gratitude Archives — Stampede: the strategic design & technology company

Happy Things!

Zana Fauzi — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 17:52:18 +0000

It would be almost impossible for people to look forward for Monday, but we do. Amongst the team banters and trolling, which definitely happens every day amidst us trying to tackle projects after projects with panache – we await this one session every week with complete enthusiasm. It’s called The Happy Things session. *rubs hands gleefully*

What is this The Happy Things session?

Part of the weekly team meeting held every Monday, The Happy Things session is a series of Google Drive slide presentation where each team member is given one (or more slides, depending on our content) slide to fill in with photos, text and links – haphazardly, yet with love – of things and activities that made us happy the week before. Once filled in, everyone will present and elaborate on their respective slides of those items.

How does it work?

To give an idea of how much we look forward to it, here’s a rough idea of the weekly team meeting agenda:

11:00 am – 11:30 am EST: Status updates
11:30 am – 11:45 am EST: Announcements
11:45 am – 12:30 pm EST: Happy Things

The first half an hour of the meeting is reserved especially for the serious stuff – catching up on projects, asking questions, troubleshooting and other work-related conversations. To save time, a team member (usually Sani) will prepare the blank slides in Google Drive and share the link with us so we could fill in while we are waiting for the rest to finish with status updates. At this point of time, those who are already done were already sitting at the edge of their seats – just could not wait to tell what we had been up to the week before. As we work remote, mostly all meeting are conducted through Skype, and fortunately this is where the most fun lies 🙂

The Happy Things Highlights

Looking back at the repository of The Happy Things slides in our Google Drive, it was just surreal to discover the amount of great things and also mischiefs we have been up to – individually or with each other. Here’s a point to illustrate (and some highlights to follow):

Shaiful was presenting his happy things (apparently about crab soup and working from the library with a view) through Skype while the rest us were listening, until he let out a huge shriek and disappeared from the Skype call for about 5 minutes. When he returned, all still panting and gasping, he said, “There was a stupid cockroach.” Intuitively as the most supportive team members ever, we decided to put up cockroach pictures all over his slide presentation (and poor him, all over his crab soup too) in between our unsuppressed laughter.

This was when Sani first joined as our junior front-end developer, all ready to take up new challenges, so we photoshopped his face on Daniel Craig’s dreamy body.

There was also an obscure Freddie Mercury video shot and food pictures, which happens every single week (the food, not Freddie Mercury) – sending us scrambling to the kitchen soon after the meeting is done.

This was when Shaza found out that Iwan was getting engaged, and was supposed to keep it a secret from the rest of us. But that wouldn’t stop her from relaying all the hints, intentionally in hot pink and Comic Sans just loud enough to catch the bait.

Of course, there are updates about all sorts of gadgetries and gaming.

Stampede wouldn’t also be Stampede without travel photos.

Eventually, after many weeks, we would still find the cockroach making another appearance – and even larger than life.

Why do we do this?

An idea of Shaza’s, she realised that while everyone was looking forward to achieve bigger and bigger things in life, it is also important to delight in smaller things that make us happy every day. Besides, isn’t Plato was also saying something about you could get to know people by the things they love? (I was kidding, the exact quote is this)

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation.

Does your workplace also have similar activities to get the employees to look forward for Monday? We’d love to hear about them!

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Mighty Things

Shaza Hakim — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 06:14:27 +0000

Hi everyone, first off — happy Monday. I am sneaking this blog post past my people who are probably still sleeping off their Sundays. We have been quietly busy the past 2 weeks working on a new website for Stampede. We call it v3 and it just launched a few hours ago so big yay!

The new website is typeset in Arno Pro and Proxima Nova. It is made responsive with Bootstrap so go ahead and give it a try on your mobile devices. Everything else is crafted, designed and built lovingly by the team.

Taking the time to take things out

For those who know me as a designer, I am the worst possible client to myself. Ever. The new Stampede is four years in the making — something I’m rather embarrassed to admit. We worked on so many iterations only to feel that it’s never good enough. We put a lot in, then we took out a lot more. For every bit and pieces you see on the website, imagine 4 or 5 variations each that got taken out. It’s a moving target but I think we’re pretty close.

This gets personal because it has to embody how we see ourselves as a team. It gotta show the tiniest details and care put into every work. It gotta have soul.

Old and Gold

Working on this website, I realized something profound. We have so many clients who have been with us since we first started in 2006. In Internet speak, that’s ancient.

Back then, Dov and I never thought it would open up so much possibilities for us and the team to meet and engage with wonderful people and businesses from all over the world. We now have clients in four continents — not that we’re ruling out the other three of course, though logistics with Antartica can get tricky — and we’re increasingly involved in projects that are greater in scale, pose bigger design challenges and have the added benefit of changing the world. Companies like Globalish and Joota are not alone in wanting to make the world a little less reactive and a little more reflective.

Stampede clients, you guys are the best, truly. You keep us busy and then you went off telling your friends and colleagues about this bunch of people who can make websites. We hope we have presented your projects in the best light but do let us know if we missed anything or if we have stumbled over a few details. We did fine-comb the site and tried to make everything almost perfect, which is why it took us four long years to finally roll this out.

Curate and Construct

We used to bounce ideas off each other via email but then we thought “Come on, it’s 2014. Share the good things already!”

We started Curated a year ago, and recently extended similar concept with Constructs. You can now see the repository of design and development ideas flowing daily at Stampede.

We want Curated and Constructs to ultimately be the place where people who are interested in design and web can take small steps to learn new things, to be inspired. It’s our small way of giving back to the community.

StampedeZine

We have also began to send highly relevant ideas and web trends through our StampedeZine newsletter.

We even went to the extent of identifying different recipient groups and finding real content relevant to each group. If you have an e-commerce website, you will receive ideas and tips on how to engage users and get that conversion rate. If you’re running a social networking platform, we make sure you get a good dose of user experience and social engagement articles. The Zine was an idea I had during one of our creative burst sessions — read about it here.

We love that everybody has found the Zine useful and engaging that no one ever unsubscribed from it (or at least that’s what Mailchimp said). I hope the readership quality will remain ever useful to our subscribers. You can subscribe to the Zine here.

Do Good Things

We started the Stampede DoGood initiative in 2008 to help non-profit and foundations lift off their online awareness campaigns and fundraisings. It began with our local animal shelter here in Langkawi and has since extended to various non-profit organizations.

Recently, we helped launch campaigns and a new website for Foundations for Human Rights in Cuba. The team stayed up all night manning the campaign website during their Miami launch event, taking shifts in between to catch some sleep but never staying away too long. Talk about good vibes.

And So…

This is not the end of v3. We’re planning to add case studies, share our thought process, give this blog a responsive facelift and pen some helpful thoughts on how we do it all, remotely. For now I’m going to sign off and try to catch some sleep before anyone spots an embarrassing typo.

To the people who made this all possible — and I’m still refreshing my browser to see if it’s real — my biggest thanks to Dov, Zana, Shaiful, Iwan, Sani and Dahlia. It is my privilege to come to work everyday knowing I’m in the company of such amazing people.

It has been one unreal, terrific ride at Stampede. Here’s to more mighty things!

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My Favourite Dudes

Anita Zein — Tue, 31 May 2011 18:16:39 +0000

There’s nothing more fun for a manager than to see the crew she led successfully meets their target. And while having much fun too.

A project requires many things: fulfillment of responsibilities, good cooperation, effective communication and the awareness to be your own leaders. For the past one year, Stampede has been actively managing post-development tasks for one of our biggest accounts. As with other projects, there were stumbling blocks. But more recently and particularly today, everyone shines at meeting the demands of their. They executed a well-orchestrated maneuver and completed their tasks with a bang.

Mothers, Lock Your Daughters

We’re very proud of our three young dashing crew – Syazwan Hakim, See Guo Lin and Mujib Jazmin. Between the three of them, they tackled updates on a severely limited system and resolved them instantly. On a live server.

GL, Mujib and I received requests from the client and quickly distribute the tasks to the expert in charge. Mujib handled anything design-related, Syazwan did his front-end magic then GL followed through with the real deal coding. We then reported progresses and completion to the client on the same hour within minutes.

This is definitely my dream team. Their young spirits and friendship are invaluable to me. We had so much jokes and fun during the session, it was hilarious. Cherry on top – I received word that the client was very pleased with our response and speed. He skyped me kind words until he ran out of praise.

I’m surrounded by three extraordinary men in the team. Yeah I’m happy. 😉

(picture by Ken Ludwig)

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Farewell Mimi

Shaza Hakim — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 04:46:46 +0000

Please don’t let our future generation regard animal abuse as life norms the way ours do.

Mimi was a kitten that Dov and I found near Langkawi McDonalds being abused by a 7 years old little girl on vacation. She ran and hide under the tables, she didn’t scream from the pain, instead just crouch helplessly in hope that the merciless kicking would stop. We asked the girl to back off while her parents sat few metres away watching the entire episode, enjoying their meal. On impulse, we adopted the kitten and named her Mimi. That was 3 weeks ago.

Yesterday, Mimi died from breathing complications. She developed a diaphragmatic hernia from the abuse and while she battled few weeks for her life, her lung gave away a day before her surgery. Kuala Lumpur, normally cloudy and wet, couldn’t be more brighter and sunnier the day she died. She left a big void in all our hearts and she will be remembered for long for what she has been to us and the life she could have had if only she had not been born a stray.

During the last few hours Mimi and I shared, I have come to understand the kindness of strangers. Our deepest appreciation to everyone who has come together in their own way and tried to save her. To Renee and Syahir too, who did her justice.

Till we see you again, Mimi.

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