January 10, 2025
Visiting (and speaking at) the German Bundestag # Many, many years ago, I invited Berlin Buzzwords keynote speakers to join me for lunch pre-conference. For the view – and the impact of the location – I reserved a table at the restaurant that is located atop the Reichstags-building here in Berlin. If back then anyone had told me that one day I’d get an invitation to speak as an expert in the committee for digital issues of the German Bundestag, I wouldn’t have believed a single word!
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January 7, 2025
Learning German in Berlin # So you have been living in Berlin for a while, maybe even for years – but you fail to speak German fluently. It may feel weird switching to German even with friends, as your English gives you many more options to speak proficiently, to be precise when talking. People around you speak better English than you speak German.
One thing to remember: While Berlin is easy to navigate speaking only English, if you stay here for more than a couple of weeks you really truly do want to start training your German language skills: Emergency information – typically first available and more detailed in German.
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September 3, 2024
Notes on meetup organisation # What feels like decades ago I went to a talk at FOSDEM. One in a dev-room. And one of the very few that proved relevant for many years after. I have no idea what the title was, nor what year it was given, I do believe it ran in the MySQL dev room - in terms of topic it provided an overview on what to do and what to watch out for when organising community meetups.
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August 26, 2024
Open Source, InnerSource, CRA? # A couple days ago on Mastodon I read a post from by Robert Sander (here translated from German): “At FrOSCon I got the impression the FLOSS community is aging together. Where are people in their mid-twenties, new people entering the community?”
“Entering the open source community” - what does that even mean? Does it mean creating a public GitHub repo and publishing source code there?
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April 27, 2024
Some useful OSPO links # https://todogroup.org/ … TODO group of Linux Foundation generally collecting material around OSPOs and getting people interested in the topic together https://github.com/github/github-ospo/?tab=readme-ov-file … OSPO policy templates as published by GitHub’s OPSO Documentation skeleton … skeleton for things to document in an OSS project. Quilin … a starter project template for Open Source, and likely InnerSource, projects Keeping the above here to not loose them when cleaning my open tabs.
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April 25, 2024
How hard can it be: Open Source contributions # “Sharing is caring - if only more downstream users simply contributed to the open source software that they depend upon.” - a thought that has crossed my mind more than once in the past decades. Except - for your average software engineer in industry “contributing to open source” is anything but simple. In addition it’s anything but obvious why - on top of daily work - one should commit time to open source.
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April 23, 2024
Reboot blogging? # March 2009 - according to the history of the posts that’s when I started writing entries for my own blog. Twitter was three years old and of little more use than sharing where people were at the moment, which food they were eating.YouTube was just four years old. It was also the year I started the Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin, back then in the famous Newthinking Store - a meetup before meetups were called meetups in a co-working space long before the concept of a coworking space gained traction.
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April 14, 2024
Children tinkering, part 2 # Roughly a decade ago I wrote a short post about children tinkering. A lot of the advice from back then is still valid today. I just noticed that ten years later there are a few more things one could look into:
Instead of only being a subtrack of FrOSCon, Froglabs have turned into Teckids e.V. - including online fora, a yearly week for an off-site and several side tracks of Chemnitzer Linuxtage, FrOSCon and FOSS events in Graz.
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April 11, 2024
A short, incomprehensive history of spam and counter measures # “… it should be clear that improvements in communication tend to divide mankind …” by Harold Innis in Changing Concepts of Time
This post was triggered by multiple conversations in my big data circle of friends. All conversations agreed on some important topics: Social media sites these days are influential on the daily life of people globally. With that influence comes an incentive to use these sites to influence behaviour and public opinion.
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January 28, 2023
InnerSource Commons Board of Directors - a retrospective # In the last years I had the honour of serving on the InnerSource Commons board of directors. I was one of the founding board members. Thank you to Danese Cooper for inviting me to that: I still remember sitting in the subway on my way to work years ago reading her question of whether I wanted to be founding member of the InnerSource Commons.
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