assemble

Assembling Assemble #3

:wave: G’day friends!

It’s technically Saturday, and I’m sitting in one a #movie-nights session. I’ve only just started writing this update, oh-dear. All will be explained. It’s been three weeks since I touched down in Vermont, this week was no less of a whirlwind than the last two.

The fact that we are now only two weeks out from Assemble is making me excited, stressed and slightly overwhelmed. Assemble suddenly feels really real. We even had our first t-shirt samples come in (great work @Hugo)! (this one was the rejected design)

We started the week with an expanded set of weekly sync notes:

(oh and a sync on my thoughts on eggos as well!)

What I Changed This Week

I decided to mix up a couple things about how I was working on Assemble this week. The main two were: scheduling when I worked on tasks and taking the bus to work.

Task Scheduling

So this is what my week look like, GCal-style.

Now, I’d be the first to admit I’m not a superfan of this approach. I’ve tried it once before when studying for exams and I didn’t last a day. It seemed to really work this week, however. I’ve talked about having 500 thoughts floating around my head, by doing this I had a clear focus each moment of the day. And I got (basically) everything done from my whiteboard last week (as I worked out during “WHITEBOARD HELL”).

I think this approach worked because each block was small & focused. The one’s that weren’t, especially in the later days, didn’t work as well as I would get the task done quickly or half do the task and then lose focus. So next week, I’m going to try to keep the tasks I schedule more focused.

We’ll see if I can keep it up over the next two weeks but I appreciated that I did this for this week!

Taking The Bus To Work

For the first two weeks I spent in Vermont, I would carpool with @zrl, @christina or @msw to get to work at around 8:30am. Very grateful to them for helping out! However, I’m waking up most mornings at 5am to 6am and then lounging around for two or so hours. What I tried last Friday was heading out at 6:20am and then walking down the highway (at times whilst listening to Highway To Hell) to the bus stop. I then took the bus up to Shelburne, which stops right outside the office (though I got off the stop before the first time, oops)! Then that gives me a bit of time to make breakfast (Eggos, ofc), catch up on Slack and do a bit of school work before kicking off work at 8am-ish.

I’m not exactly sure what about this has made me feel more focused this week, but I think that getting outside early on was nice and relaxing. Walking along the highway also gets you alert!

So what effect did this have? From the start of the week, I felt more focused and productive at work. It also gave me more free time after work! As the week went on the focus sticked around. The free time didn’t, however, as more tasks came up. On the past two Fridays, I had almost completely collapsed at work after 3pm but this Friday, I was able to keep working till 6:30pm.

So side note. I promised to explain why this journal is so late! Well, the big communication that was sent out yesterday (check your inbox!) was a big stress and it took a long time to get the copy right. Something I learnt from that process that user testing emails can be be really helpful. Special thank you to @kunal for the great feedback! We also faced some very annoying CORS errors with the ticketing system, ahhhh… fun times. Shoutout to @charlie & @ian who did amazing work to pull together a wonderful system and fixed so many bugs! We’re just waiting for Apple to review the iOS app now…

What Else Went Well

Alongside those two things, a couple of other things that went well this week were:

Physical Things Arriving/Being Made

I get this weird feeling of confidence the moment a package of goods arrives or something for the hackathon gets made! You’ve already seen the t-shirt samples above, this is a hand drawn Orpheus flag I made at the Generator (more on it later):

Let’s just say, being a sketch artist isn’t a career path for me right now.

I think it just makes it feel so real. Which is scary, but also exciting! Most stuff is being shipped directly to Figma but for the few things coming to Vermont, receiving them makes my day. The bankers can attest to this.

Subteams / Subcommittees

This is something @msw started and has been really helpful for the entire team. We’ll keep using them and expanding their usage I hope. The basic premise is that one team explores a topic in depth that can have a range of opinions such as COVID-19 or judging and then presents their findings to the whole team. It really helps with delegating (more on this in a bit) and keeping whole team sync productive. I’d recommend them for people working in big organising teams. Thanks @msw!

Beta Trip

This is a bit out there, but as HQ we went on a tour of Beta Technologies with John Cohn on Thursday! It was really nice to go around the space and the atmosphere felt great, a lot like a makerspace. It’s the sort of atmosphere we want to create at Assemble, got me excited to get back working on Assemble! Would also highly recommend John’s blog & talks, Ishan & I watched them / read it on Thursday afternoon and they rock!

(📸: Ishan safely landing a plane and not killing me, in a flight simulator)

Office Tour With Figma

@Pranav (IRL) & myself (on Zoom) took a tour of Figma’s offices on Wednesday! Wow-e! It was so wonderful to get to see the physical space we’d be in. Just another thing that really made my day :D

Here are some of my favourite snaps from the tour (excuse the :zoom: quality):

Figma’s office really is the perfect venue, the team & I couldn’t be more grateful.

Struggles & Challenges

I guess I’ll dive right into them. I’m still not doing the best job at delegating and communicating with the team. I think at times we can try to take on too much and forget that we’ve got a team around us that all want to support. This week, I’m going to try to do better communicating everything that’s going on with the team and to rally up everyone available so we have all hands on deck! I started to do this a bit more this week (I do feel like I’ve got better at it from the first week in VT), but I still feel like I could still do a lot better so I’m going to set aside dedicated time to achieve this. There’s about a million articles / blog posts on this on the internet, none of the ones I could find were especially interesting or really relatable… maybe one day I’ll write my own (not today though, not today). Thank you to the whole @assemble team for everything you do to assemble Assemble! You all are the best. (And yes, I need to stop using that bad Assemble pun.)

I’m also struggling with a nervousness for the event. This especially hit this morning, when I checked DocuSign and we had 50 waivers in already. “Oh dear!” and “Oh wow!” were my two reactions. So much has been put into this event since May and I really hope that people enjoy it :grin:. But the nerves are real! @Ella really helped me talk it through today but they still linger. I guess you’ve noticed this is a reoccurring theme in this journal, it’ll be gone by Issue #6 I guess!

Last major struggle of the week has been keeping up with my inbox and my Slack DMs (which ballooned from :ping: 7 to :ping: 99+ in an hour and a half on Friday, oops! Sorry if I don’t get back to you all, I’m trying to get everything responded to by Monday.). I think this is a time thing again, I’ve got to make sure I actually dedicate time to get through all of them in the upcoming week. I’m always a :happy_ping_sock: though, one day I’ll be a :no-ping-sock: again.

Where We Stand Today

Two weeks out, I feel like we’re in a good place. There’s a way to good but things are on the up and Assemble is shaping up to be very exciting! The numbers are good, so good, we had to switch to a waitlist: :blob_hype: & :blob-sad: at once. Physical things are manifesting and ideas are being implemented! It’s coming alive!

Thank you so much to everyone who responded to my questions from last week’s journal, really appreciated it! Your responses help guide me this week, thank you. And again, thank you to the entire @assemble team for all the hard work this week, I know it’s starting to get intense and I don’t think I express my gratitude well enough, genuinely, thank you. I could go on with thank yous, but I want to finish off by thanking everyone who heard me out and taken the time to let me talk to them, it means the world and really helps me.

For this week I was wondering: what are some things that have made previous events magical for you? And what do you find special about IRL events?

That’s all from me today. We’re getting close to August 5th, wow! Thank you for take the time to read this week’s journal.

With gratitude,

Sam

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PS: Let me tell you the story of three adventures I went on this week in Vermont!

1) The Loaf

The Loaf is a gamedev meetup that happens in the Vermont! @ced introduced it to me. I’d never been to a gamedev meetup, let alone very many IRL coding related meetups at all! I really enjoying going (despite my big time sleep deprivation on Friday), playing a bunch of games made in Vermont (Vermont has a super cool gamedev scene!) and meeting all these awesome people! One of them had even heard about Assemble naturally…

At the meetup there was also tie-dieing! Which was fun to try out :rainbow:

Which is better, mine or Ishan’s? I guess mine just looks like a greeny-blue shirt in that webcam photo.

My palms are stained with green ink for life it seems, looks like I’m an alien now :alien:!

Thank you @ced for introducing us all to the meetup and for giving a really fun and interesting talk (or as @Caleb would say, a Slice)!

2) The Generator

The Loaf was hosted at a makerspace in Burlington called The Generator. I got another chance to visit it and make awesome things on Saturday when @Ella and I laser cut and vinyl printed a bunch of things for Assemble (it was also where I made the aforementioned flag :assemble-orpheus:). It’s a super fun space to be in and also full of all these magical art projects that you can’t help but smile at.

I’ve been toying with joining the Hackerspace in Singapore, maybe I should finally do it! I’ve been there once and it also has a great atmosphere, though slightly more cozy than The Generator. Thanks @Ella for showing me around!

3) Hannaford

I’d been to Hannaford (a super-supermarket, though not as big as Costco I’ve heard, that’s my next stop) once before this week, but it was on three hours of sleep and with major jetlag. Even then I was amazed, I got so lost! This time I have discovered more amazing things, PopTarts, 50 varieties of frozen chicken nuggets, even more variety of frozen burritos and very cheap bananas! But best of all… Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was just under $4. In Singapore those pints of ice cream are around $15. Crikey! I brought two pints to last the next week or so, and then I’ll be back for more. Hannaford is great, though I keep saying it like Hannafords. Weird name. Thanks @Ella & @Kara for putting up with my madness and over excitement (this paragraph was just a taster).

Ishan & I’s fridge area is now packed with goodies:

Also fun fact! There is road called Hannafords Drive in Vermont named after Hannaford, however, Hannaford is no longer on there…. :illuminati:

Have a great weekend you all!