Manifesto
This is a message to the Software Developers from Venezuela.
Life isn’t a straight path, on the contrary, life is many times a maze. We didn’t chose to be part of our wonderful, and yet so confusing, home country. Just in the same way, some of us didn’t chose to become expatriates. We’ve been pushed around by the nature of our conditions. Such is the time. But we could argue that in fact, we’ve been blessed by causality: The technology we used to navigate the world gave us our homes and the resources to carry on and take care of our beloved ones. Knowing this is key to understand ourselves.
Ever since we considered being part of the technology market, we began to notice people walking the same path. Over the years, we’ve collected our numbers, emails and Twitters. Our deck of likeminded people has grown. We slowly became an oddity of a family. In the same way, we’ve tried many ideas to eventually work together. The effort always seems to pay off, even if the achievement itself is far from our original expectations. I wouldn’t blame anyone. It’s not really up to us. We had to flee. We had to work every day for the food that keeps charging our families’ batteries to go into every long night. As the time goes by, some of us now develop deeper roots in our locations, while others are just about to take flight again. No matter what we do, we seem to be drifting apart. But, I assure you, we have been blessed.
This is what we know about ourselves: We’re relentless, we’re passionate and we do care, deeply, for each other.
With this knowledge, and through years and years of grinding ideas in sporadic chats, let me present you a simple solution: BerserkTech.
BerserkTech is about bringing ourselves together with the minimum help possible, while indirectly being promoted by everyone’s individual achievements. This is accomplished with three twisted ideas smashed together:
- A club, not a job: This is not a startup, nor a consulting company. BerserkTech is our “crew”. It’s a place in the internet where we get to be together, to share ideas and experiences and possibly to develop alliances for any kind of endeavors. Maybe you want to travel and visit another member of the club. Maybe you want to organize a talk, a hackathon or to team up for a project. Perhaps you have a business idea, or you might simply need someone to talk to. We’re here for each other, for whatever reason seems convincing to at least a hand of us.
- Battle Royale: This is a limited exclusive group, with a modest capacity of 52 people. We’ll only add those who at least one of us knows in person, and probably another knows through the internet. Once the limit is reached, people can be removed through misconduct, lack of communication for more than three months, or if they remove themselves from the GitHub account. The benefit of this is that membership has the inherent value of scarcity, but also that we have an excuse to remain active.
- A website to advertise each one of our profiles: A common place to find each other. The progress of each individual will make this list more valuable for the rest of us. If any of us does something amazing, everybody will feel proud to be part of the crew. We might also use this as a way to compare and compete with one another, as a form of motivation to become better than we’ve ever been.
With these concepts in mind, being part of BerserkTech means being a proud member of our crew. You’ll try to be the best you can be. You’ll try to communicate with the team at least once in three months. You are considered unique and irreplaceable, just as a card in a deck of Poker (and you’ll be labeled as such, just for fun). You’ll continue to look out and help one another. You’ll work on your career just as you were doing, only being part of those projects that make sense to you. You’ll grow by your own means and you will show it, and your crew will know and be proud of you.
Without further ado, let us be and continue being how we all are, and let’s see what we can do with a little push to do something together once again.
