VIP Newsletter 018

ChristinaAsquith@ChristinaAsquithZachLatta@ZachLatta

Hi everyone, I hope you're having a great start to the spring.

For a teenager, $7/month to host an app is pricey. So, this month a group of 12 Hack Clubbers teamed up to build Hack as a Service, a free Heroku alternative for Hack Clubbers. It's written in Go and Next.js by Hack Clubbers from New Hampshire, Greece, California, Texas, Malaysia and Rwanda, collaborating on GitHub. Check out their internal progress updates and README.

Here’s a 2-minute read on how we’re building Hack Club—sent to 87 recipients, including our major donors & friends. Thanks for this time together.

robot balancing GIF

18 year old Prithul from Bangladesh built this self-balancing robot using 3D printed parts and a custom printed circuit board for the hardware.

Special thanks from Hack Club to:

  • Adam Ross of Goldcrest Capital for his incredibly generous gift of $100,000 to Hack Club
  • Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, for a conversation with Zach Latta about the future
  • SpaceX's Gwynne Shotwell for privately mentoring 5 Hack Club students in April

Nearly half of US high schools still don’t offer any quality computer science education. Hack Club is a special place for teenagers curious about computers and coding. When successful, we'll create a new generation of leaders with hard technical skills, an optimistic engineer's mindset, and a powerful network of creative, technical friends.

News:

Three of the five projects selected for Replit Ventures are led by Hack Clubbers, who will each receive $2,000 and additional support. Thanks to Amjad Masad, Replit founder, Hack Club donor, and friend. (Zach and Amjad will be on Clubhouse this Thursday night talking about coding education.)

Remember @cow, the AI bot built by Benjamin Ashbaugh, 15, from Colorado using GPT-3? Last Friday, his Hack Club friend, Jason Antwi-Appiah, also 15, of Texas created another bot named @goat that uses a more powerful GPT-3 model called davinci:

Screenshot of onversation between goat and a hack clubber

Summer at Hack Club:

Zach and Hack Club's 3-person engineering team are making big summer plans for live events, internships and supporting Hack Clubbers to make major ships. Last summer, we distributed $50,000 in hardware and supported 5,628 projects by teenagers in 28 countries. Stay tuned for our upcoming announcement!

Hack Clubbers build and ship projects for their friends in our online community:

  • Ishan, 15, of Dubai, used Go to build Devzat, a new way to chat through SSH. The server has Markdown support (including syntax highlighting), emojis and many different commands. Anyone is able to join by running $ ssh devzat.hackclub.com in their terminal.

  • Sam, 15, of Singapore, used Next.js to build a custom waiting room for Zoom so that gives other participants fun facts to cheer them up while they wait for him. He built an API to control the site, and he uses a Raycast Bash script to control it.

  • Abby, 14, of California, used Xcode and Swift to build her first ever app, VacLA, which matches LA’s age qualified residents to a vaccination center near them, for the Technovation Girls competition.

  • Faisal, 15, of India, created a Slack bot, @carbon-slack, that allows users to create beautiful images of code with Carbon directly in Slack and without needing to go to Carbon’s website.

  • Matthew, 17, of California, has been posting to Hack Club's Scrapbook every day for the last 300 days, and just used JavaScript to build a website that counts down the days until he's posted to Scrapbook for a full year.

  • Lux, 17, of California, recorded her first song on the analog modular synthesizer that she built from scratch. I appreciate your time in reading this, and all the support you give Hack Club. As always, I welcome your responses, questions, and suggestions.

Happy spring! best, Christina

-- Christina Asquith Chief Operating Officer, Hack Club | christina@hackclub.com | Donate

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