Thoughts and Travels

It seems to me that people who are passionate and successful in one area of their life are often just as passionate in other areas. In this interview series “The Successful and the Passionate” I will talk to some successful and passionate people about some of the things they share a passion for that they aren’t so well-known.

Today we talk to Therese Hansen about living small and travelling.

Therese is a Computer Scientist, Programmer, Blogger and Startup Weekend Mentor. On top of this, Therese is also the co-founder of Monzoom, and the woman behind xiive.com (the social media filtering site) and rouqk.com (analyzing Twitter every 20 minutes).

Therese’s passion is for travelling and living small. Therese says the two go together pretty well with her professional life as a entrepreneur, but they are her passion and she would be doing it even if she wasn’t a successful entrepreneur.

Therese, you tell me that your passion for living small started when you and your husband moved in with your father when you were 30. What prompted you both to quit your jobs and work full-time on your professional passions in this way?

My husband and I were part of a Startup Weekend (weekend-long, hands-on experiences where entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs can find out if their startup ideas are viable) in our then-home town of Aarhus. That weekend we met other entrepreneurs, worked on something we were passionate about, and were injected with the entrepreneurial spirit.

It was a transforming experience, and we decided halfway through the weekend that this was the kind of thing we wanted to do full-time. We both had well-paying jobs in IT, so we had quite the nice buffer of money saved and after that weekend we started talking about how to stretch our savings so we had as much time as possible before we had to make money from our new company.

My father was living alone in a really big house at the time, and he had an unused attic as big as our apartment, and when we told him our plans he invited us to stay with him. My father was also an entrepreneur, though with a physical shop, and so was his father, and my great-grandfather.

It runs in the family, and I think my father was quite happy to learn that I had the startup-spirit as well. With the support of our family and a lot of great feedback from our social circle we decided to do it.

Alongside this another side of the story developed. I was stressed out from commuting 4 hours a day to and from work, and sometimes staying in hotel rooms alone to avoid the long commute. The Startup Weeked woke me up to see that there are other ways to live.

You mentioned to me beforehand that your travels to date have so far mostly been to Asia, with cheap trips also within Europe. Can you tell me about your first trip — or about a particularly memorable trip?

Our first long trip took us to Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Krabi, Kuala Lumpur, Krabi, Hua Hin, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, and then home. We were travelling for 7 months and loved it. I learned a lot about myself and my husband on that trip. It changed our view on our daily life.

Anyone who travels a lot will tell you that seeing how other cultures organize themselves and what they hold as truths will make you do some introspection and question the things you take for granted.

It also inspires you. Nothing compares to the freedom you feel when you know you only have the things in your suitcase (we are too old to be backpackers). You can’t spend a lot of money because if you buy new things you will need to discard something old to be able to still carry your things with you.

As an entrepreneur, when you are travelling have you found there are marked differences to how you are received in different places to how you are at home?

I wouldn’t say that I know how it feels like to be received as an entrepreneur in different cultures because it has never been something we told people. We always just say “we work in IT” and the response you get for that is not much different in Thailand to what we hear in Denmark.

In what ways has living small changed life for you and your husband? What impact has it had on your outlook on life?

Living from a suitcase and living on a small budget has changed a lot of things for us. We are able to support ourselves by doing relatively little paid work. Our budget requires us to work 2 days a week on paid work and we can do what we want with the rest of the time.

It turns out what we want is to work some more on getting our own products out there, and I can’t say that that was what I had predicted when we started cutting back on spending.

I have had a lot more mornings waking up and thinking that I’m too lucky after we made this change in our life. In the old days I would work hard to earn a lot of money to spend on expensive clothes and gadgets and now my clothes and gadgets are mostly packed away and my newest dress cost 150 Thai Baht (about 30 DKK, $5 USD, £3.50 GBP or €4 Euro).

I do not spend a lot of money, but when I do, I spend it on things that will make it easier to travel. My latest purchase was a foldable whiteboard - something we really have missed while travelling. I have a whole new outlook on spending and consuming. “Do I really need it?” is the one question I have with me all the time - not “Do I want it in this second?” which were my old criteria for shopping.

You tell me that living small and travelling go well with your professional life as a entrepreneur. Can you tell me about the benefits and challenges your lifestyle has had on your professional life?

The benefits are simple. I don’t have to spend a lot of time making money to put food on the table, because my expenses are low. That allows me to create the products that I want to make and not focus on the profit from day one. My priorities are different.

The challenges I have faced while travelling have been relatively small. We couldn’t go to a certain island because the internet connection was not good enough for us to work. We can’t meet with customers in person when they are in Denmark and we are in Thailand. My professional network in Denmark is shrinking because we are not there a lot of the time and I have to use a lot of time online to keep it.

Cutting back on expenses also means a lot of public transport and that makes it a bit difficult to get places to meet with customers. It also takes a lot of time to save money.

What are the top pieces of advice you would offer to others who wanted to start living small but are unsure how to break the cycle of always collecting more “stuff”?

Start with changing your thinking. Brand “collecting stuff” as something undesirable in your head. Stop and think before you buy. Do an experiment: don’t buy anything for a week (except food) and when you get tempted, write it down. If at the end of the week you can’t live without the things you have written down then buy it; my guess is that you won’t miss anything on the list.

Where would you like to see yourself in 10 years time? Do you and your husband plan to always keep travelling, or do you think you might travel less while still living small?

When my father died last year we reexamined our priorities. Yes, we do want to keep travelling, but we will probably do it less because of our business and how it is changing.

I really don’t want to spend another winter in Denmark, ever, so that means that we have to make plans for the period of November-March in another country: with the exception of Christmas. Our mothers don’t allow us to travel on Christmas; we did it one year and they missed us too much.

Living small is now part of who we are. Even if we were millionaires we wouldn’t change much about our current lifestyle. My attitude towards my mindless spending can’t be changed back. I think collecting “stuff” was weighing me down mentally, and I will never go back to that life. Now the top of my priority list is the people around me. Material things has never meant less to me than they do now — it is a learned mindset. Less is more.

This attitude has seeped into all parts of my life.

For example, we launched our company website (monzoom.net) a few weeks ago. The website is one page, and it only has the things on it that our customers asked for. Not the many, many things we could tell about ourselves, but the things that are needed.

You can almost see the change in our mindset in the products that we create.

In our first product, xiive.com (search and statistics about keywords across social media sites), we put in all the features we could think of. Now we create apps and websites that are small and with only a handful of features - and we invite people into the process, not just to see the result.

Other than your work, travelling and living small, do you have any other passions?

I do genealogy as well, but that is a relatively new passion of mine, so there’s not much to tell yet. Although I did find out that my family has blood ties to the Danish royal family far, far back, but this is something I probably share with most Danes :)

Right now I live in a small Danish city where I have found family members all the way back to the year 1600.

Therese is now a mentor at Startup Weekend, and recommends the experience to anyone who thinks they might have entrepreneurial blood. Therese would also like to invite anyone with an interest in travels, entrepreneurship or social media to connect with her on LinkedIn dk.linkedin.com/in/theresehansen or Twitter @qedtherese.

Arghya is a serial killer, with a God-complex and a fetish for human emotions. He believes that emotions blur logical reasoning and thus, selects his projects accordingly.

His apprentice, Zemar is self-absorbed, ineffectual and suffers from a constantly unfulfilled need to please.

When the two form alliances, Zemar finds the lines of his accepted reality blurring in a mesh of conceptual arguments of a hyperreal universe with no origin.

A surrealistic exposition, “On TV, I Am Ageless” is a meandering journey of possibilities through the fragmented mind-space of a sociopath – where characters appear through the crevices, soon submerging, as the mundane marries the bizarre and folds in upon itself.
Over and over.

Coming soon.

‘Bust a Move’ by Young M.C. is my new jam.

It’s ok, I’m not asking for anyone to give me a job (although a new job would be nice), and I’m not asking for any funding or sponsorship (which must make a change). What I need is your connections.

Hopefully, you have heard about my blog post series “The Successful and the Passionate”; where I talk to successful people about their lesser-known passions, the things they love that they are not known for. It’s going well, so far, two posts in: but it needs more diversity.

I had a false start last time I tried this: I aimed maybe too high, or at people who didn’t know me. I contacted Carol Ann Duffy and got no response, and was disheartened. This time, I have started with people I have connections to, have two interviews down and two more potentials in the pipeline.

The only trouble is I am quite limited to the people, so I need your help and your introductions. Who do you know that is either well-known generally or well-known in their specific field? Actors, musicians, dancers, composers, scientists, authors, directors, architects — I want them all.

So, this is why I need your suggestions: and most importantly your introductions.

You can see the interviews so far here and here

It seems to me that people who are passionate and successful in one area of their life are often just as passionate in other areas. In this interview series “The Successful and the Passionate” I will talk to some successful and passionate people about some of the things they share a passion for that they aren’t so well-known.

Today, we talk to Peter Lubbers about running. And jumping.

Peter Lubbers is best known for his work with HTML5. He is the author of the book Pro HTML5 Programming (2nd Edition Apress, 2011) and the founder of the San Francisco HTML5 User Group—the world’s first and largest HTML5 user group with over 7,000 members. Peter now works as the Chrome Developer Relations Program Manager at Google.”

Peter also has a penchant for running.

Three-time winner of the Tahoe Super Triple (26.2M + 26.2M + 72M in 3 days), Peter also ran the entire 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail (TRT) in one go, in 57h:54m and completed the River City Marathon in under three hours.

Peter, I understand you are a former Special Forces commando in the Royal Dutch Green Berets. That is quite extreme itself — were you a superhero before you were a special forces commando?

No, not at all. I was really only good at one thing: long distance walking. That skill served me pretty well and I owe it all to my dad, who took me out walking on weekends. We started with 5 and 10K walks (my mom would also come along for those walks) and then it became more serious (Mom would stay home for those walks). We would routinely hike 20 to 50km a weekend and by the time I was 14 we hiked all across the Netherlands (where I was born), Germany, and large parts of England and Scotland. I remember we hiked 1,000km in a summer vacation when I turned 13 or 14.

In those days, joining the army was mandatory. One interesting anecdote about that was that to join the green berets you had to pass a physical and mental fitness test on the first day you arrived. They sent the requirements a few months ahead of time and one of the items was the ability to perform 8 pullups. I tried it and was horrified I could not even do one! A friend of mine welded an iron pullup bar together for me and every night I would practice before going to bed. It was only the night before I had to go to the base that I was able to so 8 pullups. I was super excited! I arrived at the base and passed all of the other tests and when I came to the pullup station I jumped up to the rail and started pulling myself up, knowing I would be able to do 8. Almost immediately, the drill instructor said “that one does not count, you jumped.” I managed 7 “correct ones” and then tried my best for an 8th, but it took too long and I was dismissed. It was a memorable moment — I was certain I had failed and would need to be stationed somewhere else, but they let it slide and the rest was history.

Authors and programmers aren’t normally associated with being elite athletes. Have you ever had to make a decision to choose between a passion for technology and for running?

I certainly don’t think of myself as an elite athlete. Also, lately I have not been running at nearly the pace I used to — having been super busy with the HTML5 work. In the ultra marathon world there are guys like Karl Meltzer, Scott Jurek, and Kilian Jornet who are the real elite athletes. One elite endurance runner who is a full time husband, father, and top-notch IT professional is Tim Twietmeyer, who held the Tahoe Rim Trail record until a few years ago. Tim has been a source of inspiration for me and many others for years.

What has been the best about the ultrarunning elites though is how non-elitist and generous they were with their advice and time. It is such a great community. For example, when I approached Tim about trying for a Tahoe Rim Trail speed record attempt, he literally gave me all the tips and tricks he had accumulated over the years, including his timing spreadsheets.

I’ve never had to pick between the tech and running, but it is exciting to combine them. For example, in the Pro HTML5 Programming book you will see some examples based on running. In general, there is not a lot of money in ultrarunning and I think that is a good thing: it has kept it very clean. That does make it hard for the elite athletes to make a living, though.

A friend of mine recently ran the London Marathon for the first time. Tell me about the first marathon you ever ran — or if, it is more interesting for you, another memorable race. Or both.

A colleague of mine suggested I should really try out the marathon, so I signed up for the 2004 Big Sur marathon and started training. I still remember driving to the full 26.2 miles to the start in an old school bus and thinking to myself “I have to run all of this?” I paced the run pretty well with a short walk break every mile. It was a beautiful course. Although it was hard between miles 20 and 23, I finished in just under 4 hours and was wondering “is that all there is too it?” It just did not feel like it was the “ultimate achievement” I had expected it to be.

As luck would have it, Les Wright, the race director of the Tahoe marathon and Tahoe Triple Marathon was at the finish line. I picked up a brochure, but as soon as I saw triple marathon, I was sold. Five months later I found myself at the infamous pre race Tahoe Triple Spaghetti dinner buffet, where Les was asking how many of us were running their 500th marathon.

Surprisingly, people got up and they kept jumping up at 750 and 1,000. I felt woefully out of my league all of a sudden. When asked how many people were running their first marathon, I was thinking, “well, that’s not me either,” but it might as well have been.

The next day we started the first marathon. One of the runners was the amazing Helen Klein, who was around 80 years old and going strong, going for another age group record in her long list of records. I kept a decent pace and was able to repeat almost identical times on day 2 and 3 (the last day it is run in parallel with the regular Tahoe Marathon. Finishing that was a great feeling, no matter what place you finished in.

I was instantly hooked and came back again in ‘05 and stepped up to the Super Triple (26.2M + 26.2M + 72M in 3 days) in 2006. I trained harder and had a lot of help from my dear friends Chris and Rebecca who crewed for me. (CREW here stands for Cranky Runner, Endless Waiting). That very first Super Triple was one of my most memorable races. I was in second place overall and completely hit the wall with about 50 miles to go. It was a very long dark night, but I made it through and with the help from my super crew, I found that second wind and was able to start running again and actually won the race overall in the end.

It seems like a big leap to go from half marathons and marathons to Triple Marathons and 165 miles races. Did you always intend to do these ultra marathons, or did it come from wanting to always do bigger and better things?

When I ran my first 50km trail race on the Tahoe Rim Trail, I looked at the map and said, “one day, I want to just run the entire trail in one go.” That was the start of a 4 year training expedition in which I kept running longer and longer, but also really studied the trail and how other runners had tackled it. The 165 mile run all around the TRT was not an official race with other runners, but a solo record attempt. Lots of friends from the ultra community came help me and I had 4 crew members and 7 pacers who I can’t thank enough. That was the most memorable adventure I have ever experienced. when you run straight for 57 hours (2 x 12 minute sleep breaks) you go through a lot of highs and—unforgettable times!

Life to me is all about experiencing a series of “moments.” Sometimes doing something extreme can force you into the present moment and allow you to experience it more vividly, however, it is also simply being present in the more “mundane” moments of our lives that can be surprisingly powerful. It’s like the elusive runners’ high. You can’t really reproduce it at will, but you can create the circumstances to allow it to happen. We can add rich experiences like that to what I like to think of as an “imaginary backpack full of life experience.” I am glad to have put some great moments in my backpack along the way, but there is still space left ;-)

After I completed the 165-mile run and the sub-3 hour marathon, it was time for something a little different and that is when I started writing the book and that led to a lot of other great stuff. I am still running a little bit (currently training to run the 72-mile, 7-person Tahoe Relay with my kids and some of their friends in June). Something that I am planning for the future is a speed record attempt on the Pacific Crest Trail (2,600+ miles). That is currently at around 60 days. It would play into my multi-day long walk strengths, but would require some serious time off. One day!

Speaking of big leaps — you tell me that you also skydive, and that it started with parachuting when you were in the military. What made you recently want to go back to jumping out of aircraft?

Yes, I love the thrill of skydiving and learnt how to do it in the army. My oldest son, Sean, recently turned 18 and wanted to go skydiving for his birthday (you have to be at least 18), so I was happy to get back into it. This time we jumped from a lot higher altitude (13,000 feet) than I was used to (in the army, you mainly learn how to dive from just above 1000 feet to lessen the chance you will get shot out of the sky), so we had a lot more time in freefall and that was a lot of fun. We already decided to go back for the full certification this summer. I can’t wait!

Aside from skydiving, you also bungee jump. Tell me about the attraction of bungee jumping for you?

Although many people think they are very similar, skydiving and bungee jumping are quite different. Bungee jumping is a lot more direct. Unlike Skydiving, when you are about to bungee jump, you see the ground below very clearly and close. The rush is incredible and very therapeutic. On a side note, every time I have made a bungee jump, I have somehow gotten very lucky. Once I even won a trip to Hawaii right afterwards!

Other than running and jumping, and generally being an authority on HTML5, do you have any other passions?

I love spending time with my wife Vicky and my sons, Sean and Rocky.
Most recently I have also become really excited about the power of Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) education.

The HTML5 Game Programming course we recently launched with Udacity has more than 65K students enrolled now—an incredible number, but somehow it seems like it is still just the tip of the iceberg. There is a lot of untapped potential in that area.

Also… did I mention HTML5? ;-)

To read more about Peter’s running, check out his blog:
http://runlaketahoe.blogspot.com/ and you can join the San Francisco HTML5 User Group here: http://www.meetup.com/sfhtml5/

It seems to me that people who are passionate and successful in one area of their life are often just as passionate in other areas. In this interview series “The Successful and the Passionate” I will talk to some successful and passionate people about some of the things they share a passion for that they aren’t so well-known.

Today, we talk to Simon Peyton-Jones about “Computing At School”.

Simon Peyton-Jones is a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, a major contributor to the design of the Haskell programming language, and a contributor of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). In 2011, he and Simon Marlow were awarded the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for their work on GHC. He is the author of a number of books, a husband and a father.

Simon, you’ve agreed to talk to me about “Computing At School”. Can you tell me, briefly, what makes you so passionate about this group?

I started getting involved in this because of my children. My eldest was aged 12 and going to school and doing a subject called ICT, but they found it extremely dull, even though the school as a whole was really very good. I found I couldn’t really make any sort of connection between the discipline to which I had devoted my professional life, and which I thought was just the most exciting thing on the planet, and this subject they were doing at school.

On further investigation I found that ICT in many schools (though not all) had come to mean little more than how to use Microsoft office. And certainly, even at its best, it is to do with the purposeful use and application of computers — but it wasn’t at all about how computers work. It was like learning about how to drive a car, even how to drive a car safely and purposefully, but not at all about something like internal combustion, or how cars work, or how you might design and make them, which is what my professional discipline is about.

I started to get involved in looking at if there was a way to reform the school curriculum in ICT, because everybody I spoke to seemed to think that it needed reform; that that children were too often being taught things they knew already, too often by a teacher who was really a geography teacher who had a spare period, too often taking qualifications that did not challenge them. In short, the whole subject seemed to have spiralled into a bad place where it was a low-status subject with low achievement: and I wanted to fix that.

You are the chair of the board for CAS. How did things start?

We started CAS back 2007/8 and it just had 3 or 4 people in it at that stage. it was just a grassroots bunch of volunteers and we grew fairly slowly. For a long time we were below 100 members — now we are on 4,000 members. And for a long time we felt that we were very much the underdog.

We were saying we have got to think of this subject as a subject discipline in the way as you might think of Maths and Physics, that is a subject with a body of knowledge, and tools and techniques and ideas that don’t change very quickly and aren’t even very closely coupled to technology, per se.

Computer Science is algorithms and ideas and data structures and computational thinking, it’s not primarily about computers or about any particular programming language or programming in general: it’s about computation.

Establish the idea of computer science as a discipline. None of that comes over in schools at the moment, and our goal was to establish the idea of computer science as a subject discipline that every child should learn in the way that they learn physics. We teach Physics to everybody, to the ones who are going to become physicists — that tiny minority — but also to the hairdressers and lawyers and plumbers. Everybody gets a bit of science at primary school, because science governs the world that they live in — and in the same way, digital things govern the world that they live in.

Some elementary knowledge about how that digital world works and sense of empowerment is really important. It was a strange connection between my professional discipline, which I am very excited about because I think computer science is so interesting, and on reflection realising that really does have repercussions at school level, and it was not being recognised.

But what if we put together in a room all the people who feel powerless about this issue, and who think it is terrible “but what can you do before the might of the supertanker that is the nation’s education system”? It was like saying “everybody thinks this is silly, but nobody thinks they can change it”, but if everybody thinks it is silly then maybe if we all would all say at once “This is silly!” we could do something about it.

You mentioned you have children of your own. What does Computing At School means in the lives of your children?

For my children, it’s a rather eccentric crusade that I am on. My eldest has now graduated from university, so it’s all water under the bridge as far as he’s concerned, and my eldest daughter is doing her A-Levels, so it’s not going to affect them directly at all.

But we have succeeded in having a major effect on the education system, and there is a review of national curriculum going on at the moment, and we’ve had a big effect on that. The new draft of the National Curriculum for computing really does enshrine Computer Science as a part — not all of, but a part — of what every child should learn about computing at school. It’s amazing, we’ve made an incredible impact in a very short time.

What do you personally consider the main challenges surrounding Computing at School to be?

A little while ago I would have said getting policy change at national level, because the Department of Education does express policy about what should be taught when at school, getting the Department of Education to understand the idea of Computer Science as a discipline is a big, big thing. A few years ago that was the big issue.

The second big issue was availability of qualifications, until 2010 there were no GCSEs in Computer Science — and if there is no GCSE in a subject you can’t study it, it’s that simple. If there’s no GCSE in basket weaving you can’t study basket weaving at Key Stage 4, it’s just not possible. Until 2010 there were no GCSEs in Computer Science. There were several in ICT, several in the use and application of computers, but nothing at all that involved programming or understanding how computers work with regards to algorithims or computational thinking — it’s extraordinary in a devleoped country.

This was a huge roadblock, so a few years back I would have said getting a range of qualifications in computer science available to school children so that they can progress from primary school through qualifications to GCSE, through qualifications at A Level, to university if they want — and each stage it would be a smaller and smaller number, as with any subject.

But both of those things we have, more or less, done. All the awarding bodies are now offering GCSEs in computing science and the Department of Education really does recognise the importance of computer science.

To answer the question, the challenge now is to get that change propagated into every school. In particular, we have a cohort of ICT teachers who are very well motivated and smart, and certainly very powerfully motivated to help their pupils. They are very, very diligent and hardworking and well-motivated, but they are, by and large, under qualified in computer science. Many come in the profession from business studies, or geography, or some humanities discipline. And more power to them — good for them, to have taken up ICT, but nevertheless this means that their computer science background is thin. This doesn’t typically mean they are opposed to the idea of computer science as a discipline, at least at an elementary level, but it means that they need our help to teach it.

The big challenge at the moment that CAS is working up to is trying to train the ICT teachers of the nation and give them the information to do exactly that. Every school and secondary school has at least 1 ICT teacher. There are 30,000 primary schools, and if they want to teach some elementary knowledge in primary school they are going to have to teach computing as well in the same way that they do science — and this is a big task.

How focused is CAS on the gender gap of women in IT? How far do you feel that greater inclusion something is important to tackle at school age?

I think that when it comes to the gender gap if you don’t tackle it at school age it becomes much more difficult to tackle it later, because that’s when children’s assumptions and stereotypes about the way they live are formed. Stereotypes is a very negative word, but as we grow up as individuals we form beliefs about the world — such as that cars are hard, and you shouldn’t walk in front of them. Lots of these beliefs make sense, and we should gain them, but we also gain beliefs about what men and women can and should do, and we can end up with quite negative gender stereotypes.

Computer science gets thought of as something that socially challenged male geeks might study at university, and they should do so out of sight. But if we were to teach computer science the same we teach other sciences, starting at primary school, well before puberty, before girls start to think of themselves as girl and boys think of themselves as boyish, then maybe there’s a chance we can get girls hooked on the thrill of computing before they get hammered with the stereotype. Then they stand a better chance of resisting it, and saying “I can do this, there’s nothing male about this. I’m really quite good at it already”.

You were involved with the book Cybernauts Awake!: Ethical and Spiritual Implications of Computers, Information Technology and the Internet . How far do you think that computing in schools should include the Ethical and Spiritual Implications of Computers and the Internet?

I’m convinced that you can’t teach science or engineering of any kind in a way divorced from its impact on the world. If you do Physics, you can learn about Newton’s laws of Motion — and those are facts. Phyiscs and Engineering have a very big impact on the world that we live in. The answers that you might come up with in computing aren’t very cut-and-dry, I wouldn’t want to teach “This is the right answer to the impact of science on the world we live in” but I want children to have a very lively awareness that as scientists and engineers every decision we make has consequences on people. That applies no less in the digital world than it does in the engineering or chemical world. I don’t want teach a monoculture of particular answers to moral questions, but I would like children to have a very lively awareness of the consequences of their choices, and have experience of debating those consequences.

I’d also like children to have a lively awareness of their spiritual lives, and have experience of debating those, too — these two worlds may collide, because moral choices and spiritual choices are not orthogonal, the can overlap.

The Computing At School Working Group (CAS) is a grassroots organisation of volunteers that aims to promote the teaching of Computing at school. To get involved, visit http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/ or follow CompAtSch on Twitter.

‘Hospital Food’ by Eels is my new jam.

“Some people have a hard time explaining rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t think anyone can really explain rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe Pete Townshend, but that’s okay. Rock ‘n’ roll is a lifestyle and a way of thinking… and it’s not about money and popularity. Although, some money would be nice. But it’s a voice that says, “Here I am… and fuck you if you can’t understand me.” And one of these people is gonna save the world. And that means that rock ‘n’ roll can save the world… all of us together.” -Jeff Bebe, Almost Famous

I love the movie Almost Famous, and despite being an asshole I’ve always had a great liking for Jason Lee’s character “Jeff Bebe”. In one of the film’s early scenes, William Miller interviews Jeff in the Stillwater dressing room — that’s the quote above.

In a funny sort of way, this quote is how I like to see the Open Source software community — “one of these people is gonna save the world. And that means that rock ‘n’ roll can save the world… all of us together”.

: Berlin Geekettes Mentorship Program powered by Google

berlingeekettes:

In November of last year, we introduced the first round of our mentorship program. Our goal was to give the women in our community an opportunity to receive guidance and connect with other women who have “been there and done it”.

So many of you applied to the program and we ended up with a…

For some time, I have been interviewing user group organisers (community managers each of them, no matter what their day job is) about their groups.

I’ve been fortunate enough to interview leaders of groups like the London Java Community (upwards of 3,000 members), Hacker News London (approaching 5,000 members), and many other group organisers from around Europe. It’s a theme I’m continuing, and I have reached out to several other organisers recently.

I love to write, and I love hearing people’s stories. I once trained and worked as a journalist for this very reason, but found in the real world of a news desk on a regional daily newspaper it wasn’t that simple.

For some time, I have had an idea: I want to interview successful people who are well known for one particular thing. But I want to interview them about their other passions. I have a theory that people who are passionate and successful in one area of their life are often just as passionate in other areas.

This is something I started exploring in my community manager interviews: my final question was always along the lines of “Aside from your work, tell me about something else you are passionate about?” — though I never had the time to pursue these leads any further, with a day job to do.

Now I want to ressurect this project. While continuing with community manager interviews — about how different groups find speakers and grow their communities — I want to hear about passions.

I had a false start once before when I contacted my hero Carol Ann Duffy to ask if I could interview her, and got no response. But now I am going to try a slightly different approach, using social media to both share this article and reach out to some public figures. And since I have contacts in the Open Source community, perhaps I can find some well known figures in the industry to tell me about their passions.

Of course, if anyone should have friends or contacts that would be useful, please let me know — these things are always about who you know.

‘Down In Mexico’ by The Coasters is my new jam.

It’s a foggy morning in Berlin. I’ve spent the night in a single room apartment on the 9th floor of a 18-storey tower block in east Germany. All around are tower blocks of a similar size and nature. The outside of the building has brightly coloured red and yellow facades, but I get the impression these were added much more recently to make the building more attractive.

The ornate fountain outside is dry and falling apart. That probably was part of the original design.

For one person living alone, it’s a nice flat. Bright and airy, with pretty much space for all you’d need. You could even have guests stay the night if they didn’t mind sleeping on the floor. But then you remember, this was probably built a long time ago in the days of the Soviets, and it wouldn’t have been one person living here back then, but probably a whole family.

The whole building is quite loud, not with the sound of music or televisions, but the hard floors in the corridors and apartments and thin walls means you hear people walking about all the time. Double glazed windows don’t keep the sound of the traffic out, either. But you’d get used to that.

The apartment has a view over the city and the dominating telecoms tower, and in a strange way the sound of the trains going by is almost comforting, it reminds me of the sound of the planes back home by London City Airport.

It’s a very short walk from the train station, when you know where you are going, and there is a Lidl supermarket right next door to the supermarket, making it well provided for — and actually better served than my own Docklands flat. It’s also a short walk from Alexanderplatz, which is a kind of city centre.

When I visit a city, I like to try and understand it. What does it mean to live here? What do the people feel? Antwerp was a difficult city for me, I didn’t feel like I ever really did understand what it meant to be from Antwerp. Berlin is obviously a city of so many different personalities and nationality that you can’t define just one characteristic.

Obviously, it was once a city divided and while the dividing wall is long gone, there are distinct differences in architecture between the sides. There are the memorials and museums, and painful memories for a lot of people. But there is also excitement and innovation and a bright technology scene, as well as the techno clubs that seem to come from nowhere at night in areas you thought were quiet during the day.

It’s a cop out to just call it a city of contradictions, contrasts and complexities — despite the alliteration. Berlin isn’t a place I can summarise so easily just yet, it needs more return visits, and I think I can confidently add it to the list of European cities I could live in — along with Paris, Lisbon, and Barcelona.

Some pictures from MongoDB Berlin

Berlin.

Landing in Berlin, it was almost as if I had never left London.

London had been grey and cold when I left, and Berlin’s airport looked just the same. Even the snow could have been explained if you’d told me we’d taken off from London and circled for 90 minutes — during which time it had snowed.

But from the air I’d seen towns and half frozen lakes, instead of the sprawling English home counties and the city I call home.

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t think all airports do look the same — from my limited experience, I have found airports in places like Scandinavia and Switzerland to have very different personalities to those of Italy and Spain. In a very generalised way about the characteristics of those nations, perhaps.

Berlin airport was confusing, there was no obvious place to go at first for taxis and being a stranger in a strange land I didn’t know what the procedure or etiquette was. Outside there seemed to be plenty of taxis, and some unmarked cars that may or may not have been taxis, and a guy who seemed to maybe be trying to get people into taxis, but it didn’t seem very efficient, or very German.

Instead, I wandered around inside the airport looking for an information desk. There they told me what area to go for taxis, and the leaflet that said not to go anywhere else.

Clearly, there are phrases I need to learn in every language. Things like “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” (je suis désolé, je ne comprendes pas), “I would like a taxi”, or “I don’t remember, I was very drunk”. The only drawback is when you can ask questions in another language, you need to be able to understand the answers. It was very well for me in Paris to be able to ask “Where is…?” but if you don’t understand when someone answers, you just simple stupidly, and walk away none the wiser.

I’m here for MongoDB Berlin on Monday and Tuesday, then I have Wednesday to myself to explore the city and learn a little about Berlin, before returning home on Thursday. Since my hotel reservation is only until Wednesday, I am staying one night in an apartment I found on Airbnb. Since Lisbon, and the charming Portuguese family I lived with, I have learned to search for whole apartments. Though I did enjoy in Lisbon being fed, being shown around the city, and taken out for Gelato, so maybe there is something to be said for just booking a room.

I hope to update several more times while I’m in Berlin!