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Some posts that had been sitting in my browser tabs for a while combined together in a brand new job guide for 2010. You can also read this as a follow-up post to my previous post on Why developers are important, this is which developers are important. This post has been lying in my drafts folder for a while, but it has actually only become more relevant.

Some ideas start out small and then grow larger than you thought imaginable. Coworker.nl is one such idea. This is a write up about how it came to be and how you can build your own.

Lots of fun to ride my second time at the Hague spring alleycat: Paria. Great guys, lots of speed and fun. Looking forward to more riding and maybe getting into polo.

Quite pleased with this picture Toby took of me at a splendid lunch at Frank:

Just saw this picture of the Wellington RFID farecard system at Adam Greenfield’s Flickr stream (CC-by-nc-sa photograph):

Yesterday I attended the fifth edition of This Happened in Utrecht city. It was a great new iteration with more polish even though it was also a big step up moving the entire event to a new venue.

A small post about the Interactive Environments exhibit at my alma mater. I had to be in Rotterdam anyway that day so I decided to drop by.

Today at an event called ‘What makes you horny?’ (#wmyh), I gave a presentation about my inspiration: Big Data.

One of the more important online projects Wikileaks got hit by a block this weekend but we at TipiT could quickly respond and get them up and running again. Read the write-up over at the TipiT blog.

The hearings for the various European Commissioners were held last week. Our Dutch representative Neelie Kroes (known from her ferocious busting of Microsoft’s balls) was given a hard time mainly due to political getting back from the Christian and Socialist European fractions for the grilling of their candidates.

Tuesday, December 8th, we had the first issue of the UX Book Club Amsterdam chapter.

Sjors Timmer writes a nice piece about the futility of innovation and the inevitability of failure.

Tim Bray speaks out on what those of us without a vested interest in the disfunctional business practices of enterprise software already knew and have been saying for years:

It’s that time of the year again, a modest list this time compared to some:

Of course I agree with this article: “Why front-end developers are so important to the future of businesses on the web” pleading for t-shaped webdevelopers being treated as such. Though that would seem like a fairly obvious point.

Yet another discussion about banks regarding the Huffington Post call to remove your money from the major American banks. There is in fact no reason why your money should be managed by a multinational public corporation (and many reasons why it shouldn’t). It is partly why my banking is handled by the Rabobank, a cooperative banking institution.

Ben Hammersley poses the question which has been on my mind for a while (tweet) now after seeing the various concept demoes of rich magazines on high resolution tablets.

Last week I trod off to Haarlem along with most of the usual suspects for the Rethinking Media event: “Show me the Money”organized by Dutch Media professionals. Along with the people from the Dutch online scene, there were a lot of professionals from the media industry present which proved to be an interesting mix 1.

Never enough time for reading, but thanks to Instapaper got around to reading some stuff that was due coincidentally both of these are from Salon:

Like I said yesterday, I added support for the Amsterdam subway to fakesubwayapis and fakesubwayapis-data. My forks: gae-fakesubwayapis and gae-fakesubwayapis-data.

Recently I worked together with longtime professional friend Kars Alfrink on a small side project. Now that we’ve finished it, it is time to show what we have done.

By the time you’re reading this I’ll be on a brief holiday to Morocco to surf and eat local cuisine. It’s been too long.

Jumping all over the randstad these past weeks. Some gems to be found:

New city, new group, same rituals:

Taplin regularly writes that the entertainment business is in crisis because people outside of the USA are not willing to pay for their intellectual property.

Interesting on the part of the sub-team adding extra information to clarify references, cultural differences and even tone of voice. There were enough of these notes to be distracting, which makes it a mixed blessing. I think a movie is experienced better without.

Listening to a conversation between Jon Taplin and Peter Chermin and Gordon Crawford. Crawford lashes out at newspapers (index 33:40):

Much to my dismay I found out that with the update to iPhone OS 3.1 Apple had disabled the workaround to be able to tether using the iPhone 1. Tethering was a very nice way to get online while on the go and a feature I would even be willing to pay a (small) amount of money for.

I’ve recently used my first OV-fiets and it was a fantastic experience 1. It’s a great way to bridge the last couple of miles on your transit experience and I think an important addition to the public transportation system.

Robert Scoble hits a point (two actually) that I’d been meaning to write-up as well about anti-features and privacy wich are very very important for mainstream adoption of your webservice.

Recently DataSF launched and I’m not very familiar with the concept, but it looks like a step in the right direction for city based data initiatives more or less in line with the “Cities That Think Like the Web” initiative. I still think the holy grail of reusability for government websites is a bit off and can only be combined with excellent websites and web literacy, but we are making progress.

I’ve never come as close to a depiction of paradise as with this picture:

I recently reread part I of Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton for UX Book Club Zuid-Holland and made notes during the proces. ‘Sketching’ is one of my favorite UX books and well worth a reread which I found reveals different layers and gets you to reflect differently with the experience you have accumulated since the last time I read it.

Jan Chipchase had asked this question recently in a post on this street scene which already had me thinking.

I can’t say enough how pleased I am to be riding this bike through the city.

Things are a bit slow in Amsterdam, this being high summer. Having Foursquare (see previous post) and being able to drink some beers in the city now and then does make it a lot more relaxed.

I had my Yashica D repaired and also recently acquired a lightmeter to make the process of shooting easier and now I’m slowly but surely shooting stuff with it.

This week returning from my new haunt in Amsterdam back to Delft, walking the streets with an appetite for beer I felt strangely disconnected.

One of the last bastions of Flash and native apps is the processing of video from outside sources such as webcams. It does not at all seem difficult to add this functionality to HTML5.

Last week I got Rebooted in Copenhagen again. Drove up with Peter and Iskander.

This is an English rewording of a post in Dutch earlier this week just in time for this Reboot session.

Adobe’s CEO said that Flash is safe from HTLM5. Just the fact that Adobe made a board level comment on this is telling enough, the answer itself is somewhat lacking.

For any international readers, as the Dutch are probably already very much aware of our totalitarian parking policies.

For my international audience; if you’ve been living in the Netherlands you could not have missed this.

Some remaindered notes:

In spite of the nice weather, I spent today at Mobile Widget Devcamp in Pakhuis de Zwijger. Having done some projects on widgets recently, I was curious to see what the state of mobile widgets was.