VIP Newsletter 019

ChristinaAsquith@ChristinaAsquithZachLatta@ZachLatta

Dear Hack Club supporters,

As we approach the end of COVID-19 pandemic, we are taking 42 Hack Club teenagers on a trip of a lifetime.

We're calling it The Hacker Zephyr. It's a train trip starting in July at Hack Club HQ in Burlington, Vermont, heading south to New York City, west through Chicago, and crossing the Rockies on our way to San Francisco. From there, we'll follow the Pacific Ocean and end in Los Angeles, where we'll finish at SpaceX.

Onboard, we're hosting the world's longest hackathon on land: 3,502 miles long.

Our hope is to create a life-changing experience that will energize the next generation of Hack Club leaders right before the start of the new school year. When Hack Club works, it's because of the teenagers who build it. Every summer we invest deeply in Hack Club leaders, and The Hacker Zephyr will be our biggest investment yet. Our first invitations go out this week.

Zephyr Sketch

Here’s a 2-minute read on how we’re building Hack Club—sent to 88 recipients, including our major donors & friends. Thanks for this time together.

Special thanks from Hack Club to:

  • Joe Liemandt for donating $500k to Hack Club
  • Vitalik Buterin for a $300k gift in Ethereum to Hack Club
  • Tom Preston-Werner for his reverse 42nd birthday gift: buying train tickets for 42 Hack Clubbers
  • Elan Lee, former chief design officer of Xbox, for his AMA with Hack Clubbers
  • Elizabeth Stark, founder of Lightning Labs, for talking cryptocurrency with Hack Clubbers

Hack Club is a network of technical teenagers from the US and around the world who run hundreds of their own after-school CS clubs and share their projects in our online community of 13,000 other teenagers. Hack Club has no teachers, fees, curriculum or classroom. Hack Club is totally free to teenagers, thanks to you.

Hack Club’s snapshot of activity

  • 2.6 million minutes spent in Hack Club Zoom meetings since Jan 1, 2021
  • 960,458 messages sent in our online community in 2021 as of May 8, 2021, a 210% increase over last year
  • 1,465 new Slack accounts created, bringing us to 13,463 total accounts

STUDENT SHIPS:

Look what Hack Clubbers are building

  • Benjamin Ashbaugh, 16, Colorado, built Tetris for Slack, employing the most “insane and impressive” use of the Slack API our team has seen yet. See the code.

  • Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin hung out with Hack Clubbers on Devzat, a SSH chat server built by Hack Clubber Ishan, 15, of Dubai using Go. Anyone is able to join by running $ ssh devzat.hackclub.com in their terminal.

  • Ngoc Khuat hacked SpaceX's Dragon2 capsule simulation to autonomously dock the capsule using chromedriver and Common Lisp. Watch the video, it's truly incredible. The entire docking process is entirely controlled with code. See the source.

  • Hack Club is covering the costs to use the OpenAI API for a Hack Clubber in Texas who is using GPT-3 to build bots for the community.

  • Belle, 16, from Malaysia made her first open source contribution to Hack as a Service, a community project to build a free Heroku alternative, by adding a dark mode toggle.

  • Charlie wants to build a code editor that can be used on iPads, and is collaborating with Jason, 16, from Texas and Linus from Seattle. He's trying to get around Apple's compiling limitations by embedding the editor in a browser.

  • A 16 year old Hack Clubber built Lucia, a lightweight frontend JavaScript framework. Lucia is now the first open source library to run on Hack Club Bank.

Hi Hack Club Africa!

Hack Club Africa Zoom Meeting Screenshot

Looking Ahead

Hack Club is growing fast. This September we expect to see hundreds of new high schoolers applying to start Hack Clubs; daily activity in our online community shows a 75% increase for the first week of June 2021, compared to the same time period the year before. We will be announcing a major partnership in August for Hack Club Bank, our financial tool for teenagers. And we will announce 2 new high-level hires later in June.

Nothing beats the energy in the community and HQ right now as we gear up for The Hacker Zephyr, our train trip across America. Our mission is to give Hack Clubbers an experience they'll remember forever.

Reach out if you'd like an invitation to meet us in San Francisco the evening of July 22nd!

Hack Club is possible because of you. Thank you.

Have a great summer! See you in July. Christina

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Christina Asquith

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

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