I used to work on this really cool Twitter client. I wouldn’t have made a Twitter client, since I have friends who already make a great Twitter client. I inherited the project, but I am who I am, so my team adopted it wholeheartedly, and made it into our favorite Twitter client. When someone helped us make our tableviews smooth like butter, we payed it forward and passed it along to our friends.
That act is what separates the community of App Makers from most other industries. We do not have competitors. We have colleagues. It’s OK if we have similar projects. We each have our own visions, and our own way of doing things. If we wanted the same things and thought the same way, we would merge the projects. You can never find enough skilled people to work with.
The reality is there’s plenty of work to go around, plenty of customers looking for lots of different things. If they think like us, they’ll buy our app. If they think like them, they’ll buy their app. Regardless of how they think, they deserve buttery smooth tableviews. We fundamentally reject the practice of hoarding every morsel of advantage. We win races by running our hearts out, not by tripping the other runners.
Appsterdam is an organization of volunteer gardeners. We tend to the ecosystem because we work in the ecosystem and we want it to be nice. We organize events and provide resources for App Makers, but we’re just as happy to help other people make their events awesome, and to help other people provide resources for App Makers.
Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on awesome, and Appsterdam doesn’t have a monopoly on collaboration. There’s plenty of work to be done. If someone else wants to pick up a shovel, fantastic. People who think otherwise obviously didn’t read Ars. If 2012 is to be the year the App Makers unite, we have to work together, whether you wear our T-shirt or not.
Joining Appsterdam is free as in beer and freedom.