Dear Hack Club friends,
Happy New Year! Omicron is closing schools nationwide, but every day teenage hackers across the country are building online at Hack Club, like Caleb, 17 of NH, who just built a super reminder app integrated into tools you're probably already using; and Piero, a high school senior from Chicago, who loves trains so much he built an app to track Amtrak's major routes.
Scroll down to see just a few Hack Clubber projects that will make you feel optimistic for 2022. And look out-- Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum founder, has just agreed to be Hack Club's next guest speaker.
All of this is thanks to those of you who donate to make Hack Club possible. Here's your 2-minute read on how you're building a better future for young people.
On Wednesday, Hack Club was on Vermont's WCAX. Watch here.
Meet Cedric, 19, a new hire at Hack Club:
Half the team actively building Hack Club is teenagers, including those writing and designing this newsletter. Plus, 100s of Hack Clubbers volunteer daily in peer-to-peer learning that creates independence and confidence. Cedric, 19, of the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia, a former Hack Club leader, just joined HQ to encourage more teen club leaders like him to ship their code for everyone in our online community.
Welcome Cedric!
What's new at Hack Club this month:
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Nearly 200 new Hack Clubs started in the US and around the world including Portugal, Zambia, and Ghana.
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4 new hires, including engineers to run our Clubs program and our online community, and an operations person to lead Bank.
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400 organizations now run on Hack Club Bank, our fiscal sponsorship platform, and we're kicking off a partnership with** Givebutter, a fundraising platform.
In case you missed it, 2021's highlights:
Elon Musk donated $1 million to Hack Club, along with generous donations from Tom and Theresa-Preston Werner, Joe Liemandt, Vitalik Buterin, Craig Newmark, Adam Ross, Ron Conway, and the Danhakl Family Foundation. Giving to Hack Club doubled in 2022.
5,000 new members in our online community and 3.4 million messages sent! Here, we also hosted a fun Dogecoin event, an AMA with Grant Sanderson (a popular math youtuber ) and a hack-along with Anthony Fu (a Vue core developer ) and peer-led workshops on topics from quantum computing to making bots on Slack-- plus dozens more events, all led by Hack Clubbers.
42 teen leaders went on a 10 day train-trip we called The Hacker Zephyr. This short 7-minute video attempts to capture the magical experience. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BID8_pGuqA
What are Hack Clubbers building right now?
Maggie, 16, from California, built a GitHub CLI extension to easily star GitHub repositories.
Rajan, 16, from Toronto, Canada, made 6(!!!) ships in the last month: from a digital novel to teach kids about autism to winning a hackathon prize with a platform that supercharges financial tracking.
Joshua, 13, from Seattle, created Coin Tunnel**, an open source crypto platform to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers of goods.
Anirudh, 17, from California, worked on rust2nix, a build tools written in Nix which allows you to build Rust applications entirely in Nix.
Jinmay, 16, from India built tinypages, a static site generator based on Markdown files with Preactjs integration.
Cedric, 19, and Kognise, 17, spent all weekend on a Zoom call making a game in JavaScript about growing trees to house squirrels.... It's a lot of fun
Lastly, this 2D visual novel video game built by Eleeza, 16, from London, UK:Double-Edged Blade: All Under Controlwas recently featured in Indiepocalypse, a game zine. She created, illustrated and wrote the entire thing, and along the way she posted updates and asked Hack Clubbers for storyline suggestions all on her personal channel at Hack Club.
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Wishing you a wonderful 2022!
"Hack Club is the community that I have been looking for, for so long," Charelle, 17, Canada
Thanks to you, we are able to keep building in 2022 and beyond for hackers like Charelle and create a home for people that want to "hack" for a better world.
See you next month! Christina, Abby, and Belle (Christina's interns)
Hack Club leader JeeWoo Chung, Vancouver, BC, leads a coding workshop for friends