I put my foot down gingerly. I think the ice is thick enough. But Jackson jogs to the center of the pond, leaps in the air, and slams his boots down. Again and again.
“We could drive a car on this.”
And with that, we’re off, hiking atop a long pond filled with miniature moon-like craters and frozen reeds pushing through the ice. There are fox tracks and a place where a bird landed, leaving a bird-shape in the dust of snow. And when Jackson and I stop walking, and the ice isn’t crunching under us, all is silent. An owl call. Then silence again.
In short: we’re not in New York anymore.
This moment was not a spontaneous one. It began several months ago when Jackson, Tom, and I met up at a Thai restaurant in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) to discuss the challenges of start-up style work, challenges that are remarkably similar to those faced by many writers, documentary filmmakers, and musicians. Loneliness, motivation, and carving out the space to focus.
Over pad thai and curry puffs, we all agreed that we were hankering for the same things: community, accountability, encouragement, as well as re-engagement with nature and a certain kind of solitude — the kind where you are very close with the people near you, but very far from everyone else.
So we decided to rent a cabin in the Catskills for 5 weeks and build our own retreat system (a “Build Retreat”). We recruited a few other members who would come and go, and established simple principles and rituals, like:
Check-ins and retros: Every day, we intend to start with a quick check-in where we share our 24 hr goals. Ever 3 days we intend to share something substantial we learned or wish we had done better.
Communal eating: Each night, one or two retreat members cook dinner for the rest of the cabin. Breakfasts and lunches are solo.
No TV policy: Reading, meditation, relationship-building, and being outside are the top priorities when we aren’t working. Screen-based entertainment is discouraged.
So far, the Build Retreat has been even better than we could have hoped. Jackson is refactoring the online card game he invented (Subject+Predicate), Aaron is writing fiction, and Tom is working on his music. The cabin itself is full of bright wood paneling and the clack clack clack of laptop keyboards.
Best of all, we have a cabin pet, named M. At first, we thought M was a lady bug, but we now understand M is an invasive beetle. Despite the obvious eco-ethical grayness of the situation, we have been keeping M nourished with figs on a wet paper towel since we found her on a cutting board in the kitchen Thursday night.
On the work front, my singular goal for this Build Retreat is to build an MVP that I can put in front of customers in mid-February.
As a first step, my initial focus has been learning a new software: Outsystems. It's a low-medium-code development tool that is several magnitudes more complicated than Glide or Build.io, but has the significant advantage of allowing users to export their raw code. Many low code platforms expressly “lock in” customers by preventing code exports, forcing you to start from scratch if you ever hire a real developer team.
If you’re trying to learn Outsystems or a similarly complex software outside a school/bootcamp environment, here is my advice so far:
Doing is the best learning. It's tempting to allow learning a new software to turn into an eternal reading and Youtube-watching exercise. Don’t let that happen! Working on even a basic project helps you figure out what you don’t understand. After the initial 2-3 days of foundation-setting, my approach has been to structure days like this:
Morning-early afternoon: Use my best “brain hours” to push forward real work using the software, allowing myself ad hoc learning along the way (e.x. Community forums, how-to documentation, and targeted videos).
Evening: Get through 2-3 classes in the guided curriculum to continue building the foundation (see #2).
Follow a guided system to learn the bones. Outsystems has some really tricky foundational concepts to grasp (for example, databases vs aggregates vs local variables, or proper nesting of server-side code inside client-side code). For this reason, I started out with an online guided path course provided by Outsystems. It's free, systematic, and helpful for knowing the right questions to ask once you get in the wild. With other software, I’ve jumped into application-centric learning first. But eventually I’m forced to recreate a foundations-first curriculum piecemeal as I go along, generating a lot of inefficiency and decision fatigue.
Watch demos. Where would humanity be without Youtube!? Watching someone narrate as they use a new software is a powerful learning tool. But only after getting the foundation. Re-enacting the demo in real-time on a second screen is best practice.
Map where documentation is strong. In general, Outsystems does not have the robust support community of products like Alteryx or Qualtrics. There just aren’t enough people using it yet. But writing down which specific pages, videos, or forum posts are particularly strong is a way to compensate for a lower quality network.
Terms and conditions apply. When you hit a snag early on, it's tempting (and often the right move!) to find an answer online that is specific: this is how you fix a REST api that doesn’t update in the expected way. But if that fails, try to figure out the right term for the region of knowledge you are misunderstanding. Yesterday, I was banging my head into my laptop trying to use local variables to increment a database using pre-fabbed CRUD operations (a class of server-side actions). Focusing on general learning around those terms (“local variables” and “CRUD actions”) was the best path for debugging, even though it took a while and didn’t deliver the fix on a silver platter. But just figuring out the right terms was 50% of the battle.
Overall: you get what you pay for spend time learning. Outsystems is free for the individual user. But it takes longer to learn than other similar software. My hope is that Outsystems’ power and flexibility will justify this start-up “cost.” But I will keep you posted if this turns out to be wrong.
That’s it for this week. More to come next!