Okay, so you should know that possibly my first week in Berlin is going to be pretty dry when it comes to tasty morsels of local culture and biting sarcasm regarding the German way of life. Sad but true: the first few days here will be spent in the Nerd Cave.
Part of my reason for coming to Berlin in the first place was to have a chance to meet Jeremy and Stefan, two Cycling '74 employees working at the Ableton Live office and spending most of their time on Max for Live. Stefan hails from Austria, where all the women are strong, all the beer is good tasting and all the Knödel are above average. Jeremy, on the other hand, came to Berlin after living in New York because "fuck it". His German is ridiculously, unnecessarily good, better even than my French by the time I was leaving Paris. Not only is his accent flawless, but also he has total mastery of the intricate tone poem that is conversational German. When he leaves the Bäckerei in the morning, Brötchen in hand, he not only says the parting "tchüss", he actually sings it.
Like any well-run city state, activity in the Nerd Cave breaks down evenly into two main components: production and consumption. We alternate with almost prescriptive regularity between drinking coffee and writing code, eating ice cream and drawing control flow diagrams. Just kidding, no one has drawn a control flow diagram since 1980.
I'd like to say that we spent our time down in a cafe, hyped to the point of hallucination on double espressos, opining on the avant-garde engineering tools that will power the future of music composition and punctuating our assertions with wild gesticulation. This may come at a later date; we passed most of the time in the nerd cave eating cheese spread and debugging memory corruption. Although we did touch on a top secret new feature of the Max language that I can't really talk about here, suffice it to say that it would address topics as far reaching as concurrency, memory safety, hooks for web and mobile and programming for the masses. Of course, it remains to be seen if the powerful new tools we design for the broader public actually arouse any interest in said broader public. Personally, if I had to boil the Cycling '74 mission statement down to a single sentence, it would be "Here's something we really really really hope you'll figure out how to use."
After a hard day eating and coding, it's finally time to eat. Just for kicks we decide to make our way down to Alexanderplatz, which might actually be the ugliest place on the entire planet. Our objective is to find a restaurant called Dolores, a new joint opened by two dudes from San Francisco with a mission to bring authentic Mexican food to Berlin. We make the journey with high hopes. We end the journey with this:
Jeremy turns to me and says, "You didn't come all the way to Berlin to eat at a fucking Chipotle." Joshua, who I should mention has an affinity for alternative lifestyles and generally aligns with an anti-capitalist agenda, just shakes his head in mute horror.
We leave.
Next door, over a beer and some dumplings, I'm lucky enough to meet Marco Kuhn, a Max for Live content creator from Ableton. He is both a musician and an awesome; we agree to meet at some point to talk about touch interface design. As long as we don't meet at a Chinese restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg called Mission, I'm all for it.
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| The poorly named Nerd Cave is actually five stories off the ground. |
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| The view from the Nerd Cave |
I'd like to say that we spent our time down in a cafe, hyped to the point of hallucination on double espressos, opining on the avant-garde engineering tools that will power the future of music composition and punctuating our assertions with wild gesticulation. This may come at a later date; we passed most of the time in the nerd cave eating cheese spread and debugging memory corruption. Although we did touch on a top secret new feature of the Max language that I can't really talk about here, suffice it to say that it would address topics as far reaching as concurrency, memory safety, hooks for web and mobile and programming for the masses. Of course, it remains to be seen if the powerful new tools we design for the broader public actually arouse any interest in said broader public. Personally, if I had to boil the Cycling '74 mission statement down to a single sentence, it would be "Here's something we really really really hope you'll figure out how to use."
After a hard day eating and coding, it's finally time to eat. Just for kicks we decide to make our way down to Alexanderplatz, which might actually be the ugliest place on the entire planet. Our objective is to find a restaurant called Dolores, a new joint opened by two dudes from San Francisco with a mission to bring authentic Mexican food to Berlin. We make the journey with high hopes. We end the journey with this:
Jeremy turns to me and says, "You didn't come all the way to Berlin to eat at a fucking Chipotle." Joshua, who I should mention has an affinity for alternative lifestyles and generally aligns with an anti-capitalist agenda, just shakes his head in mute horror.
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| No |
We leave.
Next door, over a beer and some dumplings, I'm lucky enough to meet Marco Kuhn, a Max for Live content creator from Ableton. He is both a musician and an awesome; we agree to meet at some point to talk about touch interface design. As long as we don't meet at a Chinese restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg called Mission, I'm all for it.
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