Artsy Berliners: Adam

On this episode of Artsy Engineering Radio,  Adam Butler joins us in our new series "Artsy Berliners" where we highlight the exciting stories of the Artsy team in Berlin. Adam shares his unique journey from being a security guard to becoming a musician, then transitioning to tech while still being a musician on the side. We'll hear about his experiences touring as a musician, and his move from the UK to the US, and finally settling in Germany. Tune in for an interesting conversation!

Transcript

Sultan: 0:08

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Artsy Engineering Radio. I'm your host today Sultan. And I'm joined here by Adam. Adam, would you like to introduce yourself?

Adam Butler: 0:19

Hi, Hey Sultan. Thanks for having me on the podcast. It's great to be here. Looking forward to a nice chat.

Sultan: 0:26

Great to have you. So today we're going to be having a new series of episodes. And our first guest is Adam. This series is going to be called the Artsy Berliners basically, it's talking about the the engineering team who are in Berlin, and how was their sort of path towards coming to Berlin was and all the things that they went through. And this other thing, welcome to the first episode. Adam, would you like to give us a an introduction about who you are and what you do at Artsy?

Adam Butler: 0:59

Sure. I'm so I'm a senior engineering manager at Artsy. I've been at Artsy for two, two and a half years, more than two and a half, two and two thirds, let's, let's say, Yeah, I also I actually have a slightly hybrid role, because as well as being an engineering manager, manager, I'm also a product manager on one of the teams for the mobile platform team.

Sultan: 1:25

So great. Okay. And I have a question for you. Have you always been like in the engineering? Or have you done any sort of other jobs before? That's

Adam Butler: 1:36

so I mean, certainly I did a lot of other jobs. I had, like, I had a phase at University where I was just trying to put together like, the stupidest CV that I could, so I was a security guard for a while. And then I worked in a juggling shop. And then I packed jelly on night shifts in a factory. Oh, and yeah, I was like, collecting stupid jobs. But I'm actually so not I don't think I really had many jobs before I became an engineer. But but for a long time, I had like, a parallel career because I was a musician as well. So Oh, I was musician for? Yeah. Alongside and always working as an engineer on the side to pay the rent, because music doesn't pay the rent very well.

Sultan: 2:34

But wow, that's a lot of jobs, a lot of stuff. And being a musician. I would assume that it would be very, very fun living as a musician, or working as a musician.

Adam Butler: 2:49

Yeah, it's definitely a lot of fun. I mean, yeah, it is for sure. It's, it's like it's not offer, by a long way. And I mean, it's, it's like it's hard work. Trying to it's hard, creative work. Like putting, putting an album together, like making an album is a huge project, it'll take you? Well, it depends. But you know, in total, it's probably going to take you longer than a year, it's going to involve the people, you're gonna have to sort of coordinate things, but also you have to actually write a whole lot of music. So it can be quite hard work. And then I mean, touring is great fun as well. But it can also be pretty gruelling, sometimes can also be pretty hard.

Sultan: 3:36

I would assume that touring is the you're just from a city to another city, nonstop, like sleepless and on the way. Like, it's just a really tiring process. It's fun during the shows, I would assume but through between the shows that it would be very tiring. I mean, I have no experience of any music in being a musician or anything, but I just heard stories. Are they like that? Or?

Adam Butler: 4:05

I mean, it depends. So I went on some, like I went on some big tours, where I was actually a Support Act. I wasn't, I wasn't ever really big enough to be headlining a big tour. But I went on tours as a support act where it was really like, like I did a I did a month long tour of the us on a tour bus where we were just in a different city every night and driving around the whole country. Like yeah, I mean, it was a month it was I think, like in the space of a month, we had like two nights off and we were just playing shows every other night. And then after the show we would take everything down, clear everything into the tour bus and then go and sleep on the tour bus and drive and wake up. I mean, wake up usually slow on the road because it's another driver then just go to another

Sultan: 4:52

city. Yeah, that sounds very tiring.

Adam Butler: 4:56

But I mean it's a it was pretty amazing as well.

Sultan: 5:00

That's great. That's great. So you were saying that you were doing some tours in the US. So how long have you been in Berlin? And when did you come to Berlin?

Adam Butler: 5:10

So I've been in Berlin for coming up on 13 years now. I moved to Berlin in 2010. Yeah. And, and before that, actually, I was still in Germany. So I moved to Cologne in Western Germany. Oh, quite a few years before that. So I mean, I'm, I'm British, but I Yeah. So I moved to Germany in 2001. Long time ago.

Sultan: 5:38

So it's been 13 years in Berlin. But it's been 20 years in Germany in total. Yeah, that's a long time. And I'm assuming that you speak German fluently, because that's the struggle that everyone who comes to Berlin, they don't speak the language at all.

Adam Butler: 5:55

Yeah, it's true. No, I mean, I, yeah, I can, I can live fairly happily. And

Sultan: 6:03

that's great. That's great. If you have any stories of it in Berlin, but what was the most shocking thing that you saw in Berlin, for example,

Adam Butler: 6:12

I mean, to be honest, like, I didn't even see the action. But the most recent New Year's Eve in Berlin was pretty amazing. I mean, the thing is, like, it really was pretty shocking from the stuff that was going on, on the streets in Nikon, mostly from what I hear, but from where I was, it was, like, the quantity of fireworks going on in every direction was pretty incredible.

Sultan: 6:40

Yeah, actually, yeah, this new year, hey, it's been here like it like the streets did not stay quiet, like for the I would say, for three nights in a row. Like he would not hear any silence. It's always going on and on and on. And yeah, I believe that. I mean, I've never been that long in Berlin. But I believe that because of COVID, they sort of stopped the fireworks for the past years. And because of the iPad, assume that there was locked downs and stuff. And now, because it was allowed, and like freely, anyone could do that. Everyone sort of had this sort of kept energy for celebrating the New Years. And they all did like the three years of just not but not celebrating to do the just in three days. The amount of fireworks and the amount of things that were happening is just insane.

Adam Butler: 7:32

Yeah, yeah, I think it was, there was definitely something like that. I mean, there really was some weird stuff, a lot of violence that happened as well. And I have no idea where that came from, like what it was that drove people to do that they probably was something to do, like you say, with the tracks of having been kind of locked down. So some kind of release from that, I guess? I don't know.

Sultan: 7:57

Yeah. I believe it was like, especially for the New Year's. I think it was a controlled release. It was just raging. Yeah, it was just raging. And it was like the outcome shouldn't have been that way. But that was so that was a little strange. Like, what was the decision that made you choose Berlin over any other place? I would say either in Germany or in the world. Like if you choose Berlin, audit Berlin choose you.

Adam Butler: 8:26

So I guess I mean, I did choose cologne before I chose Berlin. And the reason I chose cologne was because at the time, my record label was placed there. And and I met some great people, including, including my now wife, Ella, and so like, great. Yeah, I mean, I always say that the reason I moved to Cologne was a lot of music, which kind of was about right. And then, I mean, so then actually, we we actually, we both moved to New York for a while as well. So from Cologne between cologne and Berlin, we spent a year and a half in New York. And then when we came back, honestly, it felt like it wasn't really clear where else to go. And then all it seemed like Berlin was just a natural choice.

Sultan: 9:15

They chose electric, in what sense due to being a musician or due to work and as an engineer.

Adam Butler: 9:24

Kind of both. I mean, it's, it's like it's obviously it's a pretty good place to be for both of those things. But also, I just, you know, I just, I love the excesses. I lived in London for quite a while before I moved to Cologne. So I lived in Paris for a while in New York for a while and so cologne felt like actually a pretty small place to be and I wanted to get I wanted to get back to living in a proper city again. Not sure if Berlin is a proper city, but you know, it's quite big.

Sultan: 9:54

It's it's a city. It's a different city, I would say. Yeah. And like the Kelowna Ben Nicholson purchased like two months or three months, a few years back. And it felt like a big village, but not a big city. I mean, it has its own culture, and it's very vibrant. But it sped up. I would say, density wise, it's not as big as Berlin.

Adam Butler: 10:18

No, I mean, it has like, it always, it always claims to have a million people. I think it's always like, teetering on the brink of a million people. It's always like 999,998. People. So it's like, it's, it's, it's actually quite a lot of people, but still is true. It doesn't actually really very likely. So So you're right. It's like it's like a giant village.

Sultan: 10:41

Yeah. So you told us before that you were a musician, but you were working as an engineer on the side. Have you started your engineering career before coming to Germany? Or like before coming to Berlin?

Adam Butler: 10:53

Yes, I did. Absolutely. When I went to university, like I was always doing music. I was always in bands at school and stuff. And then, and then I went and studied philosophy university, because it seemed really interesting. And it was extremely interesting. But then I finished that and was like, oh, okay, so philosophy is not a very good career move. If you want to advance your career, I wouldn't advise studying philosophy. And being a musician, honestly, is not a very good career move either. So then I was like, Okay, what should I actually do? And I figured out back then, that if I went and studied again, I, so it did, like a high speed degree in computer science, I think because I thought, if I do this, then it's probably going to be quite interesting. And also, unlike anything else I do, I might actually be able to get a job.

Sultan: 11:43

I speak as in like, intense.

Adam Butler: 11:47

Yeah, it was like, Uh, I mean, so it was a master's degree. But it was a master's degree for people who hadn't studied computer science for their first degree. And so did like, in the space of a year, it did like, it did like four years in the space of a year.

Sultan: 12:03

Yeah, that's quite intense. Really intense. Of course.

Adam Butler: 12:08

It was. Yeah, it was. But it was good. It was fun. I enjoyed it. Definitely. Yeah. And now after that, I came out. So I came, I came out of that into the middle of the first.com. Boom, which is at the end of the 90s. Yeah, that was a good time.

Sultan: 12:29

Was it a good time to be an engineer back then?

Adam Butler: 12:32

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I guess it's, I guess it's been a good time to be an engineer ever since then, honestly. But I mean, that was a, that was particularly good time. So I mean, there was a lot of money around, probably not as much money as there have been around for the last, I don't know, 10 years, or something in tech. But even then it was like it was all new. And the nice thing was as well, that it really, it felt like a good thing to be doing. I think it like it's a little less clear in tech these days. I don't think anyone thinks any other tech is just undeniably good. Yeah. It's like a more ambivalence.

Sultan: 13:14

Yeah. Just comparing, like now, and back then at the start at the start of the.com, boom, I'm assuming it was very difficult to actually write code, because nowadays, we have, like documentations. And we have, like Google to search for stuff. And we have Stack Overflow, which makes our lives much, much more easy. Back then, I was hoping that everyone would be just in front of their computers just banging their heads at the keyboard trying to fix things. But this is this, it's died of frustration, just make something work. But how to fix it.

Adam Butler: 13:56

It wasn't quite that bad. In fact, back then I used to, I was a Java engineer. That was, that was my main language. So I was writing Java. And yeah, it's true that I guess we use books quite a lot. Oh, which, you know, doesn't? I mean, I don't mean, I haven't read physical programming books. For a long time. Yeah. But yeah, back then that was something that we did a bit. I mean, you know, documentation was still already online. Like all of the Java API's. Were all online. So you can search through all of that it's true, like the Stack Overflow wasn't there. So you did actually have to write your own code. And the ones are many tutorials and things.

Sultan: 14:45

Yeah, bear with me. They went to so many examples. And if you want to make something like something new you it's difficult to have some sort of an inspiration from except for an informal example or something from a tutorial or nowadays, you just go to chat GPT and ask it to spit out some code for you. And get a dispersion out of that.

Adam Butler: 15:08

Yeah. And how could that possibly go wrong?

Sultan: 15:12

Oh, that's quite a history. That's quite a lot of things. Maybe let's go back a little bit to Berlin. How was the tech scene over there, like, elsewhere, and compared to Berlin? I'm assuming that you started in, like out before Germany, somewhere in, I would say, in London.

Adam Butler: 15:29

Yeah, I was working in London for a content management system. And I was like, I was actually building that. And then I was working as a consultant for a while for all of the people who were using our content management system. So that was sort of within London, but also I went to the US a few times as well. We had we had customers in the US or around Europe. And then when I moved to Cologne, at some point, I started working at the crown whorfin Institute, the Fraunhofer Institute is actually a kind of general scientific research institute. And it's actually the founder of the Institute. We're the people who came up with mp3. So when mp3 first came, the codec led us to use the file for our was the Fraunhofer codec. And well, I wasn't working on mp3, I was doing some but I was working with a group of people, we were making experimental user interfaces for discovering media arts. So I was writing, I was building Java applications that, for example, allowed you to navigate around a landscape of media artwork, where the landscape or a map was created by a neural network. But this was like, this was a while ago, so none of it works for me. That was really interesting. That was a lot of fun. And it was a very interesting place to work. And then for a long time, I had a, I worked freelance, and I had like a company with a couple of other people. And we will we were working as freelance consultants for nonprofit organisations. So we built a lot of we built a lot of websites for various kinds of nonprofit organisations, mostly in the UK, actual International, I guess, when I was beylin, I did start working in the tech scene in Berlin fairly quickly. So I remember the first place I worked and I mean, this was also still working as a freelancer. But I worked at Rocket Internet, which is Rocket Internet was like the first big company, first big tech company in Berlin maybe. And rocket had this way of doing things where they would, they would like copy successful companies, they would just make, they would look see a successful website, and they would just make a copy of it. And it was very cynical. was kind of interesting as well.

Sultan: 18:08

But with the copies work, though, like would they actually succeed?

Adam Butler: 18:12

Yeah, definitely. Well, no, I mean, sometimes they succeeded. Sometimes they just, I mean, what they did was just build them fairly quickly. And then if they didn't succeed, they just shut them down very quickly as well. So one, something that I did there for examples, the Lando was fairly recent and Zalando was one of the first big success stories and I can't remember where this Lando was connected to Rocket Internet. Originally, I'm not really sure. But one thing that I did a rocket was to build tools for a Lando copy that was going to sell shoes in I think it was in Russia, Japan and Brazil or something. Oh, so building like, I built an inventory management application for shoes that was then translated into Japanese, Russian and Portuguese, which is nice building something was nice during internationalisation. Oh, yeah. Languages was completely different.

Sultan: 19:09

Chinese was very different than Russian and it's also very different than Portuguese because Yeah. It was kapow. But yeah, I like the the idea of copying things just on the spot, like quickly copying things and see if they work. Get a proof of concept and just throw it in the market. See if it succeeds, if not just destroy it and do another thing. That's a fun, expensive but fun idea to fun company to be in.

Adam Butler: 19:39

Yeah, it was. It was weird. I mean, they worked. They worked a lot with freelancers, and I remember going in one day and they just sacked all the freelancers. And I was the only Freelancer that really didn't sack it was just a Monday morning went in. They sacked everybody, and they the reason they didn't save me used because I was the only person I was building this application on my own. So they couldn't really sack me because no one else

Sultan: 20:07

to replace you. Yeah, so I was

Adam Butler: 20:09

like the one Freelancer left standing.

Sultan: 20:14

So I'm assuming that you your weeks has been quite busy in Berlin, like weekdays. What about weekends? Like, what do you do for leisure? What do you do on weekends in Berlin? There's always something happening around the corner in Berlin. Like, there's a show here, and there's an event there and there's, like, a movie that's coming out in a theatre just around the corner. So what do you usually do? On weekends?

Adam Butler: 20:45

Yeah, I mean, that's so that's changed because I have a because I have kids now. I mean, so I don't go out clubbing.

Sultan: 20:57

Oh, yeah, Berlin is known for its clubbing scenes.

Adam Butler: 21:00

Yeah. I mean, I go to I definitely go to shows occasionally, obviously, like, that's, to be honest, I'm not totally back into the habit of going to shows since Corona. Because like, there was no music for such a long time. And yeah, I just got out of the habit. And I haven't really gotten back into it. But I do go to shows just not as many as I used to. I mean, there's a lot of great cinemas around as well. So yeah, just bars hanging out with friends.

Sultan: 21:28

Yeah. And the the personnel also here in Berlin. It's really great. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, now we're getting to the end of this. The end of the episode. So I want to ask you about what's your best falafel place in Berlin?

Adam Butler: 21:43

Best falafel place in Berlin. Yeah, that's a good question. I really like Maroush which is near Kottbusser Tor. I think I'm pretty sure it's called Maroush. I think that might be my favourites.

Sultan: 21:55

What makes it so special?

Adam Butler: 21:57

I don't really know.

Sultan: 22:00

There's there's a tonnes of falafel shops in Berlin like almost every other corner.

Adam Butler: 22:06

Yeah, no, this this there's something about the like the sources that they use. And just the way they put it together. I yeah, I don't know. The differences between a good for lateral and a great for lateral can be hard to pin down.

Sultan: 22:24

Yeah, yeah, that's That's true. Yeah. You heard it here. First, the best falafel in Berlin. It's Maroush near Kottbusser Tor. Well, thank you for joining me, Adam. It's been a lovely time hanging out with you and chatting with you. Yeah, thanks. It's

Adam Butler: 22:41

been great chatting with you. Thanks for having me.

Sultan: 22:43

Ciao. Bye.

Matt Dole: 22:45

Thanks for listening. You can follow the Artsy engineering team on Twitter at Artsy open source and you can find our blog@artsy.github.io This episode was mixed and edited by Jesse magalia. And our theme music is by Eve Essex who you can find on all major streaming platforms. See you next time.