Work

I dropped by the UIKonf unconference yesterday and gave a quick code/architecture talk. Normally I do mostly design/strategy type talks which are a lot more handwavy, so this felt a bit out of my water.

As a variation on the classic one: the willingness of a corporate CEO to spend half an hour in a room without windows with a random customer.

Our world’s bright future will be built by people who have discovered that leadership is the enabling art. It is the art of releasing human talent and potential.

The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.

When you use “And what else?”you’ll get more options and often better options. Better options lead to better decisions. Better decisions lead to greater success.

Boeing’s executives expect their managers to know this information, in real time, if the company is to remain profitable.

Nothing will bias a session faster than you trying to sell him on your ideas. You’re not there to talk. You are there to listen.

The idea is that by sharing orders, delivery status, and customer feedback each member company can improve efficiency and service quality, while remaining separately owned.

Ik ben een trouwe luisteraar van GBI en het was leuk dat Vasilis toen hij in Berlijn was de tijd nam om ook eens met mij te praten. Volgens mij is het een leuk gesprek geworden.

Successful people consistently compare themselves favorably to their peers.

“I believe that the dominant paradigm for managing product development is fundamentally wrong.”

“You must see the people who work with you.”

For my personal archive, here is the talk I gave at Thingscon Amsterdam last year.

One for the archives, this a talk I gave last summer that I thought went pretty well.

I shared it elsewhere but to briefly clip it here as well. I took a bunch more pictures with the photographer that were a lot of fun but of course this is the one they chose.

At the end of 2015 personal and professional changes made it clear to us that we would not continue Hubbub in its current form. That realization made me reorient myself in Berlin and refocus on my core skills as an engineer.

This post was previously published on Medium and is now archived here.

A couple of weeks ago by now I finally got to visit our new office in the Vechtclub XL building in Utrecht. This turned out to be a great experience.

I promised to write an update to the Heist Model a long time ago and never got around to it because of work and other stuff. Then recently conversations with friends moving back into the freelance life prompted this smaller update but it too had been languishing in a draft for far too long.

We just switched over to Slack and we are quite happy with the tool as a replacement for our previous Hipchat setup. It all feels a bit fresher, it’s easier to integrate with the rest of the web and has more functionality and niceties built in.

This week was a bit more stationary than the last thankfully. I tried out a competitor to Cuppings called Bean Seeker which is a rather terrible app.

Odd that I hadn’t gotten around to blogging these notes from Dan Hill’s brilliant book, but here they are then finally:

I’ve been on something of an applied philosophy 1 binge recently and after almost finishing “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War” 2 I am now starting to read Aramis which Latour opens with:

With KANT we were still figuring out mostly what it is we are doing and seeing as we are neither a collective or a coworking space it was up in the air a bit. I wrote up our offering in a more straight-forward and streamlined way where you can very easily find what it is you may be looking for. In other news we are discussing next steps for KANT in the future but anything on that order is off for at least 6-12 months.

Most of the time this week was spent doing heads down work (notes on which elsewhere). Meeting with Igor and Tijmen and hanging out in parks. Summer.

Travel is making it hard to keep up writing these notes weekly (or write anything for that matter). So this blog is turning into an expensive affair.

This was the week that Kars returned from his honeymoon on Bali. And all for the better as well, because I had worked through most of our stack —we didn’t have any running projects at the time— and I was getting so annoyed by Dopplr’s performance that I was about to write a clean implementation of its trip model to store my upcoming travels in.

As my work based weeknotes are being catered for rather nicely both at Hubbub and KANT, I’m going to keep writing weeknotes here, but instead of making an overview of the week’s work, I’ll do some more long form reflecting on stuff that happened. A bit more casual and personal than we are used to.

I’m running frightfully behind with these and debating whether to continue writing weeknotes if it means this work is being featured in a total of three places. That seems a bit too much.

So that cat is out of the bag: I’ve taken up residency at KANT, the Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering. Peter who you may have read before on The Waving Cat just wrote the inaugural post on our freshly pressed Tumblr (tweets are still forthcoming).

The week before last started out with me still in Paris sampling the local coffee scene which has been improving massively over the past year or so.

This week was the week where we were in full sprint for the pilot launch of KAIGARA. Besides that we had a dinner off NEXT with some people involved and some speakers. What I managed to catch from NEXT’s program while working was nothing short of splendid. Bruce Sterling’s talk has been shared widely and I’m eagerly awaiting Anab Jain’s to be published as a video (the slides are already there).

The week before this on Monday (almost two weeks ago), I went to a lecture by Graham Harman. Notes on that were blogged in a timely fashion.

The week before this is getting a bit boring, but as soon as the current project is over I promise that adventures will resume again.

Last week we were on something of a tear continuously shipping things (it beats continuous integration). As Kars mentioned in the Hubbub weeknotes I was featured in the rather shiny TNW magazine about the subject of gamification. Much to my surprise this issue was filled with blabbering by Gabe Zichermann. It’s not only that we take issue with the way he approaches games, it looks like everything about the man is shameful. You can read unparalleled levels of douchebaggery over at Kevin Slavin and to my dismay even GigaOM 1 is complicit.

It seems to be not completely obvious how to host a website on heroku while at the same time also maintaining e-mail delivery. You would think that this is a very common situation and it would be well documented but unfortunately it is not.

A bunch of stuff I did last week is summarized nicely at the Hubbub weeknotes. This is going to happen more and more often, so these weeknotes may become at risk. We’ll see what happens.

Last Monday Uber had drinks here in Berlin and took a complimentary Uber there to chat with their Berlin team. The experience was extremely comfortable but given big city traffic it wasn’t very fast 1. In cities where the cab market is unreliable and corrupt I can definitely imagine the appeal of Uber. People working on transit apps should take note, this is the way it should work.

Recovering from flu meant a week of mostly broken days, but still got a lot done and more importantly: got better.

I got things back running again. Did a bunch of work on TORREON. Most Hubbub stuff is in a weeknote over there now that I am writing now alternating with Kars Alfrink.

Nothing much happened during the Christmas week before, so I decided to skip that note. Most of Berlin shut down into a deep hibernation normally only witnessed in student towns.

Last week was a week without travel or deadlines so a lot of stuff that had been lying around for too long got done.

Horribly late but here goes anyway. On Monday I briefly dropped by the Makers Loft and finally managed to see the Third Wave crew again.

At the start of the week I managed to upload a batch of trip pictures (the China section) but after things went quickly downhill.

After some weeks traveling to Beijing and Australia, last week I was back in Europe, touching down in Amsterdam Tuesday morning early. I had a very nice flight in from Sydney with the only annoyance being that my laptop had broken upon arrival there. This made me spend half a day of the two I had there in the Bondi Apple Store trying to figure out what the problem was.

I’m sitting here at Beijing Airport writing these too late weeknotes on their free WiFi 1 which is an oddly implemented but still excellent service.

Last week I built a new version of the Pig Chase client for the final test in the stables (more on which later).