[08.01.21] Alec's Weekly Update #34
"In here a tale of a boy who reached the masses" - Periphery
Hello and happy August 1st to you 😎
We are hitting the 8th month of the 2021 which is insanely wild. This means I have been in NYC for a full 7 months. In the last 7 months this city has definitely changed right before my eyes. NYC has picked up a lot, but at the same time apparently it’s not even close to what it used to be which is insane.
Other than NYC changing quite a bit, ZipSchool has done the same exact thing. We are venturing into a new area of education around the developer community and calling it BuildSpace. You may have seen me post it around my different socials, but I’m going to go into a little bit of how we landed on this idea and the future of it 🚀.
LOTS of goodies to chat about today. Leggggggggo.
Welcome To BuildSpace
We are moving away from ZipSchool to work full time on BuildSpace. This section will now be called “Hype BuildSpace Moments”, but let me introduce you to our new baby 🐣.
You may be thinking “Alec, what the heck happened to ZipSchool?”. The TL;DR behind this is we weren’t getting the momentum we expected from ZipSchool. As a team, we had been grinding on ZipSchool since October 2020 (discounting the work Farza had done before David, Emily, and I joined). Thats a solid amount of time! We gave ZipSchool a proper run and realized we needed a change.
We wanted to stay in the education space and have the same “bigger picture” of really accessible education for all. This was the core of ZipSchool and is the core of BuildSpace. On our way back from Iceland we were all sitting on the plane and just started talking about the excitement around building our own projects and how we learn so much from applying these concepts in real world experiences. I think we were all really excited coming off of the Hackathon we just finished! One thing led to another and alas - we landed on the idea of BuildSpace - “Where devs learn by building.”
So, what does this TRULY mean? I think for me it always comes back to the idea of how I learn best. For example, Cycles - Daily Habit Creator came about because I was trying to solve a problem of tracking habits for myself! I learned a plethora of things about iOS development and how to ship my own app. I remember always telling my friends - “I just want an app in the App Store that my mom can download”. It’s funny, but it’s true! For me this is where the excitement for BuildSpace came in. How can we capture this excitement and help other developers see this potential in themselves while learning the hottest new tech out there?
So how will BuildSpace actually work?
Our team has spent a lot time thinking of courses that you’ll ACTUALLY want to finish. This is a pretty big deal. We all thought about courses that we have taken and why we did or did not finish them. We also talked a lot about hackathons. How can we bring the hype of a 24 hour hackathon into a two week course? It came down to the project we were making and the ability to do this along side other builders who are in the same boat as you. As of now, BuildSpace courses will be 2-week learning journeys with livestream sessions and group building activities that will take you from never have shipped an app to being able to “share this app with your mom”.
We launched last Monday with early access. The goal - 50 signups for the week to see if people were truly interested in this thing. Well, we met this goal and then some with over 500 signups for the week 😳. Pretty insane. No matter where this leads us we are definitely onto something here…
YA - a lot has happened this week. Farza and I are in the process of building our own courses. I am working on a Personalized Twitch Dashboard and Farza is working on a Pokemon NFT Trading Center. If you want to see one of courses in action, you should signup 😉. BTW it’s all FREE.
Personal Growth
I think it’s a given that I had personal growth with this transition to BuildSpace last week, but another REALLY awesome event happened last week - MY FIRST TWITCH STREAM. This was literally amazing. It felt fun, exciting, refreshing, and just plain fun.
I haven’t streamed since last October. As you have seen me write about, it’s been mostly because I needed time to adjust to NYC. I really wanted to feel excited about coming back to stream and this past Saturday felt exactly that way. It was so cool to see the entire crew and say whats up and hang out. We spent a lot of time catching up and joking around, but we also started a BRAND NEW PROJECT. The community came up with the name NFTyGraphics - a Spotify Wallpaper NFT generator. Ya, a lot of buzzwords here! Hit me up if you have questions about what this thing actually is and we can chat 🤘.
I had an average of 47 people hanging out with me and a peak of 93 people come on in! Just so wild to me to see the community comeback and share some support. I am starting with one stream a week (every Saturday) and will go from there! I am hoping to go up to two times a week, but I think this is a really good cadence right now as I work on BuildSpace and bring back the Twitch streams. If you are intrigued by programming livestreams, you should drop a follow!
I wanted to wrap up this section with some photos of food and my stream setup for the first stream!
Music Of The Week
We are on playlist #25! Dude SO HYPE. I’m impressed with myself. It’s been really cool to actually keep up with this stuff. I’m SO EXCITED to see what I actually end up doing with all this data. Anyways - here we are. A lot of cool jams in here with sprinkles of new genres 🤘
‘Twas a great week and this week is turning out to be pretty exciting as well. Thanks for taking the time to see whats up and I look forward to chatting with you next time! Until then, have a happy start to your August!
Salute y Saludes.
Alec