Sent on Wednesday, September 9, 2020, at 9:55 AM Eastern Time.
Hey everyone,
This summer, Hack Club student Jaden Taylor launched his Hack Club Summer of Making project 82,000 feet and took a photo of the curvature of the earth; Ellen Xu, 15, made a machine learning algorithm to run on a Raspberry Pi to help people diagnose Kawasaki disease; and Onur Sertgil, 17, from Turkey, built a fully custom MIDI controller that “made some epic beats.”
Hack Clubber Jaden Taylor's balloon captured this photo of the earth. He built his $130 balloon + camera + GPS system via a Hack Club/GitHub grant.
Nearly 500 teenagers participated in the Hack Club Summer of Making, where they spent the past two months building and shipping technical projects–in large part due to people like you who support, connect and advise us. Check out the recap, made by a 15-year-old. Thank you!
This is our 12th 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.
Our asks:
- As Hack Club grows, we continue to appreciate introductions to potential supporters such as Mackenzie Bezos; and Melinda Gates, who runs Pivotal Ventures.
- Hack Club is hiring. Please message me if you can share our posts with your network.
- Are you interested in Hack Club's efforts to bring more young women into coding? We made this deck on our plans, and can share more.
Special thanks from Hack Club:
- To Craig Newmark and Miles Lasater for funding our Summer Series for Young Women. We hosted 6 events in partnership with Girl Genius, a nationwide high school girls club. Each event had an average of 40 young women, mostly of color, and tutorials focused on HTML, Python, and React.
- To Andrew Reed of Sequoia for taking time on many occasions this summer to get to know Hack Club, support us, and open his network to us.
- To Debbie Sterling of GoldieBlox, Theresa Preston-Werner of Preston-Werner Ventures, and Emily Ramshaw of The 19th News for taking time to meet with Hack Club students.
- To Guillermo Rauch for donating a speaking fee to Hack Club.
Osaiyekemwen O. is one of 40 students who received laptops this summer via Hack Club thanks to Preston-Werner Ventures!
**Summer of Making: **
Hack Club staff in collaboration with students ran a hugely successful summer-long event called Hack Club’s Summer of Making in partnership with GitHub.
A few highlights:
- 5,628 posts about projects being built by 414 makers
- Thousands of commits on GitHub
- We shipped 1,950 orders of hardware to 143 cities across 28 countries
- Over the summer, our Slack grew 43% in weekly active members
How else we’re growing:
- Hack Club Bank launched embeddable donations. OpenMeal raised over $10k using it, along with many other nonprofits.
- Over the summer, we hired 5 students on contract, and for the Fall we brought on a part-time an accountant, scheduler, and fundraising consultant.
- For students, we held Arts Gala, a treasure hunt, a ship showcase, weekly Hack Nights, and “Orpheus Legion” (our girls & gender minorities group) hangouts
- We hosted 5 AMAs this summer, including with Alex Stamos and Nicky Case
Tommy DeVoss leads “3-2-1-Hack!” countdown to wrap up a July AMA with hackers.
**Our student ships: **Hack Club students learn real code, use GitHub, and build with the same tools as professional programmers. Check out a few examples of student ships from the last month:
- Fayd S (Mumbai) made Binger, a comprehensive movie database where you can search for movies and see their ratings, open sourced and built in React.js.
- Linus S (Seattle) made Scrapple, a Mac app where you can post updates to Hack Club Scrapbook straight from your menu bar.
- Josh Brown (New York) released version 1.0 of BitLink, an open source video conferencing app! This includes features not on Zoom, such as editing/deleting messages, message history for anyone who joins the call, and more.
- Jackson M. (Zambia) recently learned Bootstrap to build their first personal website!
- Vihan B (California) utilized GPT-3 to build Rothko: an AI bot for recipes.
Next newsletter, we’ll update you on our 2020-2021 school year launch. We’re hard at working making the 4 parts of Hack Club even better:
- Hack Clubs: Students start after-school computer-science clubs at their school, online or in a pod;
- Events & workshops: Students develop and imagine big ideas via AMAs with technology industry leaders; and follow weekly technical workshops;
- Hack Club Slack: 10k students have accounts in our community, which is wholesome, fun, intellectual, and technical; and facilitate peer-to-peer learning;
- Money: Students execute big on their ideas with access to raising & spending money using Hack Club Bank, which offer them 501(c)(3) status.
We couldn't do it without you all. Thanks for this time together from all of us at Hack Club.
warm regards, Christina
Zach Latta and Lachlan Campbell contributed to this newsletter
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Christina Asquith
COO | Hack Club | christina@hackclub.com
@christinaasquit / christina.cool / github
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