Sent on Thursday, July 30, 2020, at 11:10 AM Eastern Time.
Dear friends,
Most U.S. schools are not reopening. Here's 4 ways teen hackers will have the most technical year ever (see below).
This is our 11th VIP update, your 2-minute read on how we’re building Hack Club—sent to 80 recipients, including our major donors & friends. Thanks for this time together.
Hack Club’s AMA last Thursday with reformed black hat hacker, Tommy DeVoss.
Our asks of you:
- Introductions are so helpful. Tom Steyer cares about developing youth in America. Can you introduce us?
- Volunteer yourself or someone great for an AMA this fall. How about Julia Hartz?
- Wish us luck—next week we ask GitHub to renew our partnership for a 2nd year.
Special thanks!
- Thanks to Tim & Kate Clem for their financial gift.
- Thanks to Amjad Masad of Repl.it for donating an hour of his time for a 1:1 with me.
- Thank you to David Cramer of Sentry for donating an hour of his time for a 1:1 with me last Friday. We opened up the call to Hack Club students. (David also donated 15 iPad Pros to our students earlier this year.)
4 ways to a technical year:
Hack Club’s mission is to create a generation of teenagers who think creatively and build with code. Hack Club has been growing steadily since 2014, but really picked up this March after schools closed. Slack messages have jumped from 2,000 a day to over 10,000 a day. We’re making plans to hire for new positions.
This September, we plan to support students to:
- Lead standout computer science clubs with their friends, online and inside of in-person pods;
- Develop big ideas via deep talk AMA conversations with tech industry leaders;
- Make friendships on the Hack Club Slack that are wholesome, fun, intellectual, and technical;
- Bank them. We help students execute big on their ideas with access to raising & spending tax-deductible donations using Hack Club Bank.
This week, staff Matthew & Dina (both 18) are prototyping online club meetings; Christina & Dina are experimenting with AMA formats, especially for young women; and I’m working with Max to create new features to improve Slack's utility as a tool for our community. Lachlan, 19, and Max are in the early stages of building Hack Club Bank 2.0 to launch in September.
For students
Alex Stamos, former Chief Security Officer at Facebook, joins Hack Club August 6th. Thanks to hacker Tommy DeVoss, who talked on July 23rd with students about earning a million dollars as a bug-bounty hunter. His dogs, Jackson and Mercy, joined in! Later in August, indie game developer Nicky Case will visit.
After a successful trial period, we’ve hired student Amogh C. (17, from Storrs, CT) to continue running online events for the rest of the summer, such as the Fine Arts Gala he hosted last week. This week, community members are running the Open Source Fiesta. Lachlan made new webpages about our Slack, AMAs, our Minecraft server, & worked with Amogh to relaunch Hack Night, our weekly Saturday night Zoom coding hangout.
Look at what high school students in Hack Club are building with code:
- Caleb D. (17, New Hampshire) made a vacation responder Slack bot using Go
- Matt G. (17, New Hampshire) open-sourced a new Go project & made a remarkable GitHub profile with GitHub Actions
- Ashay P. (16, Chicago) won a hackathon prize for HealthDESK, a website using AI to detect bad desk posture & habits
- Theo B. (16, staff, near Boston, MA) published a call-to-action for his high school to comment on their school district’s COVID plan
- Patrick H. (17, Illinois) used his Summer of Making hardware grant made a physical display for the album cover of whatever music is playing nearby (& found the time to FOIA his school to visualize his school’s grades)
- Akash (Kerala, India) used his Summer of Making grant to make a smart electricity meter:
Smart electricity meter, Kerala, India
Student snapshot: Dina’s story
Hi! My name is Dina Elhanan, I’m 18 from Milton, Ontario, Canada. My junior year, I started a Hack Club at my school focused on cybersecurity and Javascript. Hack Club was the first place I met friends interested in tech that were building projects people actually used. I now intern at Hack Club and my goal is to get more young women into tech, supporting them to code, build, and ship. This fall, I’ll be starting my freshman year of Electrical Engineering at McMaster University.
Dina giving a talk at Flagship 2019. San Francisco, CA.
Thanks for the time together, as always. It means the world to have such an incredible group of supporters as we make Hack Club happen in the world.
—Zach
(Christina Asquith & Lachlan Campbell co-authored this update)
--
Zach Latta
Founder, Hack Club | zach@hackclub.com | Donate
@zachlatta / fb / web / github
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