assemble

Assembling Assemble #2

👋 G’day friends!

Wow-za! I’m back here. It’s been seven more days working full-time on Assemble out here in Vermont. And well since last Friday, everyday has felt like climbing up a mountain. On Saturday, we actually climbed a real mountain: Camel’s Hump.

(1,244 meters in the air, looking over Vermont 🤩)

All the other mountains are figurative, however. Just as challenging though, if not more!

Let’s start with where we started this week: at the weekly team sync! Here are my notes (try decoding them, I dare you):

Somehow, my sync update ballooned from one Post-it to three Post-its…. you should have seen me… I was full on rapping! It was pretty satisfying and motivated to get a big cheer at the end of all that, all it cost was my voice.

Stunning Views

I started this journal on a bit of a negative note when talking about mountains, but mountains can also be wonderful adventures with stunning views (such as the one above!). Let’s talk about some of the (figurative) stunning views from this weekend…

• The whiteboard from Saturday. [retracted, confidential]. Just kidding… @ced, @Caleb & I brainstormed a board-full of fun things to make Assemble a magical experience. My brain had been blocked on this for a while and the moment we got talking suddenly the blockade in my head started falling, brick by brick (this imagery is weird, TLDR I got unblocked when we started talking). Moral of the story is that three brains are better than one, ask people for help.

• The swag mockups! Oh my! @Hugo is doing a stunning job with this swag… especially the lanyards. Once we get the mockups / prototypes @ HQ, I’ll post them in my #scrapbook so keep an eye out for those!

• My DMs. Right now I have 24 unread (it was 0 this morning, I swear). That’s stunningly horrible, I know, but that’s not what I mean when I put DMs on this list! It’s when I click on each them it becomes a stunning view because of all the cool workshops people are planning to run! @Bash & @Ishan sent out a wonderful email to everyone and having doing really well working with everyone to nail down their ideas. I’m very happy this won’t be like CodeDay Singapore where it was only boring old me running every workshop. I might even be able to attend a couple of these workshops this time :D (PS: I will respond to all these DMs tonight, I promise!! pinky promise?)

Awesome Hack Clubbers, all with awesome workshop ideas!

• Having a big todo list on my whiteboard. It’s not very stunning… but it’s better than having 500 things running around my head. So relatively stunning? Thank you @kara.

• It’s 4:04pm! Previously our security guards were no where to be seen, so you could have said they 404-ing. Too much of a stretch? I thought so too. Anyhow, it was amazing to see $1,890.00 drained from our Bank account for a security firm… sighs… at least it’s done now. This positive seems to have turned sarcastic. I’m genuinely so relieved to have done that!

• I’m super happy about this graph I made of predicted energy levels at the hackathon. Take a look for yourself, do you think this is how it’ll pan out?

• Last thing… the plan for the renaissance. Assemble is only the first step, this year we’d really like to launch a couple of “features” or two for hackathon organisers (like we do for club leaders each year!). There are a ton of exciting ideas bouncing around, it’d be great to hear yours :D

The Deep Question

Now there were some stunning views on the hike of this week (yep, I’m still trying to continue this metaphor), but it was a TOUGH hike with steep hills and long distances… all of these challenges has raised a deep question.

English Translation: I’m going to present the challenges of this week as a series of questions and I should stop trying to be a poet.

Why are people coming to Assemble?

I have this awful habit of overthinking everything. And I’ve been doing it a lot this week. We were preparing the hackathon’s run-of-show and I was going through every 30 minute time block, and there were blank ones! And I was stressing! But then a conversation with @ced & @kara (which brought together other conversations with @msw & @zrl from throughout the week) course corrected for me. People want to meet awesome people from the Slack & build with them. So let them do that! He walked me past hackathon experiences of his and it really helped me pull things back a bit and refocus. Thanks @ced. I was so tired in the moment that I probably looked dead, but I’m very grateful. It’s about finding a balance in the level of activities we have and the time we give for natural magical interactions to happen, we’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer.

This leads onto 100s more questions: what do people expect from us? What can we do to enhance those natural interactions (do we need to?)? How do we break the ice? All questions to answer next week, but where I’m going with this is that I needed that reminder to put myself in the attendee’s show and design the event that way.

The Boulders Needing Climbing (The Other Challenges)

500 thoughts running around my head has been replaced with 500 challenges this week. I won’t bore you with them all but here are the major ones:

• Motivation. This is for me and the whole team, we’re in the weeds right now and it sucks! We’re working out the nitty gritty stuff and we’ve been doing it for a fair while… it’s getting a bit of a drone for myself and I sense that the team is feeling that too. I don’t have the solution here, it’s been plaguing me all week. The “honeymoon” period is over and I’ve got figure something out to keep us all going!

• Sleep. Or more general tiredness… I can feel this all around HQ. In my “corner of the office”, we’ve got three projects in crunch mode (Sprig, Assemble & Sinerider)…. plus a ton of other stuff going on that I barely know anything about across the office! That means stress. That means lots of work. And it’s tiring. The only solution is sleep, shocking am I right? I recommend asking Ishan about his sleep schedule (or lack thereof) 😉

• Uncertainty. I would say that the uncertainty for Assemble is ±5.10m, what ever that means. (that was meant to be a joke, sorry) What I’m trying to say here is that there a fair few uncertainties in our plan right now that are causing mental block for me at the time. I’m going to try and break down those walls next week! But my general advice would be to try to avoid getting yourself in these situations by getting over these hurdles early. A good way to do this is by talking through your event with someone.

• Imposter Syndrome. I’m trying not to repeat myself from last week and I’m still not sure if this is the right word for it but this is something that’s still lingering over my head. @kara talked me through this well today and I’m going to keep taking a step back and reminding myself where I am and the goals of Assemble.

There’s more and I could go on, but those are the big ones. I also promised a follow up on some of the challenges from last week, here’s my best attempt.

• Meetings: use focus time on your calendar and try not to do coding in short sessions but instead dedicate a couple of hours

• Being Overwhelmed: write everything down. (And give yourself the satisfaction of crossing things off!)

• Communication & everything else: still figuring it out :/

The Summit

So we’ve reached the summit, AKA the end of the week. Where are we? Well we’re in a great place with registrations (I forgot to mention! Our numbers are going through the roof!) and a solid place with the schedule. In all tangible aspects I feel like we’re doing well, I just am feeling stressed for the weeks ahead. It’s going to be tough, but just writing this journal has really helped me feel better about things. I want Assemble to be something that I’m proud of, that the team’s proud of and that is special for all the attendees. We’re 80% of the way there, just that 20% real steep!

The summit is a place for reflection, and a lot of reflection leads to gratitude. I’m still grateful to everyone I mentioned last week! But I want to mention some more specific things. I’m grateful to everyone who has talked through things with me this week , talking things through has really helped me this week. @Ishan also deserves a special shoutout for being a super kind roommate and making spectacular food, plus helping me destress (I’m also very grateful to @christina & @zrl for sharing their cooking with me as well this week and in @christina’s case an entire dungeon to stay in whilst Ishan had COVID)! I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who’s given their belief in my this week, it’s been a rollercoaster of a week and it means a lot.

Thanks for taking the time to read this all, I hope you’re enjoying them! If you’ve got any feedback or anything you’d like me to start including in these, let me know!

If it’s alright and you’re still around I was wondering if you could help me with these questions:

• What do you want to get out of Assemble?
• What is a great hackathon you’ve been to and why was it great?
• What has made a hackathon bad for you previously?

With gratitude,

Sam

---

Now for some fun things I discovered this week & got up to this week!

Let’s start with my proudest achievement: hoisting the Australian flag at HQ. You may have seen how American my desk is with those big old stars and stripes! I’m pretty sure I’ve one upped that.

In other news, I finally worked out how to take the bus into work (confession: I got off the wrong stop and had to walk 15min to HQ), look at how cute this little bus is!

At first I thought it was an ambulance! This bus. is nothing like the big bus that goes to my school in Singapore (but I still love it):

As I alluded to earlier, Ishan has been taking us a bit on a bit of a cooking adventure, here’s some of the things we’ve (well really him, I do the dishes and hold things up) made…

Now it’s been a lot of Italian this week but that’s going to change tonight because @kara showed us the wonderful store that sold Asian food (mostly frozen, though):

The best find was some Singaporean / Malaysian Milo! Which is different from Australian Milo (and IMO slightly worse… but hey? It’s still Milo!).

That’s a wrap from me! We’re heading to Montreal this weekend and I’m going to try and relax & reset this weekend for a big week of work next week :D