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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January 11, 2013
ABC - die Katze lief im Schnee # Seen this morning in Berlin:
A little impression from what the city looked like the weeks before it turned green on Christmas:
For winter images of other years see also previous posts. Title taken from a children’s song:
September 14, 2012
Learning German # For some reason I got that question multiple times now from people that moved to Germany but work in companies where English is the language to use for communication - how to best learn German (in addition finding people to talk to).
When thinking about how I got started with English there were a few things that helped: As a child I got some “made for learning English” crime stories to read.
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August 19, 2012
Open Source Meetup Berlin # This evening the (to my knowledge first) Berlin Open Source Meetup took place at Prater (Bier-)garten in Berlin. There are lots of project specific meetings, a monthly Free Software meeting, quite some stuff on project management. However this was one of the rare occasions where you get Linux kernel hackers, Wikidata project members, Debian developers, security people, mobile developers as well as people writing on free software or making movies related to the topic around one table.
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August 15, 2012
Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin - August 2012 # Despite beautiful summer weather roughly 50 people gathered at ImmobilienScout24 for the August 2012 edition of the Apache Hadoop Get Together (Thanks again for hosting the event and sponsoring drinks and pizza to ImmoScout as well as to David Obermann for organising the meetup.
Today there were three talks: In the first presentation Dragan Milosevic (also known from his talk at the Hadoop GetTogether and his presentation at Berlin Buzzwords) provided more insight as to how Zanox is managing their internal RPC protocols in particular when it comes to versioning and upgrading protocol versions.
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July 25, 2012
Recsys meetup Berlin # Planning a meetup in Berlin: 8 people register, a table for 14 people is booked, 16+ people arrive - all of that even if no pre-defined topic or talk is announced. Seems like building recommender systems is a hot topic currently in Berlin.
Thanks to Zeno Gantner from MyMedialight for organising the event - looking forward to the next edition.
July 12, 2012
Apache Sling and Jackrabbit event coming to Berlin # Interested in Apache Sling and/or Apache Jackrabbit? Then you might be interested in hearing that on September 26th to 28th there will be an event in town on these two topics - mainly organised by Adobe, but labeled as community event, meaning that there will be a number of active community members attending the conference: adaptTo().
From their website:
In late September 2012 Berlin will become the global heart beat for developers working on the Adobe CQ technical stack.
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May 31, 2012
Preparation done - clock is ticking # The clock is ticking - only one more weekend to go before Berlin Buzzwords opens its doors for the main conference (check out the Wiki for the Sunday evening Barcamp and the Sunday Movie Hackday). Looking forward to an amazing week with awesome speakers and great attendees.
One word of warning before: Given all the buzz around that conference as of now until mid-next week I won’t take any major decisions, most likely I won’t be able to follow through with any additional organisation, probably I won’t remember everyone I meet on-site.
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May 29, 2012
Last minute Getting Around information for Berlin Buzzwords # I’ve been sharing information on how to get around in Berlin more often than I’d like to type it out - putting it here for future reference.
Before going to Berlin make sure to put an app on your phone that helps with finding the right public transport mix to use for going from one place to another:
Nokia Public Transit for WP7 phones
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