With the Summer of Appsterdam well under way, our community is growing in leaps and bounds. In order to keep up that growth, we’re restructuring things a bit, getting volunteers and sponsors to take over large swaths of the Appsterdam landscape.
To that end, we’re turning over structural work on the Appsterdam.rs website to Fingertips. They’re making much needed upgrades, especially to the members section, so you’ll be able to manage your own membership listings. We’ll also have searching and filtering to help people find you.
We’re implementing some of the most common requests, such as removing pagination from the lists. We’re also adding a “classifieds” section where you can post or find jobs, bikes, housing, or anything else you need.
In the spirit of openness and community, we’re open sourcing the website. For now that means you can watch our progress in realtime. In the future, this will make it easy for people to add functionality, since our standard response to “you should do this” is “you should do that.”
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.
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.
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.
