Notes from ▲ Ship week

Brisbane's tech scene is small. There's a community here and I'm okay with it, and events at this scale don't really happen, they all land in Sydney or Melbourne. So when Vercel announced Ship Sydney I signed up straight away, and ended up getting invited to the two nights around it as well.

The reason I go to these things is pretty simple. I want to be in a room with people who are building, hear what they're working on, bounce ideas around, and meet people I'd never cross paths with otherwise. Most of what I've learned in the last year has come out of conversations, so a week of flights and a accom wasn't a hard call.

It ran over three days. A big social night first, a few hundred people. Then a quieter day two: a kebab lunch at midday and an invite-only dinner for about fifty engineering leaders that evening. Then Ship itself.

Night one. A few hundred people under the staircase.

I booked all of it assuming I'd be the least experienced person in every room, which was probably true. It mattered a lot less than I thought it would.

Being chronically online turned out to be useful

I believe I'm on 𝕏 more than I should be. I follow most of the Vercel releases, and I usually end up trying what they ship within a week, so I'd always filed that under bad habit.

At these events it was the thing people wanted to talk to me about. I'd tell a story about how we use some feature in production, what we tried first, what broke, what we do now, and people would stop and ask follow ups. How do you actually use that SDK? What do you reach for, and when? Where does it fall over? These are VPs and engineering managers asking. By the third day a few of them knew me as the guy who's been living in this stuff.

AI Social Club, the first night.

None of them are less capable than me. I figured they just haven't had a free afternoon to keep up with the endless stream of releases in this field, or to sit down and try new things. When you're in it every day you stop noticing that you know anything at all. Other people still find it useful.

The feedback obsession is real

You see Vercel people being high agency on 𝕏 all the time. Replying to complaints, shipping off the back of a random thread. So I already had a sense of it before I flew down. Watching it happen a metre in front of me is what made me sure.

Their leadership is properly technical, and they're obsessive about feedback in a way I hadn't seen up close before. I've been rewriting one of our agents on Eve, so I'd hit a few rough edges myself. I mentioned a couple of them at the dinner on the second night and it turned out the guy I was talking to was the VP of Data, and Eve had come out of his team. What got me was what happened when I finished talking. He went quiet for a few seconds. Actually quiet, visibly turning it over, working out where it would fit. Then he told me to DM him so he could add me to the group chat where they collect this stuff.

That pause is the part I keep thinking about. He wasn't asking to be polite. He was going to do something with it.

Malte, the CTO, had done the same thing over a halal snack pack at lunch a few hours earlier.

You can feel that in the products. It also took a lot of pressure off me. I never had to work out how to introduce myself or make Avenue sound bigger than it is. I'd used the thing and I had something specific to say about it, and that was enough.

The bar on the first night.

The kebab lunch

That lunch is worth its own note. It was a casual thing on the second day, hours before the dinner, and hardly anyone came, so a handful of us ended up sitting with the CTO for about an hour.

At the flagship event you get five minutes if you're lucky. I almost skipped the lunch, and it was the best thing I did all week.

Telling people what I'm building

The other half of the week was people asking what I'm working on, me asking them the same, and going from there.

The Ship stage before the doors opened.

I'd explain Avenue, where we're at, how we've grown, what I'm stuck on. And because the room was full of people who've run startups or sell into them for a living, I'd get real answers back. Ideas, and questions I hadn't thought to ask myself.

Should we be going after agencies or corporates next, and why. Is VC something I actually want, or something I've absorbed that I'm supposed to want. On the first night, a guy who works on a small team with the founders of an Australian agent tooling startup just started throwing things at me, try this, that one probably won't work for your model. On the last day, one of the Ship speakers walked me through my own competitive landscape: who's running a predatory model, who's somehow doing fine anyway, who I can stop worrying about.

Ship, day three.

The cards

Events like this run on swapping details, and the default is LinkedIn. I don't have one.

So I printed a little black card instead, with my email and my 𝕏 and GitHub handles on it. I thought it'd be a good momento. People get something physical to keep, and it doesn't disappear into a list of connections they'll never look at. Or maybe they throw it in the bin, who knows.

Everything I came home with, card included.

I gave one to a Vercel guy on the first night. The next evening he stopped me at the door of the dinner because he'd gone to my site after the meetup and had a play around with it. That's what the card is for. Whatever you've built ends up doing the introducing, which is a decent reason to keep it in good shape.

What I took home

I'm not pretending I'm at their level. That was obvious every hour I was there. But once you're mid conversation with someone, the gap is mostly years and a job title.

Hard to keep acting like a guest after you notice that. I'll be back next year. ▲

Sydney, ▲.