New place – new people – new projects
More than one year ago I moved from Linz to Berlin. I have never regretted it. I had and still have many friends here, for skating the city is just great, a lot of things are going on here, especially in media art and of course more than enough party. So it's definitely enough for not getting bored.
During last 13- 14 month I got involved in some projects with friends and new people. In this blog post I give a short overview of these activities.
Living Rooms Developers
My friend and ex-roomie Flo Feigenbutz are totally dedicated to software development and learning new technologies. Unfortunately, we got in touch with the dark side of this passion -> too much working. After many hours of talking about this passion and the inherent destiny of being a developer, we figured out that we have the same ideas about work life balance. We both love Snowboarding and other Outdoor Sports but also enjoying living in a city... We have to combine all these lovely things somehow with our developer passion... For this reason we founded the Living Rooms Developers network. Our aim is it to be flexible as much as possible. So that we can perform our developer passion on same level as our outdoor passions. The main subjectives of our network are: working with friends, find great projects we are really believing in, and at the end having the freedom to enjoy our outdoor activities. That means for example, if it snowing heavily in the Alps we want to leave the city and go for Snowboarding. In our opinion this is only possible if we create our own software products and sell them. Being independent from our clients is one solution to come one step closer for designing our sustainable business ecosystem. We did already a testrun with our RVG Assistent cost calculator App for lawyers. Some things went totally wrong and some other approaches were just great. So more projects will come and we will see. Time for experimenting!
werkstatttraum
Since February I work at the Werkstatttraum. Werkstatttraum is a mix of a co-workingspace and a shared studio. We are bunch of (international) artists who just live out our passion of creativity in the heart of Kreuzberg. Everyone has different backgrounds (Sculpture, Painting, Street Art, Grahpic and Fashion Design) and influences the others one. It is a very nice friendly atmosphere, which reminds me on my studies in Linz. Just a great place for working on my master thesis (Human Plant Interfaces). Tinkering time!
Was futtern
Rusbeh Sufi, a class-mate from school, asked me if I can create a website for him. He wanted to solve the question what and where can I have my lunch. He did a two or three years long market research about available menus in restaurants. He analyzed prices, ingredients, and menu names. In the end he had a list of 500 common menus, which are almost everywhere available in Germany. That was a great starting point for me. So I developed a small web application for him, where you can enter
- which kind of food do you want (e.g. Turkish, Italian, German...)
- what ingredients do you prefer(e. g. seafood, pork meat, vegetarian...)
- how much do you want to pay
After you defined your wishes, you will get a collection of menus. This collection should be appropriate to your preferences. Afterwards, you can see which restaurants might have this suggested menu. I am still working on this and we have some future ideas to run a small business out of it... and again Tinker time!
Result
Well, a lot of activities exists with no obvious direction. I am sure I will experience some failures but also some positive things. We will see... I am just happy to be able the to experiment with such different things and of course working closely with FRIENDS.