kerimsatirli.com

After a rather mediocre conference day at Video Vortex, I finally got a shot at meeting some other Dutch Last.fm’ers during the first (of hopefully many) Dutch Last.fm Live Meeting.

Now, for those that do not know last.fm let me give you a quick overview: last.fm is a kind of social network that tracks what you are listening to. It is a great way of showing of your taste (or lack thereof), but also works nicely as a way to discover new music through friends and Last.fm’s music matching features.

Set-up by Stephan and Walter, two other xolo.tv colleagues of mine, it is safe to say that, even though we were a tad on the light side as far as attendance goes, with ten of 70 members showing up, we all had a great time and we even have proof for it!

All in all, a great evening and definitely something I will be back for next time.

Yesterday marked the conclusion of our most recent project, the current batch of juniors at CMD Breda have now officially concluded the bigger part of their study and can now move on to internships, minors and other awesome stuff.

Yesterday marked the conclusion of nine weeks of hard work and lots of annoyances for just about everyone even remotely involved with our group.

As always, our group consisted of students representing the four different majors our faculty offers and that is where the problems began: traditionally speaking, a faculty like ours always attracts more media designers than technologists, there are generally more interface designers than marketeers / project planners and with projects that rely heavily on the technical side of things and good branding, this, eventually leads to problems.

It is said that the first few meetings of any group are essential. Think of two dogs that meet for the first time - they will sniff each other out, try to gain as much information about the other as they can and then move on. During the next meeting, they will have some sort of idea of what to expect and based on that will either take a friendly or hostile stance towards the other.

This is the very spot where it went wrong for our group. Our first meeting ended in a situation where no one was willing to be the team leader and I can understand that; after all, leading a group of five is no easy job, let alone a group of 32 other students, but in the end, if your major includes the very classes needed to lead a team, namely project management, team building and all, you should at least be capable of taking the helming and steering the group towards a mediocre final product.

Now, do not get me wrong, I am not bitter or harbor any hard feelings, not in the least, but I feel that there is a great number of things that could have, that should have been done better.

The biggest issue I have with this project is that we worked in teams of 33 people where everyone seemed to have the same voting rights. Democracy is fine and all that, but as long as everyone can veto many things, the outcome of a project will be uncertain.

I believe that, if the project were to have internal representatives that would be allowed to vote (and represent a group of say five or six people) and that those votes were to be considered final, that we would have gotten through the planning / brainstorming stage a lot faster.

Another pet peeve of mine is that our group had little to no regard for application development protocols. I do, of course, realize that with things like this, last-minute changes are part of the whole deal and I would not mind those changes if they were only to fix a bug or two, but if those changes include building new features, days after a feature-freeze has been issued, I get annoyed.

I get even more annoyed when the building of those features results in bugs that kill other, more essential functionality of the main application due to a lack of testing (which was my fault however).

I am a technologist at heart, I suck at designing and I know that, but I try to make up for that lack by knowing just about everything there is to know about the project at hand and I dislike it when people tell me to do things differently when I know that that my solution is going to be used in the end.

One such situation occurred with the building of one of our sub-sites; back in November, I suggested that we include a member registration system, because it would not make sense for everyone to be able to upload data to the site, but I was veto’ed against. A couple of weeks later, all of a sudden, the request for a member system came in and I had to realize it, long story short: I believe that I understood the way the whole thing would have to be set-up a lot better than those that actually envisioned it.

After weeks of work, much of it being redundant, as in: building features, removing them and rebuilding them, we finally entered the home stretch and with only a couple of days to go, I was confident that we would be able to pull it off (we did!), yet, for one reason or another, it had to be a lot more difficult than it should have been:

Everyone who has ever worked with a live audio / video feed knows that a script is an absolute must, not because I have a hard time remembering things (I do), but because it is essential for everyone involved to know when something is going to happen and how long it is going to last.

It is safe to say that the team involved with the live feed begged for a script, yet we did not receive one. Due to the shuffling of the various clips, we could not make our own, yet the team lead had the audacity to complain about the clips not being played out perfectly in the dry-run.

These things simply annoy me to no end and I am happy, very happy that we are finally done with it. I have learned a lot in the past nine weeks: a bit about streaming with the Flash Media Server and the Darwin Server and a whole lot about team dynamics and how the lack thereof can make everything exponentially worse.

A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me if I ever regretted moving from Austria to the Netherlands and basically leaving everything behind – the short answer? No. You will want to read on if you are interested in the long answer.

First, let me preface this entry by explaining a few things: I moved to the Netherlands in the summer of 2002 – it was more or less a spontaneous decision after having been there only once (and enjoying it) a couple of months earlier.

Normally, with big decisions, I tend to consider all the advantages and disadvantages, I weigh my various options and try to look at the big picture and disregard all small details that are not important for the overall decision.

Not this time though, when my parents first approached me in the fall of 2001 about moving internationally, I was reluctant, I knew little about the country or its customs, I did not speak one word of the language and, childish as it may seem, the one thing I could think of first – broadband Internet was not going to be available for at least a year at the very address I would be living at.

All in all, quite a hand full of reasons to tip the decision in favor of simply staying in Austria, but as always, there were also a few reason that would be able to, at least, balance the whole thing out:

First of all, Austria still has a conscript army where you are supposed to spend (waste?) ten to twelve months at, while getting paid little and seeing all your (female) friends move on to their sophomore year because they are not required to join the service.

Now, I will not say that I am a pacifist, but I do not see the point of me shooting vintage rifles, throwing hand grenades and crawling through mud all day long. Yes, it’s free physical education, paid for by the man and certainly a great way to condition yourself both physically and mentally, but at which cost? Being harassed days on end because you did not complete an obstacle course in the required time? No, thank you. I will just go to a gym and pay for it myself.

That and of course the fact that many drill instructors have enjoyed a lower education than me and still behave like they fought in both Wars and helped tip them in “our” favor. I do not have a problem with authority, I realize that there is a definite need for leaders and followers, but some things simply do not work for me.

I am not much of a patriot, I realize that, but then again I never claimed that I was one. I see citizenship as a, I guess the right word would be, attribute, that can benefit someone (or not) and I would like to think that by paying taxes and behaving like every good citizen should, that I have done a lot for my country.

There are others that are more willing to join a service and sacrifice themselves for their country, but I am not one of them. I do, however, have an insane amount of respect for every soldier that actually fought in a war and had to take another person’s life to protect the very country I am in.

Apart from the army issue, there was also the longing for change. I always wanted to spend a year abroad, just pick up a new language on the go and experience another country by immersing myself into their culture and therefore making it, at least partially, my own.

The Netherlands provided me with all that – a good education, a new country and a new language and best of all: no army I would be required to join after high school.

Obvious advantages aside, the Netherlands also were host to a number of other things that would be important for me later on, after high school – such as a good higher education that focused on new media. Yes, there are colleges and universities like that in Austria, but they do not have the same national status as the college I am studying in right now and prestige, somehow, still matters to me.

Back to the future, it has been five and a half years since I have moved here. As always, there have been the good times, the bad times and then there have been the great times: in the past two years I have personally met some of the people I admire, such as Kevin Kelly and Dick Hardt, I have talked to people that made millions on the web and lost them in the blink of a second. I have talked to some of the most influential people of the Dutch media scene and I had (and have) the pleasure of working with some of them.

I have given speeches in front of huge audiences on topics I care about and even though both cases were rather ad-hoc, I like to think that I did perform quite well.

The Netherlands, for me, were and are a catalyst of sorts: after moving here I acquired new clients, nay friends that taught me a great deal about going about business. I have met generous people that helped me by sharing experiences and interesting information with me and I have worked with people that showed me the works and I am thankful for that, because I believe that I would not be who I am today were it not for their intervention.

Business things aside, there is one issue that keeps coming up, an item that many people cannot and will not disregard as lightly as I did: friends.

When moving internationally, you are basically sacrificing friendships; sure – there are trains and planes and cars and you could visit them (or they could visit you) every now and again, but one way or another, the friendship is going to change.

Well, let me say this: real friendship transcends borders. There are a few people in Austria I still have contact with and those are people I consider true friends. Not only because we shared many things in common back “then”, but also because we still have regular contact and try to keep the other in the loop, which is good enough for me.
I have not been to Austria in more than five years now and every time people ask me when I will be going back, I have to give them the same answer: I do not know if that will happen any time soon, maybe not ever at all.

In closing, let me state that if someone were to ask me what the best decision was that I made in the last decade, I can say, with absolute certainty, it would be moving to the Netherlands and I do not regret it at all.