The DevHouseBerlin weekend is over, but don’t worry if you missed this one. This first one was such a success that we will do more of them.

Thanks to all of those who came, helped, organized and shared their knowledge to make this such fun. I’m not lying when saying that everything turned out to be better than expected.

The upfront organization was minimal. Special thanks to Jan and Alex! We even got some unexpected PR beforehand thanks to an online article about the DevHouse. In response we bumped up the available slots to 20. Which were all filled up soon.

The location Box 119 which houses the offices of upstream, finnlabs and rocket rentals was an ideal location for such an event with its medium large office rooms and a bigger foyer. Box 119 had a solid infrastructure, the WiFi and Internet didn’t let us down once. We even had a decent coffee machine, major factor!

Saturday was packed. I guessed more than 30 people at once filled the DevHouse. Everybody was very open and eager to share. The presentation slots for the evening were filled up already by the early afternoon. I even lost my planned slot because of getting out of bed a bit later than planned.

Right from the beginning major hacking was going on. In the afternoon the talks started. In parallel there was tons of time to chat, eat and hack at will within a very relaxing atmosphere.

PHP raised in my opinion again, after I learned through Falko’s Meta Programming PHP talk that it also has a method_missing equivalent. Nico gave some helpful user experience insights by analyzing start pages on the projector. It’s amazing how many – in retrospective obvious things – you can do wrong on your start page. With Fabian we had a non technical discussion about Economy, after his talk about Fixing Money, which unfortunately left out the solution. After that talk I heard some creepy stories from The Enterprise at dinner.

At 2am at least a dozen people were still in the house. I left at 3:30am still full awake thanks to the optimal Club Mate supply.

Sunday wasn’t that busy. People dropped in later, I had plenty of time to get a presentation slot this time. Some realtime programming battle was going on in the afternoon. You can find Gregor’s battle tank A.I. on Github. Filip showed some quick code kung fu by building a poll app with Django in his talk. This little python Framework is worth a look, if you need to get up small apps fast.
My first talk on Bug Fighting with TDD went well. People seemed to be very interested in the subject. I had some time to play with JRuby and was able to get HtmlUnit to run with Webrat, although my solution is still sort of hackish.

CouchDB was all over the place of course with Jan around. He helped interested folks to get it up an running and helped out with problems related to CouchDB. Alex used the time to enhance his CouchDB persistence layer couch_potato. It will make the transition for rails people much easier.

People who stayed late this sunday – which excludes me – witnessed as the very first the rise of cloudplayer the most beautiful online music player in the world wide interweb, that Erik & Henrik gave the last touches at the DevHouse.

These where just some of the talks, projects and peoples that I get to know that weekend. There was so much more as you can see from the photos and the wiki.

Wow, it was just great. And next time will be even better. We will tell you more soon on this

We are very proud to announce DevHouseBerlin.

DevHouseBerlin is a fun-packed weekend of hacking and sharing knowledge. We open the Box119 office for a weekend and invite hackers of all sorts to join us working on projects, sharing code and ideas and just hanging out among fellow geeks.

DevHouseBerlin runs on December 6th & 7th, 2008 and it is a free event. You can sign up on the wiki.

We are highly influenced by the SuperHappyDevHouse:

SuperHappyDevHouse is a non-exclusive event intended for creative and curious people interested in technology. We’re about knowledge sharing, technology exploration, and ad-hoc collaboration. Come to have fun, build things, learn things, and meet new people. It’s called hacker culture, and we’re here to encourage it.

Find out more about DevHouseBerlin.

Last weekend was Barcamp Berlin 3 and I was there, too. This year’s location was the Deutsche Telekom Haupstadtrepräsentanz – an awesome place.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to summarize the sessions i attended and found worthy to write about. So here we go. Slides are mostly posted in the barcamp wiki.

How to promote your Web 2.0 Application

This first session was held by Michael Sliwinski of nozbe.com – a very energetic talk presenting a couple of tips and tricks to turn the visitors of your web tool into caring users and finally paying customers. Michael has built nozbe for himself and only later started turning into and app for others. His idea(l)s are heavily influenced by the 37signals guys – looks like we operate on the same level as he does

Back to his talk, some of his points were: show people how to use our site, show them the benefits hey will have from using your product (not your features, their benefits), tell them why to use this app and not the competition, testimonials are important even though nobody reads them, email still works – send newsletters and special offers – much higher impact than blog posts, people still don’t use or even understand RSS. And most importantly: love your app and show that love to others.

doingtext

We skipped the next session in order to prepare go through our own presentation titled “getting things written” one last time (ok seriously we had started working on it the day before). We ended up with around 70 slides for a 30 minute talk. I had added a presentation feature to doingtext the week before so we did the entire show straight from the website. We had decided to make this an entertainment show so we started explaining what paper was and how to use it and then applied the principles people use to work on texts with paper (show text to others, comment, highlight, talk about it, view history, merge changes) to the various online tools available (sending ms word documents by email, google docs, writewith, adobe buzzword), then text editos with collaboration features (gobby, subethaedit) and finally presenting doingtext and its communication focused approch to text collaboration.

It looks like the talk was good – we had around 60 people attending and staying until the end of a longer discussion following our presentation.

Today I repeated the same talk at the Webmontag Berlin. Having only 8 minutes of time I ended up rushing through the 70 slides and almost rapping the words in super high speed – earning quite a bit of praise – thanks everyone.

books for freaks

This wasn’t really a presentation but more a everyone talk about their favorite books thing. Here comes everybody (great book about how people gather on the internet, how communities work, how the economy shifts from limited production capabilities to limitless production and much more), but also fictional books. Charles Stross was mentioned as the author of a couple of weird (in the positive sense) sci-fi books (The Atrocity Archives) – will buy one of those soon.

jquery tips & tricks

The presentation itself was actually a bit lame (sorry guys) but it reminded e that I really wanted to try out jQuery. On the next project – promised. $('.item').show().siblings().hide() – pretty slick eh?

our favourite tv series

Very good session for leaning back and watching funny scenes from a couple of tv series. They even mentioned Top Gear – the funniest and most overproduced car magazine ever.

death to the ipod

This one was mostly about a pretty cool gadget called the pacemaker – basically a mobile dj tool that fits in your hand. Comes with 2 decks, crossfader, equalizer, effects, beatcounter, prelistening via a separate headphone out etc. – pretty cool, I even got to test it out for a couple of minutes.

Barcamp2 Berlin, meine erste Session. Holger Dieterich von moviepilot.de projiziert die Mechanismen, nach denen klassische Spiele funktionieren, auf social Communities im Web. Anhand von 10 Beispielen zeigt er, wie eine Community für ihre User spannender und unterhaltsamer (mehr Traffic) werden kann, indem sie von Spielen lernt.

Folgene Annahmen macht Holger über Spiele:

• sie machen Spaß
• die Spieler werden in eine Art Flow-Zustand versetzt (vergessen die Zeit)
• Spiele sind ein soziales Erlebnis (z.B. Fußball)
• werden immer wieder gespielt

Genau das, was man als Community Builder auch von seinen Usern sehen will Die Herausforderung ist nun, die Mechanismen, die Spieler ihren Spaß bringen und sie immer wieder spielen lassen, auf Web Communities zu übertragen. Ich hab das mal für autoki versucht:

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Ich halte am Donnerstag eine kleine Präsentation zum Thema file_column und Widgets/Banner. Wer hin will: www.rug-b.com bzw. einfach 19:30 Uhr bei /i-d media, Ohlauer Strasse 43, Berlin Kreuzberg. Man sieht sich.

Die Slides gibt’s hier.

schnell anmelden, unter https://ssl-id1.de/re-publica.de/akkreditierung/

vom 11.-13.4. 2007 findet in berlin die re:publica statt. dabei handelt es sich um eine konferenz rund um’s “web 2.0″ (logo ). soziale netzwerke, blogs, podcasts usw. besser erklaeren koennen das aber die macher (spreeblick und newthinking) selbst.

allem anschein nach wird das ganze wohl kostenlos sein, ich bin auf jeden fall da. um teilzunehmen, trage man sich auf der wiki-seite ein.