CocoaDevHouse Amsterdam

April in Amsterdam wil be jam packed with lovely geeky Mac events; as well as MacExpo and iPodParty, CocoaDevHouse is coming to town.  Blake Burris from Cocoa Radio has been creating CocoaDevHouse in the States and now it's coming to Europe. I have agreed to help organise the event, fellow interested parties and organisers should add stuff to the wiki.  It's a weekend hackathon and informal 'show and tell event' on Cocoa, Mac OSX, WebObjects, web services, and other cool geeky stuff. Come along and share or make something!

All details as they emerge will be added to the CocoaDevHouse wiki. I have also written about the background, history, premise etc.  (See below).

CocoaDevHouseAmsterdam - What is this all about?
I have put together these notes as a guide, and to offer a little history.  Please, please correct me if I’m wrong about any of it! I am not an authority on this but for those who might like to come to CocoaDevHouse Amsterdam who’ve never been to anything similar, it might help explain – and hopefully encourage you to come.

CocoaDevHouse
CocoaDevHouse is officially a "hackathon" event; bringing together Cocoa Developers to collaborate on projects and make stuff together.  (Several guys in a room, hacking away, making cool stuff). Previous projects that have been made in this way are PB Wiki (made at SuperHappyDevHouse) and Audipad, made recently at CocoaDevHouse Dallas.

History: the unconference and the adhoc hackathon?
A great history of the rise of the unconference is here at Chris Heuer's Blog.  As Chris puts it, there are Meetups and BBQs, BrainJams and 'Barcamps'.  The three models being the loose night time party meetup, the day long discussion, and the weekend long hackathon and ideas sharing models.

History: Barcamp
Barcamp was setup in response to FOOcamp.

From Wikipedia: "In response to criticism of FOO camp, BAR Camp was created as an open, welcoming, once-a-year event for geeks to camp out for a couple days with wifi and smash their brains together. FOO Camp happens every year; it is an invite-only event for technology luminaries hosted in Sebastopol, CA at the O’Reilly headquarters. People camp out, have sessions, and work with other great technology minds to come up with ideas. One criticism is the exclusivity: everybody isn’t invited. This is why BAR Camp was created as an open event."

Barcamp Amsterdam (October 2005) was ‘championed’ by Roland Tanglao, Chris Messina, and Andy Smith.

Other Barcamps are organised by other Barcampees.  For a great guide on Logistics, see Amit Gupta’s Blog.

Barcamp Amsterdam
I attended Barcamp Amsterdam in October 2005.  It was truly a great event, so many interesting projects to learn about + also a lot of lovely people.  It was two days of sessions (ad hoc presentations from everyone who participated) and a hackathon going on in the kitchen for the hardcore crew. Some stayed the distance seeping over, some popped in and out. 
Mark Wubben's tales of Barcamp Amsterdam are here.
My video of Barcamp Amsterdam (a lighthearted view - some clever people actually did useful things!) is here. Barcamp Amsterdam and Flock was on Newsnight in the UK.

History: SuperHappyDevHouse
As well as Barcamp, there's also SuperHappyDevHouse.  "SuperHappyDevHouse has become the Bay Area's premier monthly hackathon event that combines serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere…We're about rapid development, ad-hoc collaboration, and cross pollination. Whether you're a l33t hax0r, hardcore coder, or passionate designer, if you enjoy software and technology development, SuperHappyDevHouse was made for you.
DevHouse is not a marketing event. It's a non-exclusive event intended for passionate and creative technical people that want to have some fun, learn new things, and meet new people. In this way, we're trying to resurrect the spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club. We also draw inspiration from the demoscene as one of the only intentional getting-things-done computer events in the world."

History: CocoaDevHouse
CocoaDevHouse focusses the development environment of SuperHappyDevHouse on the Mac Platform. CocoaDevHouse was setup by Blake Burris of Cocoa Radio. CocoaDevHouses are now happening in Dallas, Boston, San Francisco and more cities. And now it’s spreading to Amsterdam.
Because we had so much fun attending Barcamp, and because we’d like to grow the network of Cocoa Developers, WebObjects developers, Mac geeks and enthusiasts in Europe, we want another lovely event in our town!  Blake Burris suggested it; we think it’s a great idea.

Camping it up!

Cool, so now everyone gets the idea of an unconference either for meeting and sharing and also for making. Basically it seems that we all love a good camp. And the discussion is changing to be about what makes a good *camp / DevHouse, which model is the best, how (un)organised must it be? Can it be sponsored? All of this is to be discussed… So more Camps are emerging some are children of Barcamp, some are Children of SuperHappyDevHouse, some are children of CocoaDevHouse – like our CocoaDevHouseAmsterdam.  There are other projects too, such as MashUpCamp and bringing this 'unconference' concept to the non-tech world:BrainJams.

History: BrainJams
"BrainJams Events are open spaces where the participants decide on the content of the event within a basic framekwork that includes the BrainJams signature one on one knowledge networking in the morning and open discussions on how to best use emerging technologies in the afternoon. The knowledge and information shared amongst participants will be gathered and redistributed online to further the discussions, learning and idea manifestation after the event and beyond". - from http://www.brainjams.org/

CocoaDevHouseAmsterdam
Well, I have volunteered to help with this. In terms of organising and promoting, we’re using the standard format of the wiki, the poster, the tshirts.  We may go as far as stickers, though probably not temporary tattoos!  However, any help from the rest of the community here in Amsterdam is greatly appreciated, and we’ve already had some great offers of help! It’s not meant to be a great pain to organise; so we’ll leave it pretty fluid for now and see what the interest is like. If we know we need to find room for 50, there’ll be a little more work than if we only need room for 10.

So it’s both a hackathon for developers, PLUS a loose and very informal ‘show and tell’ / session event for the rest of us.

What is it again?
My need to explain from the beginning came from when I told a ’normal’ person about CocoaDevHouseAmsterdam.  “We’re having a kind hackathon / meetup for mac geeks in Amsterdam next month if you fancy it’.  She looked at me very very strangely even though she owns a Mac and makes technology things. It could be that there’s a slight loss of translation from “American” into “European” or something, but we’re learning!

My attempt at a few principles – for discussion
IT IS....

It's a hackathon.
It's a meetup.
It's a Show&Tell.

It's both serious and not so serious.
It's fun with added party atmosphere.
It's open and inclusive.
It's run by its participants.
It's diverse; so not everyone will be Cocoa Developers, and you can also come if you're not a developer of any shape or form!
It's for anyone working on the Mac platform.

IT'S NOT...

It's not a conference.
It's not a speed networking! event.
It's not a trade show or convention.

It's not run by one person, company, or corporation.
It's not expensive to attend and participate in.
It's not pre-planned.

Technology
Here’s some technical information if you’re reading this and still really don’t know what we’re on about. (You would have got bored by this point already).

What is Cocoa? (from Wikipedia)
Cocoa is Apple Computer's native object-oriented application programming environment for the Mac OS X operating system. It is one of five major APIs available for Mac OS X; the others are Carbon, Toolbox (for the Classic environment), POSIX (for the BSD environment), and Java. (Environments such as Perl and Python are considered minor environments because they are not generally used for full-fledged application programming).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_%28API%29)

What is WebObjects? (from Wikipedia)
WebObjects is a Java Web application server by Apple Computer which is available, at no additional cost, as part of the company's Mac OS X platform. It has a range of tools and frameworks to develop and deploy Web applications and Web services. Its hallmark features are its deep object-orientation, powerful data connectivity features and rapid prototyping tools. Applications created with WebObjects can be Web browser-based, have the full interactivity of stand-alone Java desktop applications or be offered as standards-based Web services.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webobjects)

OK, so if you’re coming please add yourself to the Wiki here: http://cocoadevhouse.org/
And the Upcoming event here: http://upcoming.org/event/61899/
If you want to sponsor the event, email me.

Tags: cocoadevhouse, cocoadevhouseamsterdam, amsterdam, superhappydevhouse, barcamp, unconference, meetup, mac, apple, macosx, cocoa, webobjects, technology.

Comments

[Randal L. Schwartz]

You say that Perl is a minor environment, but Perl can be (and has been) used to provide the functionality for a full cocoa program through CamelBones, an officially supported project of Apple.

[Katie]

Randal, I didn't say that; it's quoted from Wikipedia, maybe I should make that clearer. But noted anyway!

[Axel]

Cool, Randal reads your blog! I agree with him of course, being JAPH myself. But at this CocoaDevHouse Amsterdam I truly used Cocoa development and was amazed at the results we booked with our little group. The atmosphere was great, loads of nice Cocoa coding people, who apparently all live in Amsterdam! I'm a happy camper...

[hibTooriGlurb]

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