YOW! 2011: Mike Lee - The Road to Appsterdam

Mike Lee is an exceptional developer and an even better person. His life's story is fascinating and the work he does benefits developers around the world, especially those who build mobile apps. Mike's a visionary guy and he has taken his vision of protecting and serving developers and built something real—a community-driven developer "safe-house" or, better yet, a global cultural center for app developers, a place to get training and support, help and guidance, build skills and get help when patent trolls attack. This place is called Appsterdam. In Mike's words "for app makers and product engineers, we have one API: What do you need?".

What is Appsterdam?

Here, Mike shares with us the story of how he got into computing and product engineering and how his path has led him to Appsterdam (and to Amsterdam, Netherlands). He explains the purpose and goals of Appsterdam, which are noble indeed. Mike's a visionary. He's able to follow his convictions and explain them with intelligence and passion. Heck, after the interview I felt like packing up and moving to Amsterdam! I'm glad Microsoft is involved with Appsterdam. It's great to see such devotion to developers and to the craft, business, culture and humanity of product engineering. I've not met anybody quite like Mike before. It was great listening to Mike's story and his passion is inspirational.

(Stay tuned for his YOW! session - it will be available soon. We'll provide a link to it and all other YOW! sessions).

Mike's YOW! speaker page


Tune in. Enjoy. Meet Mike Lee.



The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff - Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others - for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!