Inaugural Blog Post

Just the post is inaugural, not the whole blog. I’m not completely sure how you’d have an inaugural blog, but this sure isn’t one. Instead, this is the blog for the 2024 Congress Organizing Team, where we’ll put news, updates, announcements, and… stuff.

Good stuff, I promise.

The first thing we’d like to announce is for all you recursion fans out there: it’s this shiny new website that you’re currently looking at and reading this post on! Hello and welcome! We’ve had this thing in the works pretty much since the last one went up, and it’s been redesigned from scratch so that we can do cute little things like have the blog be RSS-compatible and customize the page layouts. We have a lot more planned for it, such as the kind of schedule and cost breakdowns that last year’s website had, in addition to some extra info about the environs of this year’s Congress so you can spend your downtime like a local. All that’s in the works, and we’ll throw up another post announcing those pages when they’re done.

Secondly - and perhaps most importantly - registration is now open! As of this writing registration fees are currently slashed to an early-bird rate of $400 for adults and $200 for youth in an effort to make this our biggest Go Congress yet! These rates are temporary, so people are encouraged to jump on them while they can.

Finally, I’d like to briefly introduce this year’s organizing team. In addition to the core AGA folks, we have a strong team of locals from clubs all over the Pacific Northwest. Stew and Matt have been doing amazingly on venue coordination and getting registration up and running respectively - both subjects which make my eyes glaze over whenever they come up in meetings, so I’m insanely grateful for their efforts. Nathan wrote most of the code that went into this site, I helped with visual design and writing things, and Jonas has been our very needful project manager throughout the push to get it up. Our AGA liaisons, Chris and Eric, have been a pleasure to work with as well, so special thanks go out to them and AGA management as well. That’s by no means our entire volunteer team, but rest assured that if I didn’t mention someone it’s because I ran out of ways to say thanks and definitely not because I forgot anyone.

If you’d like to be part of this unforgettable team of people, volunteer sign-ups are still open over here. It’s definitely not necessary to be in or even near the Pacific Northwest in order to volunteer - just so long as you’re planning to come to Congress, we could certainly use the help! Bonus points if you’re part of a club that’s thinking of hosting Congress next or in future years, that way you’ll be familiar with the way things are done.

Anyway, that’s all for now! Be sure to check back for updates in the near future!