Nights and weekends, from a kitchen table

Season 4 started August 5, 2023 and ran six weeks. Season 5 started June 15, 2024 and ran six weeks. In between there was a job, a dissertation, and whatever else life does. Nights and Weekends was the name of the program and also a fair description of when I did it.

The structure was simple and it was the whole point. Each week had a theme. Week one, pick a thing. Somewhere in the middle, build the toy version. Near the end, launch it, badly if necessary, and show people. Seventeen thousand people did this with me in Season 4. Sixty thousand did it in Season 5. Most of them I never saw. The ones I did see, I saw on a Discord server and on X, posting their progress in public because the program asked you to, and then, if you could get there, in a room in San Francisco for three days at the end.

Here is what the three people I interviewed said about the structure, because they said it better than I can. Andrés, who did it from Mexico, said the six online weeks were where he could actually code, and the in-person days were for talking and maybe showing a feature, if at all. Emanuel said he preferred the six structured weeks because the in-person events were chaotic, and then, in the same conversation, said it felt like he was using the seasons as a crutch to get work done. Both of those are true and he knew it. Esther, who had been through the eleven-week campus program, said that one was two or three lectures a week plus side activities, definitely more intense.

What I noticed in myself was the same thing Emanuel noticed. A deadline you have announced in public is a different object from a deadline you have set for yourself. He put it as: if I say I'm going to do something and I'm held publicly accountable, nobody wants to be ostracized, and it forces my executive dysfunction to become function. That sentence is the entire mechanism of the program in one breath, and it is also a Jacobs mechanism. Eyes on the street.

The kitchen table part is just where the laptop was. I mention it because the program's name made a promise about when learning was allowed to happen, and it kept it. Nobody had to quit their job to be in the room. The room came to you, at eleven at night, and it was full.