can put out blankets on the artificial beach. If it starts to rain, we’ll move the party indoors.
Late nights
In addition to being the City of Apps, you may be aware of some other things Amsterdam is known for. You may even be interested in experiencing such things. On Friday and Saturday nights we will have informal expeditions into other side of Amsterdam. Call it Appsterdam After Dark.
Because of the nature of these expeditions, you must be at least 18 years old—bring ID. We’ll be out from the end of festivities at 22.00 until around 02.00. We’ll play it by ear, so how much money to bring depends on how crazy you are. I’d plan on €20-100.
I mentioned yesterday that you can pre-order T-shirts until noon on Monday, which generated a flurry of questions. Since time is of the essence, I will address these here.
What’s the deal?
We’re celebrating Appsterdam launch party weekend by having a small batch of hand-printed T-shirts professionally silkscreened. Since that doesn’t necessarily guarantee we’ll have enough shirts in your size, we’re letting you pre-purchase your shirt before we put in the order at noon on Monday.
What will they look like?
The simplified Appsterdam logo in red and black expertly silkscreened onto a light gray T-shirt. You can imagine something like our awesome teaser site, but with fewer words, and as a T-shirt.
Are there women’s sizes?
Of course, but you will definitely want to pre-order these, as we’re unlikely to have many at the party.
When do we get them?
You can pick-up your shirts at the party on Saturday night. If you can’t make it to the party, but still want a shirt, we can ship one to you, but only if you pre-order it by noon on Monday.
How much does it cost?
The shirts are €20 if you pick them up at the party. If you need us to ship it to you, it’s an additional €5 in the Netherlands, €10 international, for up to 3 shirts.
Sign me up!
Great. Email klaasspeller at gmail with a subject like: Appsterdam shirts: 2 x L, 1 x WS.
With WWDC behind us, it’s time to get ready for the Appsterdam launch party weekend, which will be kicking off the Summer of Appsterdam.
This is a party worth flying in for. You should plan on arriving in Appsterdam on Friday, June 24. We’ll kick things off by descending upon a pod of bars in the city and drinking them dry as we get to know each other.
You could go strong all night, but you should probably get a good night’s sleep for the morning’s adventures. We’re going to have several expeditions running through the city—coffeeshop tour, canal tour, museum tour—whatever people are interested in.
On Saturday evening we’ll all get back together for a big party. I’ll deliver a keynote, welcoming people to the city, launching the things we have planned for the Summer of Appsterdam, and highlighting some of the developers working in the city—followed by a few hours of meeting and drinking.
In addition to your social pants and good liver, you should bring your app. There will be lots of people there to show it to, from fellow developers to members of the press.
If people have anything left in them, we’ll send a contingent toward the red light district, where the party lasts all night. On Sunday morning, we’ll have a hangover brunch, and greet the sun as it rises on a new Amsterdam.
We will be selling the first batch of Appsterdam T-shirts at the party for €20. If you’d like to guarantee we have a shirt reserved in your size, you can purchase it in advance and pick it up at the party—email klaasspeller at gmail to make arrangements.
You have until noon Monday to pre-order a shirt. Otherwise, stay tuned for our upcoming RSVP, which will include a short census to help us ensure everyone is taken care of.
I can’t wait to see you there. It’s going to be amazing.
Today Sofa announced we have been acquired by Facebook, who are moving the team to Palo Alto. Sofa’s products will find a good home in due time, but what about Sofa’s role in the Appsterdam initiative?
I’ll tell you what’s not happening; I am not going to Facebook. I never even considered that an option. As much as I love Sofa, I love Appsterdam more. It’s not just a question of honoring my obligations. I think what we’re building here is bigger and more important than Facebook.
When I started talking about Appsterdam, I thought there was no developer culture here, because that’s what everyone told me. It seemed like every day I would go to a different meetup and listen to a different room full of developers tell me there was no developer culture here.
I came to realize two things about Appsterdam—there is a ton of technology here, and nobody knows about it. To illustrate this, I asked a group of developers how often they thought we had a tech conference in this city. The consensus was about once a year.
Actually, it’s once a week. Every week we have a tech conference here. Every day we have a developer meetup here. Talented and passionate developers fill this city. Just the other day we had a BBQ on a week’s notice over Twitter and had about 40 people stop by to talk about Appsterdam.
We haven’t even launched yet. The Appsterdam initiative begins this summer with a launch party over the last weekend of June (24-26). Yet we’ve already been in two newspapers here, are all over Twitter and the Internet, and have dozens of people coming to the weekly planning meetings.
One trend that disturbs me however is the most common response to all this: “I hope you can pull it off.” Building a world-class developer community is not something one company, let alone one person, can pull off. The success of Appsterdam is something we all have to be a part of.
So the idea that Sofa is the lynchpin that holds Appsterdam together is as silly as the idea that a feather can make you fly. It is not the feather, but your willingness to believe, that lets you fly. When the feather is gone, the important thing to realize is that you never needed it.
The good news is, the feather has been gone for a while. Acquisitions take time; the likelihood of Sofa’s non-existence has been part of Appsterdam longer than the promise of Sofa’s involvement. We, the developer community of Appsterdam, have been running things without Sofa for months.
We will all miss Sofa. They are one of the most talented teams I have ever had the pleasure of working with, and I am honored that I was able to do so, even given the circumstances. But we still have each other. We are still together in this glorious city. We are still Appsterdam.
