Dear Hack Club friends,
Every summer Hack Clubbers do something special. This Thursday, we’re embarking on our greatest investment in leaders yet: The Hacker Zephyr, a cross-country hackathon on a train for 42 Hack Club leaders.
Here’s your 2-minute read on how we’re building Hack Club—sent to 92 recipients. Thanks for this time together.
Rishi, 15, Claire, 16, and Belle, 16, hackin’ away at HQ this month, and writing this newsletter!
The Hacker Zephyr will be highly technical: There's no internet on the train, so we’ve purchased a refurbished server with 2 CPUs, 192 GB of RAM, and 16 TB of storage. It's hosting an intranet over WiFi, and we've configured a custom DNS server and a deploy flow for both static and dynamic sites. A handful of Hack Clubbers have already mirrored crates.io, npm, and the Ubuntu Package Archive, along with adding offline copies of Stack Overflow and Wikipedia to it. We’re calling our server and intranet the ZephyrNET.
As the train clacks from Burlington, Vermont to Los Angeles, we’re challenging the 42 Hack Clubbers on board to make 500 contributions to the ZephyrNET.
Engineers Zach Latta, Zach Fogg and Max Wofford with the server we're taking aboard the Zephyr.
Hack Club is all about building real projects in the real world. Since this past June, 73 projects were shipped and shared by Hack Clubbers in our online community. Stay tuned for more examples of what Hack Clubbers are building below!
This month, we thank:
SpaceX’s Jamin Gallman, Amy Fels, and Emily Shanklin for offering to host Hack Club's closing ceremonies at SpaceX's Hawthorne facilities.
John Abele, founder of Boston Scientific, for lunch with Zach and connecting Hack Club to some amazing builders, thinkers, and collaborators.
Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream co-founder Jerry Greenfield and NASA flight director Zeb Scoville for joining Hack Clubbers' BBQ this Friday on our first night of the cross-country train trip.
Hack Club’s snapshot of June activity:
Hack Clubs are student-led, after-school computer science clubs, and teenagers run hundreds of their own clubs in 22 countries worldwide. In our wholesome online community, in the last 30 days, 250,000 messages were sent between students. Additionally, 252 new students joined the Hack Club Slack since June 1, 2021.
This summer, we hired a Head of Clubs, a VP of Philanthropy, and also an Operations Associate for Hack Club Bank -- all newly created positions. Three new, paid full-time high school interns work around the clock. This week, we signed a lease for office space next door to HQ to handle this growth. Thanks to you, Hack Club is growing and staying free and accessible to all teenagers.
Read our op-ed about Hack Club Bank in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the leading publication for nonprofits in America. Here is the link.
Also, check out this recent television spot on Hack Club from a student leader in Mauritius: https://fb.watch/6fSLqZ2PXh/ (it's in French).
🚢 Student Ships! Look what Hack Clubbers are up to this month
Jacky, 20, from Vancouver, Canada, built a peer-to-peer encrypted file syncing tool, Portal.
Amy, 16, in the UK, wrote a game in 24 hours using the open source devKitARM toolchain for the Nintendo 3DS.
Aiden, 16, and Will, 14, in Washington, created Million, a library-agnostic Virtual DOM in JavaScript library. It currently has 904 stars on GitHub and counting.
Abishek, 20, in India, built Vaccine Finder, an app that makes finding a vaccine in India easy. It was even featured in a local newspaper.
Claire, 16, and Damian, 15, in Los Angeles, competed in the VEX AI world championships with a completely AI-controlled robot that could score goals and move around the field. Their team and their three robots won the THINK award in Dallas.
Lavi, Sam, and Jacky are three Hack Clubbers that were featured in MLH’s top 50 hackers list
Hack Club is possible because of you. Thank you. Have a great summer! We'll write again in August.
—Claire and Rishi (Hack Club summer 2021 interns), and Belle, Hack Clubber