It has been some time that I wanted to start blogging about the workshop we have started at NexWerk and what it means to me, how we are doing, what this experiment is all about. I always found an excuse to procrastinate and postpone writing about it for a better moment. There have been many excuses I have been using, no time, no internet connection, I am tired… you know how it is

Without any preamble I will start telling you about what this is all about and what we are experiencing and doing.

The idea of making The Workshop a reality in my life was seeded long time ago, although I cannot pinpoint it really. I guess it had to do with reading Pete McBreen’s book Software Craftsmanship back in 2002 which changed the way I see software. This seed kept growing year after year in me, I changed jobs many times, consulted for years in the Telecoms traveling from country to country building custom Value Added Servers for mobile telecom operators who would not spend millions on servers from big vendors. Thinking back and reflecting about it, I started my journey…

I eventually decided to live in London and here is where the whole years of searching and that idea that was in me caught up. I had many conversations about the idea with Nuno, a fellow craftsman, and we finally decided to jump into the cold water and just try to live together in a nice place where we could also work, learning better ways to follow our passion – Software Development.

We started looking for a place fit for purpose. The requirements very strict, we decided that it had to have living space for 3 people (we wanted the option for the possibility of having visitors or fellow journeyman be able to stay in the workshop for a period of time), a working area that would be separate, yet within, the living area. The last requirement was that it had to have awesome views so that we could free our minds while taking a break from whichever work we where doing.

With a set of requirements like that it seems impossible to find a suitable place, or at least the search for it would take eon. Nothing further from the truth. We started looking and Nuno, in a display of universal luck, found a place that was (and is) just perfect in his first attempt! We called up the letting agency and arranged a viewing…

We have been living in the workshop for about a month and a half now, and there are still a lot of things that we have not done yet, ideas we have not followed. One of those is our internet connection! It is really incredible how long this things can take. The landlord had an ISDN line in the apartment which he had to cancel, which took him almost 3 weeks In the meantime we have been pretty much disconnected from the world, only being able to get online whilst working in our day jobs (I got actually fed up with the whole situation and bought yesterday a mobile broadband dongle which I plugged into my computer).

Whilst we where out of reach of the networked world we had many discussions about what we think we should be doing as craftsmen in our workshop; what the workshop means, and what we really are after.

Our aim and value comes from the following points

• We share our experiences with anyone that wants to listen to them.
• We offer a lab (an experimentation place) where other craftsmen can try new things in a safe environment
• We develop Open Source Software
• We might develop software for you

Sharing our experiences is one big aspect that we want to follow. We are going to post articles in here about what we do, techniques and tutorials about things that might come up in our work that we want to share with you, podcasts (not sure about that one, I’m pretty camera shy)…

We are also going to have our doors open on Sundays for those craftsmen out there that want to come over and teach/learn with us. For that we also have our so called lab (a bunch of servers and machines that are in the workshop).

Before I forget, being disconnected also helped to define our mantra E3:

Establish, Explore, Excel

I think that’s all form my part from the moment… Cheers!