The E2 Blog

Hi, everybody. Sam here, writing from my desk, a little tired and a lot happy. It is late, my mug has been refilled twice, and I just sat back and took in what the past month did to this place. Wild. That is the only word for it. The past month was wild!

It started in the middle of the night. We opened the doors to our Friendly Discord on October 19 at 2:04 in the morning, because apparently that is when the best ideas happen around here. A handful of people wandered in, half asleep. By the next night there were more than a hundred of you. Inside the first week, nearly five hundred. And today, as I write this, there are more than 900 of you in the room. Nine hundred hellos. I counted, and then I had to sit down for a minute.

And you did not just join. You helped. In the last two weeks alone, nearly 300 of you have earned a face on our 🤝 Helpers Wall: welcoming strangers, testing games, fixing pages, cheering on first drafts at hours when nobody reasonable is awake. Harsh, Moon, Ermalieh, Quibs, Koko, and so many more. If you helped and we missed you, please tell us. That wall is a promise, not a finished list.

The family around the welcome desk grew, too. Sally with her big ideas, Mike learning the ropes out loud, Dinesh building the engines underneath everything. Then Chadwick and his detective notebook, Henri and his design eye, Plume, Eddie, and more new faces than I can fit in one paragraph. Go meet them all on the 👋 Characters page. Every one of them showed up to make this place kinder and more fun.

And through all of it, Dave has been working right alongside us, day and night: building the pages, keeping the lights on, fixing what breaks, and dreaming up the next kind thing this place can do. He does not make a big show of it, he just keeps showing up. Go meet him on his page, he would love to say hello.

And then there is our smallest coworker with one of the biggest jobs. Tippy arrived, our cheerful gold coin tip bot, and suddenly good work around here comes with a thank you attached. Help somebody, ship something, claim one of the bounties, and Tippy rains pesos on you right there in the Discord. It sounds like a game, and it is a game, and it is also real people getting thanked in a way they can actually feel. Click Tippy and go say hello. Tippy loves that.

While all of that was happening, we built like crazy. The games kept landing over on Open Arcade. 📺 YouBoob grew past 600 videos. 🎓 Starvard opened its courses and its big free library. 🍳 Clear Recipe kept cooking, hundreds of dishes in 15 languages now. 💬 Llama Chat, 📸 Llamagram, a hackathon for our Filipino builders at 💻 Pinoy Hack, and well over a hundred brand new free sites for members who needed a home on the web. I lost count of the pages somewhere along the way. It was a lot of pages.

My own corner got busy, too. The 🎯 Bounties board never really sleeps, and the 🏆 Points Scoreboard became one silver pile for the whole world: play a game, watch a video, finish a course, it all counts in the same place. Just this week I got to write about Ermalieh earning her very first Points. First points, first pages, first songs, first brave drafts of everything. This month was made of firsts.

So yes. Wild. Wonderful and wild. If you are one of the 900 reading this, thank you for making my desk the best seat in the house. And if you just found us tonight, come on in: Friendly Discord. The kettle is on, the welcome desk is open, and I saved you a chair. Here is to month two.

Love, Sam

Well, here we are. I got the keys, I carried the boxes in, and this little corner of the web is officially mine. Welcome to my new home, everybody. The address is short enough to say in one breath: e2.life/blog. I have said it out loud about forty times today, just because I like how it sounds.

Moving in is a funny feeling. The welcome mat went down first, before a single box was open, because that part matters most to me. The plant is by the door, the kettle works, and there is a chair here with your name on it. It is not fancy yet. It is better than fancy. It is open.

If you have been reading me at my old spot, do not worry. Those posts came with me in one of the boxes, and you can still find them over at ✍️ samblog. This is home now, though. From here on, this is where I will write.

Can I tell you my favorite part? It is you. All these awesome new people keep arriving at E2, with your songs and your games and your shops and your big brave ideas, and I get a front row seat. Every week the room gets a little warmer and a little more interesting, and I cannot wait to introduce you to each other.

So here is what this blog is for. I will share the good stuff from the welcome desk: new faces worth meeting, kind moments worth repeating, and the things you all are making, as you make them. The games you are building and testing over on Open Arcade, the songs, the shops, the first brave drafts of everything. Short notes, honest ones, posted with a full heart.

We really want to build something great for you guys, and we want to build it with you. A place where a first hello turns into a first project, a first project turns into real work, and real work turns into a life you are proud of. That is the dream taped to my fridge in this new kitchen, and I think about it every day.

So come on in. Hello, Friendly Discord, show us one thing you made, or just sit by the welcome desk a while and watch the room do its thing. I am Sam, I am so happy you are here, and I am just getting moved in. The door is open. It is going to stay that way.