With all the great initiatives we’ve launched, there are so many chances for you to participate in the Summer of Appsterdam, it can be hard to keep track of them all. Here’s a quick summary of where the action is in Appsterdam:
Appsterdam Approved Hangouts are a place for you to bring your laptop and get some work done alongside other App Makers. Our first facility, Appsterdam Noord, is currently in beta testing at NDSM Wharf. It’s open Tuesdays and Thursdays. There’s no charge, but let us know you’re coming.
Weekly Wednesday Lunchtime Lectures, hosted by SourceTag, are educational business lunches presented by your fellow Appsterdammers. These happen every Wednesday at 12:30 at Vijzelstraat 20. Presentations are recorded and put online, so even if you can’t make it, you can still benefit. There’s no charge to attend, but bring your favorite sandwich filling to share.
Appsterdam Meeten en Drinken are informal get-togethers at cafes and bars around the city. This is a chance for you and your partner to have a night out surrounded by colleagues. We get together like this about once a week, and while you’re free to just show up, you can RSVP and see who’s coming on our Meetup site.
Appsterdam Family Weekends are fun outings for App Makers and their families, and your best chance to really get to know your fellow Appsterdammers. Our first one will be on Saturday, July 23, at the Artis Zoo here in Amsterdam. Please let us know you’re coming, and bring cash for admission.
In addition to these recurring events, Appsterdam also participates in other events, such as next weekend’s iOSDevCamp, and this September’s PICNIC festival. News of the former is coming soon, and planning for the latter is happening next Friday in Bloemendaal.
You’re also likely to run into Appsterdammers at any one of the many technical and cultural events constantly happening in the city. We maintain a “concert calendar” of all our events at the Appsterdammers site, and will soon include other events of interest to Appsterdammers.
When we talk about Appsterdam, we talk about App Makers, and when we talk about App Makers, we talk about nerds. Maybe they’re programmers, or designers, or lawyers, but they’re all nerds in their own way. But Appsterdam is about more than nerds getting together.
Even in the Netherlands, App Makers on a project leave their families. We might be sleeping at home, but we’re not there. We’re at the office for ungodly hours, distracted behind the eyes, and generally unavailable to tend to our families’ needs.
Having our families involved increases our diversity and makes our community more welcoming to a wider range of people. They also keep us in line. I firmly believe if people had brought their partners to WWDC, none of the hullabaloo from the after parties would have happened. We don’t call them our better halves for nothing.
That’s why it’s important not just to get the nerds together, but also to get our families together. When our families get to know each other, they will be able to build their own community, and their own support network. This will be especially important for families that move to Appsterdam.
Getting to know each other’s families will also help us to get to know each other better. It is one step past the Meeten en Drinken on the path to forming true friendships within our community. Those friendships are vital in building an ecosystem that allows us all to mind our businesses.
This is why I am particularly pleased to announce that our first Appsterdam Family Weekend event will be happening on Saturday, July 23, at the Artis Zoo in Amsterdam. All members are welcome, and encouraged to bring their families. We’ll meet at the zoo at a time to be determined and take this fantastic urban safari together.
Please bring cash to pay for your admission to the event. The prices are as follows:
Adults (10 years +) € 28,50
Children (3 to 9 years) € 25,00
Artis members (3 years +) € 11,50
Details will be added as we know them. You can RSVP now.
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.
