I’m packing things together for Createcamp tomorrow. I went to get food and drinks and checked in with the venue to ensure things are ready for when we arrive.

So far everything seems ready. And I couldn’t have done it without the extensive amount of stuff that I’d written down. Again I realised today how important lists are. That’s what I learnt today.

This week I’m making the last preparations for a little event that I organised and that’s taking place the coming weekend. As the day of the event closes in, there seems to be more and more stuff to think of, more and more things to put together and in general just more and more work to do to make it happen.

One might think of it as a stressful undertaking, but I have to admit that I really enjoy this kind of stress at the moment. Today I remembered the time when I gave photography workshops years back and I realised that I had the same satisfying experience of organising them at the time. It seems to me that planning and getting events up is something I should do more often in the future. That’s what I learnt today.

I’m on the verge of finishing the preparations for Createcamp 2015. It’s an event that I’ve been wanting to organise for a long time and this year I finally got around doing it.

Today I was planning the meals for the attendees. It’s no secret that I like to cook and because we are a small group of people, I thought I’d take on the challenge to provide food for everybody myself.

As I went into planning today, I realised how easy it is to get caught up in the details. And again I noticed how important it is, to simply write things down. When it comes to food, the truth is, you can’t plan everything. But having a written outline of meals and ingredients proved to be very reassuring. At least that’s what I learnt today.

I first came across Beyond Tellerrand because of a video of Andy Clarke’s talk in Berlin 2014. Since I also heard him recommend the conference on his podcast unfinished business, I was really excited to attend this year.

First of all, it just blows my mind how much attention to detail is spent on every aspect of this event. Everything is taken care of and you feel very welcome and well looked after.

Marc Thiele is organizing the conference on his own, which— after the two days I’ve spent here—seemed to me like a Herculean task. But as he mentioned in his opening statement: he does it just because he loves doing it. And I’m sure everyone who was lucky enough to have been here wouldn’t have the slightest doubt about that. Just amazing.

The selection of the speakers couldn’t have been better. The wide range of topics was just incredible and I enjoyed every single talk.

For me, the most interesting notion of the last two days was to take a step back and look at the basic building blocks the web is made of and—even more important—why that is the case. A notion of quality over quantity – not running after the latest innovation but instead building and caring about something that’s here to stay. In that regard, the talks of Jeremy Keith and Christian Heilmann stood out for me.

I enjoyed the more “techy” talks as well, like Sara Soueidan’s take on common problems with SVG or Scott Jehl’s approach to deliver sites responsibly. And Petro Salema’s talk about our attention capacity in an ever increasing stream of notifications and stuff thrown at us by digital platforms was just mind-bending.

I’m leaving Düsseldorf tomorrow morning, fueled with stuff to think about. And I wouldn’t hesitate a second to come and attend Beyond Tellerrand again!

The last two days have been packed with interesting discussions and ideas on how to own the stuff you put online. But I guess what intrigued me most are the things that can be done by people who really care about something.

I’ve seen and learned so much about the building blocks of the indie web. I managed to implement a micropub endpoint in Processwire thanks to Jeremy’s code. Using IndieAuth, I can now use any micropub interface (e.g Quill) to post to my own website. I use OwnYourGram to post photos to my Processwire installation via the Instagram app and finally—and with tons of help from Tabea—I am able to post from Processwire to Twitter now.

I was pretty impressed by how much people got done. At the final demo session, everyone had something he or she had done to update their website – although I’m pretty sure that the end of this event will not be the end of their efforts to try and own their stuff online.

If you would like to read more, Bastian and Jeremy wrote a very good summary on the IndieWebCamp.