assemble

Assembling Assemble #4

Why hello there!

As I start writing this update, there are 6 days, 22 hours, 42 minutes and 29 seconds until Assemble kicks off! That’s very exciting and very scary, mostly scary. I’ve began packing for SF, look at all the stickers we’re bringing (there’s actually way more):

(underneath my desk is almost as messy as my room)

Most of what I’ve been up to this week is firefighting (putting out logistical dumpster fires) and putting the finishing touches on the experience. I’ll start with my notes from this week’s sync (all the way back on Tuesday, feels like forever again!)…. well I was going to but I left my post-its at HQ. Here’s basic gist:

Numbers (now out of date):

• 60+ on the waitlist, numbers going strong!
• 80 waivers are in

Last week:

• Massive logistics update has gone out!
• Supplies are in a good place.
• Workshops are looking fun!
• General attendee experience is really developing

This Week’s Focuses:

• Building Scrapbook
• Run of Show
• Logistics Firefighting

I had to make them a little (just a little) shorter for this week :D

The Run of Show

A lot of my week was spent on one document: The Run of Show. It’s currently a spreadsheet with 39 columns and 192 rows, which with some quick maths makes 7,488 cells. Yikes!

The Run of Show is a 30-min-by-30-min (hourly before Friday) breakdown of everything that happens from when the first HQ flight arrives on Wednesday at 11:45am to Monday evening. Now do you see why it’s so big?

Producing it however has been an incredibly helpful task. It’s allowed me to run through the event in my head, which lets me see the holes in the event and feel confident about the parts with less holes. Its also a very handy tool for sending out to everyone staffing the event so that they know what they have to do at all times. In stage productions, you have the “Stage Bible”. For Assemble, the ROS is our “Bible”.

I’ll be open sourcing our’s post-event (there are no surprises, ofc!) but the basic format we’ve taken is one “Main” sheet which has the breakdown and then separate sheets for each individual event that you are taken to when you click on individual cells in the Main sheet.

So that’s certainly something that’s gone well.

A Couple of Other Things That Went Well

I managed to keep up the scheduling tasks in calendar thing I talked about in the last “edition”(?) of Assembling Assemble! This is what my GCal looked like this week:

Now, I’ve only go two more office working days in Vermont (pre-Assemble). Wow. Feels weird to say that. But I’ll probably keep it up for those two days as well. I’ve found it really helpful :D

Another thing that I’m really excited is the prompts system that the prompt (fmr. theme) subcommittee (@ian & @Ishan, kudos to you both!). Here’s how we’re describing them:

A prompt is some phrase that inspires project ideas. It’s like “themes” at other hackathons, but people don’t have to follow it.

I had the fun of being a beta tester with Ishan last week! He gave me “unnecessarily complex”, I came up with (and I quote):

“to-do list app but it’s 6 factor authentication, and your list items have to be base64 encoded wait no emoji encoded and then when you want to check something off, you … machine learning to see that you do 20 push ups and then it needs an email confirmation from your boss that you’ve done the task and finally you have to say what the task was to make sure you remember what you did. oh and meanwhile it’s in the format of an nsa dashboard like you see on hackertyper yeah?”

Dall-E’s impression of this entire thing (one big dumpster fire):

Ishan responded with “wow, sam!” I had the fun of brainstorming prompts as well, what would you build for “down under” or “javascript hell”?

We’ll be having a bracket-style vote to select the final theme from them all during the Opening Ceremony. The idea of voting is inspired by Ludum Dare, a game jam @msw & @zrl are always talking highly of. Anyhow, I’m super excited for this part of the opening ceremony!

The last part is building the Assemble Scrapbook (name suggestions, anyone?). A successor to The Zephyr Chronicles, its just as hacky! You can see the WIP version here (very very hacky at the moment!). My favourite part is the SFX, try clicking the clap button

Struggles & Challenges

My big struggle this week has been one moment being incredibly confident in our plans & Assemble, and then the next week feeling like the event is falling apart. So… asked around the team to see how others are feeling:

@charlie:

I think things will be mostly fine. There will be fires, but there will be fires with anything. And as a wise man once said “Most things I worry about never happen anyway”.

@ian:

It’s all coming together. There’s a lot to do between now and next weekend, but I’m excited!

@Hugo:

I’m super excited to go fly to San Francisco next week! It does feel slightly stressful in case say something we need arrives late, though, but generally I’m looking forward to assemble!

@belle:

I’m incredibly excited of how everything came together and both anticipate it and am in disbelief that it’s ACTUALLY HAPPENING.

@Ishan (truly insightful):

Heck ya.

So… I guess some people are kind of in the same boat as me! I love Charlie’s Tom Petty’s quote: “Most things I worry about never happen anyway”.

Following Up From The Last Week

I talked about a lot last week, I thought I’d run through some of them to see how my thoughts have changed!

But, FIRST! Fridge update!

Now… there’s a fair bit of “junk” as one person described it. BUT! There are vegetables! Ishan & I went to two dinners (one with Nicky Case and another with Adam Davidson which featured Ishan’s wonderful pizza cooking) and we got some leftover vegetables so we’re now living that super healthy lifestyle! 🥗

Ishan made this fabulous dish with some left over onions, mushrooms, tomatos and cheese:

Oh my god, it was delicious! We also had a new roommate (kind of): @Dev, welcome to the madness @Dev 👋

Delegation: I think I’ve got better at this! I’m still taking on a lot, but I’ve felt like I’m getting better at sharing out what needs to be done. I especially am finding this easier IRL in the HQ office, still working on it, however!

Taking The Bus: Yeah, this didn’t last. I started working too late in the evening I enjoyed it whilst it lasted!

Slack DMs & Emails: I hit inbox-zero and DM-zero on Sunday. Yay! That hasn’t lasted, however, but I’m in a better place than last week. Dedicating time to do this really helped.

How I’m Feeling Tonight

Well.. I’m bloody tired. This week was ton of firefighting! Now, I’m going to take a long rest this evening. I’m also feeling relatively confident and certainly excited. I’m going to San Francisco this Wednesday! How cool is that?? So it’s a weird soup of emotions.

I’ve got a couple of big mountains to climb before departing, but everything should be doable! Numbers continue to look good and we should be all set for a wonderful hackathon.

It may feel like I’m always repeating myself, but I’m so incredibly grateful to everyone involved in the project. Alongside the amazing and wonderful original @assemble team, @Dev & @tmb have joined the team recently and have been so gracious with their time and commitment to the hackathon! Really appreciate everyone, you all are working magic within minutes and it’s bringing the hackathon alive! Also really appreciative of the trust placed in me to pull this off from everyone at HQ :D

Going forward, this will probably be my last one of those until post-Assemble. For the next week, I’ll be #scrapbook-ing the run up to Assemble and then #ship-ing a compilation of those when we kick off :D

See you all soon,

Sam

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Want to wrap this up with four funny / interesting things (unfortunately, my eyes are trying very hard to close and I’m resisting):

• 🇦🇺 Question Time: I had the absolute honour of introducing @Ishan to the chaos of an Australian Senate’s Question Time. He described it as “childish”, “chaotic” & “spicy”! Seem fairly accurate :D

• 🛠️ How Things Are Made: I found this super interesting / oddly satisfying Twitter account that I’m slowly getting addicted to: (proceed with caution) https://twitter.com/fastworkers6

• 📹ExpensiCon: I got this wild email (a couple of times) from our expense management system with this video…. (enjoy!?). I want to be an accountant now!

• 💸 Finding 150 $10 & $5 Bills: We’re planning something… and we need cash! So how do we get cash in SF? Well it looks like we’re going to go all the way out Menlo Park to pick up a big bag of cash… watch this space we’ll all be showing up to Figma HQ like:

In all serious-ness, I’m just so excited to meet you all next week! 150 Hack Clubbers, that’s going to be epic! ❤️