kerimsatirli.com

Let me tell you a story: a couple of years ago, back when I was still living in Austria, I discovered an application, called Trillian, a multi-network chat application that just worked.

Trillian was (and still is being) designed by Pak-Kei Mak, better known as kid, who, back then, was “just” a student who won a design competition.

Trillian’s design appealed to me; it was new, it was non-standard, it carried the mood factor and it had emoticons that, to this very day, make me smile (or frown, depending on the selected emotion).

Kid, besides being a kick-ass designer, also did some PHP coding on the side and created a script that would index a directory in the same (visual) style as Windows XP, and I loved that, as did Ben.

In fact, we enjoyed the greatness of said script so much that we basically created a clone of the whole indexer, distributed it amongst friends and made a few people happy with it, oh, and Ben and me close contacts of each other, often conversing long hours on the most interesting (or the most ridiculous) topics.

Fast-forward to January 2007, when I was invited to the Trillian Astra Alpha-testing cycle and decided, on a whim, to start a conversation with Kid, after all, this was my chance to talk to one of those that I admire.

One conversation quickly became many, admiration was joined by respect, advice, dare I say: (online) friendship? In any case, we felt that we struck a note with each other and we got along very well, so well, that Kid and I started working together.

At first, our collaborations only included brainstorms on various things, basically toying with ideas and sharing some dreams with each other, up until a point where I asked Kid to step up to the plate and design something for me. His work turned out great (more on that in another post) and we decided to continue our collaboration in the future.

A couple of weeks ago, when my first internship was entering the home lane, I had to make a decision: would I go for the medium or big company with the well-known name and earn a few pesetos but probably do stuff I have been doing the past couple of years, or would I go for the company that is not even a company but much rather an idea.

In my (professional) life, most of my choices have been about doing the thing that I am the most passionate about, I am interested in learning new skills and hone old(er) skills much more than I am in making a big buck (at least, right now) and so I went for the idea that I am passionate about.

From June 3rd, 2008 up until, at least, sometime mid-August 2008, Pak-Kei and me will be on a journey, a journey of exploration. We will be battling against many of the same things that (web) start-ups have to deal with and if bad meets worse on the way and they manage to get along well enough, we might end up with nothing but great experiences.

And in fact, the few people I discussed this with mostly told me, often in very specific terms to drop the idea of makin’ a big buck and just go work for an established company and be done with it.

While I value the input of the people around me, I believe that the following quote sums it up best:

He who tries and fails is wiser (and happier) than he who does not try out of fear of failure

And that is why I am going.

Seventeen weeks ago, on January 19th, I started my first ever internship, at a company called XOLO.TV.

My college’s internship period officially did not start for another three weeks, but that did not bother me, I wanted the experience and I was not afraid of investing my free days in order to get that experience.

Now, seventeen weeks later, I have about seven weeks more experience than most of my co-students and am leaving XOLO.TV with a whole treasure-chest filled to the brim with new knowledge, good stories and new contacts.

It is said that all good things must come to an end, no matter if you want them to or not and In a way I am sad that my internship is over, for I will surely miss the guys (and gals) from XOLO.TV.

Without trying to come off as being too emotional, I think it is safe to say that I did not only find (business) contacts at XOLO.TV, but rather friends.

The past months, starting with the, by now, famous, New Year’s Party, Video Vortex, the actual start of my internship, Paaspop and The Next Web 2008 it has been a fun-filled ride for sure.

GabeB, GabeMac, Marc, Paul, Stephan, Tatjana, Walter, Wiendelt - you guys rock and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for making this internship experience as great as it was.

Just two weeks after Paaspop, the 2008 edition of The Next Web was planned to happen at the beautiful Westergasfabriek area in Amsterdam and once again (for the third time in a row), I decided to join this fest of innovation and, to quote another attendee:

this buffet filled with delicious brainfood

This time around however, I decided to make things a bit more interesting, for obvious personal reasons.

As concluded before, working at XOLO has it’s perks, one of them being that we have a myriad cameras available for use, so I decided to assault the conference armed with a camera and a number of questions.

My hopes were that I would get at least two, maybe three interviews, at the end of the second day, I had a total of two hours of uncut footage. Even cut, I still had a good 90 minutes left, including high profile interviews with Robert Scoble and Jessica Mah as well as the, sometimes very controversial, views of a number of different attendees.

Day 1, for me, was mostly about interviewing companies and speakers, trying to get their views on how web 2.0 affected their lives in one way or another.

On Day 2, I focussed on capturing the views of females on web 2.0, because, after all, it is widely known that females tend to be more social beings than (most) males and as such, ought to have a different view on all things web.

The result is that I got some very good footage, with participation from people from, amongst others: VPRO, eBuddy and IENS.

As remarked during my live-blogging session, a camera is a powerful tool and if one asks the right questions (which I hopefully did), people are more than willing to share their stories, no matter if they are speaker or attendee.

Taping two hours of footage, obviously also requires a lot of editing, cutting and encoding but close to ten days after the conference, I was done with the better part of the clips.

Again, my thanks go out to XOLO.tv for making it possible to use their equipment, it made the whole conference a much more enjoyable event.

Wow. Last time around, I thought that the break between two intern reports was too long, well, turns out that this one was even longer and the reason for that, just like last time, is that I am too busy to actually blog.

Shortly after the last posting, GabeMac and I went to Paaspop in Schijndel, as an attached asset for KINK, one of the better radio stations in the Netherlands.

Paaspop was held during the (Dutch) Easter weekend on the 22nd and 23rd of march and and was comrpised of a good selection of acts, such as Blof (yay!), Krezip, Racoon, Within Temptation (kick-butt pyrotechnics show) as well as Stevie Ann and others.

Working during a festival certainly has its perks, one of them being that you get to go just about everywhere, because of your backstage pass. And go everywhere we did. To quote GabeMac:

working at XOLO has it’s perks

And right he is. Having a beer with the artists from one group and talking about the newest CD with the singer/songwriter from another really makes work a lot more bearable.

All in all, a very fun-filled weekend, even though the whole area looked like a mud hole most of the time.

For a number of good pictures, I would suggest going to the album for day 1 or the album for day 2.

If there is one thing that I hate, it is most probably getting up early. It is not like I can not get up early, it is just that I have a strong dislike against getting up early.

I am not lazy, but rather nocturnal and a big part of my creative cycle revolves around the late (and sometimes: early) hours of the day.

Some people have suggested that being nocturnal, as far as humans go, is a conditioned behavior and even though I partially agree, I do not care enough to actually change my set way of operating, not unless I absolutely have to.

Having to get up at 5 am (!) to prepare for a set-call at 7 am some 60 miles away from where you actually slept, in my book, qualifies as one of these situations where deviating from your normal way of doing things is acceptable.

Ten days ago, Wiendelt invited me to take part in a shoot for the CliniClowns’ show Neuzenroode, where I acted as the boom-mic operator.

Not even five days later, I got another chance at joining both Wiendelt and GabeB (our resident singer-songwriter) for a shoot comissioned by the NISB, and that is where the story began.

The shoot was split into two days, Monday was in Maassluis, Wednesday was in Zwolle, both locations being a fair distance from Amsterdam meant getting up early, very early, namely during a time when every sane person is actually sleeping.

Still, the morning started off nicely with a fairly sized bowl of cereals and the Foo Fighters’ Times Like These playing on the radio, I already knew that the day would turn out to be good, and it would. I am going to spare you the details, but shooting can be quite entertaining, especially if you have company that can make it worth your while.

Apart from having a great day, I also learned a valuable lesson: cables are never long enough for the task you need them, yet always long enough to get in the way, which can be quite annoying when you have someone moving around your boom-mic all the time and stepping on the cable (I figured out a simple way of solving the problem with the help of a keychain and some ducttape).

That’s it for this entry, the only thing left to say is: thanks Wiendelt and GabeB for inviting me and a very big thank you to GabeB for hooking me up with a place to crash, thereby actually making it possible for me to join the team during the shoot.

I realize that I have been talking about my involvement with xolo.tv for some time now, but I always forgot to really show people what it is that we do. Well, fret not, I am not going to show you, right now, but I am going to share something special with you.

All you have to do is (left) click on this link and a new window will open with the video in it.

A note of advice: the clip is roughly 17mb in size, so you might not want to do this on a mobile connection unless you really are dying get to know the team.

It has been something close to four weeks now since my last intern report and while I initially planned to make this a weekly returning series, it turns out that working fulltime can do weird things to your scheduling as well as your stamina. One of those things is that, after a full day, I sometimes feel so spent that I simply cannot bring myself to write something that is actually worth posting and often just end up scrapping the whole piece.

Lucky me, xolo.tv has what could be considered an implementation of the Google Labs idea, where you get to spend 20% of your work time on personal projects; with the biggest difference being that, at xolo.tv, I actually get to choose what I want to work on, while Google limits your freedom to something that may be used to expand the company’s product portfolio.

Be that as it may, I find myself spending most of my time with treks through the intricacies of ExpressionEngine, which is finding more and more support here every day; if not only for the fact that the system, excuse the strong language here, damn flexible, that we have not yet been able to come up with a problem that cannot be tackled with it.

Apart from my techy backend work, I have also forayed into the area of frontend development and am actually starting the first phase of a huge project this week. Once phase one is completed, I will make sure to post about it here, suffice to say that the project is bigger than most of the ‘jobs I have done in the past and combines a great number of different techniques to form a solution that delivers content across a large scale of mediums, yet is able to target highly specific needs.

While, technically speaking, the project should be considered “work”, I perceive it much more as a reward given to me by the powers that be; the reward itself stemming from work I completed earlier on, where I proved that I could carry my load and come up with solutions that, most of the time, simply worked.

In fact, my direct boss was (and hopefully: still is) so happy about my work, that he decided to give me a recommendation on LinkedIn:

On a related note: it still feels weird to think of someone as my boss. In my short time in the field, I have always been independent. Yes, I have worked with others and yes, I have had clients that required reporting, but I never had a real boss. It is an interesting setting indeed…

As if a recommendation on LinkedIn was not enough, Gabriel Bauer, our resident movie-shooting-director-turned-producer-and-what-not dedicated a whole song to me (well, me and the two other IT guys) and the guy has got talent too (beware, the clip comes in at a hefty 25mb):

That’s it for now, more is coming soonish

It has been a tad more than a week now, since my last intern report and I am finally finding some time to actually post something here.

The past few days have been busy; we have been doing a whole lot of testing, evaluating and fine tuning of one of the core components , but it is safe to say that the solution we came up with is working as expected, in fact, it is working so good that we are undershooting the projected and optimized reference values by anything between 16 and 25 per cent, hoah! to that.

Besides testing, we have also moved forward with a number of web-development related projects and I managed to convince my superiors to make use of ExpressionEngine, one of the web’s most powerful CMS as far as I know.

A few weeks ago, I posted on the topic of team dynamics and how important they are for the well-functioning of a group of people that are supposed to work together and now, after three weeks of working at xolo.tv, I can safely conclude that this team has an awesome flow.

Yes, even good teams have those moments where individual members get a tad cranky, but like in every good relationship, it is way better to talk about the things that annoy you than to keep them to yourself and, finally, erupt like a volcano and most probably damaging a relationship (for good).

It is also interesting to see that humans are not unlike dogs, at least in the way they approach each other: the first few days, I had the feeling that we were mainly trying to figure out what my position would be exactly, kind of like a group of dogs sniffing each other out and deciding if the other is a threat or an ally.

So far, I have not been bitten, so I figure they do not consider me hostile and judging by the stuff I get to do, I am actually getting the feeling that they are starting to warm up to me. And … let me tell you, it feels good to be appreciated, because that makes you want to perform even better, impress the others even more.

When I first pitched the idea of me doing my internship at xolo.tv, I was offered a chance that few interns get: I could pick my own project. Now, you have to understand that my college has some guidelines as to what an intern should do, but technically speaking, everything that xolo.tv had available, fell within those guidelines and I had carte blanche.

In the past years, I have learned that having cojones is one of the main ingredients that you need if you plan on making a difference and that, dear reader, is something I want(ed) to do at xolo.tv, to make a difference.

At a highly dynamic company like this, with a high output of deliverables, finding something that actually makes a difference can be rather difficult, unless you are foolish enough to propose to deliver a solution that works faster (in terms of time), costs less (in terms of usage) and offers a more customized feature package; the fact that this solution is one of the core components of the xolo.tv platform is just additional icing on the cake.

What it is exactly that I am doing is something I cannot tell you, due to an NDA I signed, suffice to say that it is important, interesting and even innovative.

While we gear up for the release, you might want to check out a few of the pictures we took ‘around the office.

Being offered a chance to work on something like this is, simply put, freakin’ awesome and very educative at the same time and I figure that the best way to finish this report is by giving you something to think about:

Ain’t nothing like a man that can do what he wanna…

When I moved to the Netherlands a couple of years ago, my parents decided to choose the beautiful town of Oss as our hometown.

While there is nothing wrong with Oss in itself, after all, this is the city where the world’s most famous anti conceptive, the anti-baby pill, originated, Oss’ location is anything but close to the place xolo.tv is located in, Amsterdam.

What this basically means is that I get to enjoy the Dutch Public transport on a (close to) daily basis and as such, have made some interesting discoveries:

I have been commuting by train from Oss to Breda for more than two years now and have not had a single month withouth any delays, but never had more than two days with delays directly after each other … until now.

My first day at xolo.tv started with me nearly being late, not the kind of first impression you wanna make, not even if it is out of your own control and since the Dutch Railway operators love consistency, I was graced with delays of ten to fifteen minutes every day of my first week.

On my normal route, from Oss to Breda, ten minutes do not matter, because the same train I enter in Oss, is the same one that takes me straight to Breda but the situation is quite different when you are going to Amsterdam. There is at least two trains, at worst three, which means less consistency for the traveller.

And consistency is something I start(ed) to depend on: interning in Amsterdam is great, travelling close to four hours every day - not so much, because when you have to change trains all the time, your sleeping pattern gets all mixed up and my body, for one reason or another, is very unappreciative of that.

On a more interesting note, however: since I am interning in Amsterdam, I am actually getting more sleep than I did before, due to the fact that I simply cannot stay up too late anymore and also thanks to the downtime I have in trains, downtime that is used to sleep and just let my mind relax.

Back on topic, however, public transport. When you travel a lot, you get to meet a number of interesting or funny people and you experience a whole range of peculiar situations.

Commuting during rush-hour means that trains are crowded and everyone is longing for a place to sit; me on the other hand, I do not mind standing for one part of the journey, after all - sitting is what I do at the office (when we are not playing with the frisbees that is).

So the other day, while I was standing near one of the exits, I noticed another male who was fascinated by the amount of people that had to use the John (his words). He had been traveling with the same train for about half an hour at that point and completed another part of his journey (an additional 45 minutes) with me.

The guy literally made a listing of people using the toilet and his total count, after an hour and fifteen minutes, came down to 26 people. His conclusion was that some chef somewhere the day before had probably screwed up royally and that, in turn, prompted that much bowel movement.

I know that, sometimes, we should just stop to admire the little things in life, the things money cannot buy, I am just wondering if the things this guy was fascinated with are those small things (no pun intended)…