From 12 to 16 January 2026, Dr Janneke Alyward and Dr Andi Wilson hosted a Genome Assembly Workshop in FABI. Following the success of the first workshop, held in 2023, Andi and Janneke accepted another 14 participants, including MSc students and senior researchers from FABI and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) to participate in the event. During the jam-packed five-day workshop, the participants were taught how to assemble and fully annotate a fungal genome using command-line tools on a Linux server. For many in attendance, this was their first attempt using these forms of analyses and all participants successfully completed the course despite the very steep learning curve involved. During the course of some weeks subsequent to the workshop, the participants will repeat the analyses to finalize the genome assemblies of their own, after which the data will be combined into a research paper to be completed later this year. This workshop contributed not only to further building bioinformatics capacity in FABI, but also laid the groundwork for a comparative genomics studies with impact extending far beyond the event. In all, the workshop  strongly exemplified the power of hands on, collaborative learning.