HackerHouse Taiwan
Supabase is a fully remote company with employees all over the globe, allowing us to work from wherever we choose. Once a year, we gather everyone in one physyical location for our yearly offsite, but additionally some SupaTroopers personally organize so called HackerHouses, renting a house in an interesting location to work and spend time together. Over the last couple of years we've done these in Munich - Germany (where SupaBrew was born), Bali - Indonesia, and Penang - Malaysia.
I personally split my time between Singapore and Taiwan (Taiwan offers a Gold Card visa program which makes this very convenient, especially for folks working in digital fields, including a special program for open source contributors!) and have been wanting to organise a HackerHouse Taiwan edition. And this time, rather than only inviting Supabase colleagues, I decided to open it up to other remote engineers, open source and indie hackers to come and work together from Taipei and get to know Taiwan, and let me tell you - it was a blast!
Interested in the next edition of HackerHouse Taiwan? Fill in this form to stay in the loop!
Special thank you to PicCollage for hosting us at your Taipei office! π
Why Taiwan?
Before meeting my partner, who is Taiwanese, I didn't know much about Taiwan. I only visited for the first time in early 2023 but instantly fell in love with this extremely special island. The people, the food, the nature, you have to experience it for yourself, you'll be longing to come back as soon as you leave!
That being said, it can be somewhat daunting to visit Taiwan for the first time, especially if you don't speak the language. So with HackerHouse Taiwan I'm hoping to make it easier for folks to take that first leap and experience working from Taiwan, and at the same time connect with the local developer community for networking and sharing experiences.
Thank you to Anita Chen from the DIGI Gold Card Community for stopping by with some Taiwanese snacks to fuel us up and tell us about the different Gold Card initiatives!
The logistics
Since this is a non-commercial passion project I couldn't spend too much time organising everything and had to approach this in a scrappy way. Since I was going back for Lunar New Year celebrations anyway, I just set the timeline as the week before LNY, whipped up a Google Form and started collecting interest via Slack, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Pretty soon we had a nice group of ~18 people signed up, some from Supabase and Vercel, which offer flexible remote working, as well as some solo entrepreneurs and indiehackers, and completed by some locally based tech folks.
Now historically, for Supabase HackerHouses, we would simply rent a big house and work from there, but with external and local folks joining, and also with prior bad WIFI experiences, that wasn't an option. Luckily I had made some friends at PicCollage during my prior Taipei visits and knew that they had recently moved office and were renting out some of their former office space as co-working space, so I reached out to them to see if we could do a short-term rental.
For housing we partnered with Star Hostel Taipei East εζιεΉ΄ζ 逨 which offer beautiful yet affordable stay options in Taipei!
Work time
Taiwanese people are extremely welcoming and generous! When John Fan, one of the PicCollage co-founders, heard about the idea, he said he liked it and offered us to join them at their conveniently located Taipei Headquarters in the Daβan District!
With a great view of Taipei 101 and multiple rooms at our disposal we managed to have a productive week. Thank you once again! π
Play time
When in Taipei, you gotta play! There is so much to explore! During the weekend we went for a little hike up Elephant Mountain, explored the memorial hall and LNY , cycled along the river, strolled through the nightmarkets, and some of us even went for a team workout at F45 Training Daan πͺ
It's also super easy to hop on a bus and get out of town for a bit, so we went to visit the coastal area around Keelung and visited the famous Keelung MiaoKou Night Market.
Food time
Obviously Taiwan is famous for it's cuisine, so when we weren't working, we were trying as much of Taiwan's fantastic food as we could. And sometimes even while working π€€
Now this is just a tiny selection of food pics, there are tons more, but that would make this blog too long! Just trust me that no one went hungry!
Connecting with the local community
It was important to me to connect folks with the local dev community. So apart from inviting local tech folks to come co-work with us, one of our attendees, Dan Starns organised a local Dev Tools meetup while we were in town, inviting fellow HackerHouse attendees to talk about what they were working on. It was a great turnout and a fantastic night of networking \o/
What's next?
It was great getting folks to visit, experience Taiwan, and connect with the local developer community. I'm hoping to be able to do this more regularly and maybe even inspire some folks to apply for the Gold Card and spend more time working in Taiwan. If this is something you might be interested in, you can fill in this form to stay in the loop! I'm excited to see you in Taiwan soon πΉπΌπ