Dear Hack Club friends,
In-depth, intellectual conversations happen all the time at Hack Club, like Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin's recent 1:1 with Hack Club teenagers. Later tonight, Hack Clubbers are programming and conversing with Feross Aboukhadijeh of Socket.
And one sign that Spring is coming and COVID is behind us is the nearly $500k that Hack Club teenagers have raised already in 2022 using Hack Club Bank, the financial tool built by and for Hack Clubbers- that's 3x what was raised this time last year.
Across the US, India and 22 other countries, teenagers are learning, creating and building with code, and this is thanks to you who donate to make Hack Club possible. Here's your 2-minute read on how you're supporting incredible teenagers to build a better future for all of us.
Hack Clubbers from India at a hackathon in Mumbai
News at Hack Club
Special thank you to Tom and Theresa Preston-Werner for their generous gift of $500,000 - which is their 4th gift over 4 years to Hack Club. Reliable, early-stage and generous support like this makes Hack Club possible.
Thank you to Hack Club alum Conrad Kramer for donating $25k. (Yep - if you've used Shortcuts in iOS, you're using what Conrad built.)
In the last few months, there have been 100+ highly technical ships by Hack Clubbers (sample ship: Building a Transport Protocol on ARP) and they have hosted 15+ community events and you can watch the entire AMA with Vitalik here. Teenagers hosted a talk and live coding demonstrationabout the Remix framework from Kent Dodd, and numerous Hack Clubbers led workshops, including Build A Custom Blockchain hosted by Hack Clubber @Rajan. Hack Clubbers also presented to hundreds at Replit's recent conference.
With 21 new clubs this year, we're focused on building learning tools like Game Lab, an easy to use online JavaScript video game editor (tested in 10 clubs so far), and forming meaningful relationships with Hack Club leaders to help them run amazing clubs!
Our team is growing: We hired Jessica Card, a senior software engineer formerly at GitHub, to deepen accessibility and education at Hack Club for all teenage hackers, especially from underrepresented groups. One of her first projects was launching contribute.hackclub.com, making our organization even more hackable by teenagers. We hired Rick Blount to lead philanthropy, after he helped raise $17.2m in Vermont for a new YMCA in downtown Burlington. And Kara Massieis Hack Club's new executive assistant and project manager, coming to us from lead production role at Activision.
We have more open positions: Currently, we are looking for a senior-level Ruby on Rails engineer to join us as the Tech Leadfor Hack Club Bank and would appreciate introductions.
Big picture: As we spring into April, we continue to work towards making Hack Club the most incredible learning and building community for teenagers. This includes improving the current learn-to-code pipeline by exploring new formats for workshops and growing our team of engineers to work directly with Hack Clubbers.
See what Hack Clubbers are building:
Sam Poder, 17, from Singapore, and Dev, 16, from Mumbai, worked with other Hack Clubbers to run CodeDay events in their own cities! Outside of their own hacker journey, they are embodying the Hack Club spirit to create unique coding experiences for their community. During Mumbai's CodeDay, 80% of attendees wrote code for the first time ever.
Kognise, 15, from San Antonio, shippedarpchat-- a chat app built on the arp protocol. The project gained 1.2k+ GitHub stars in under 2 weeks!
Caleb Denio, 17, from New Hampshire, created a Slack app for Hack Club Bank that allows Hack Clubbers to easily check the transactions on projects with Transparency Mode turned on.
Tejas Agarwal, 14, from India, built Hera -- a simple programming language that is really fast! When executing a Fibonacci sequence program, Hera was 33x faster than Python.
John Lins, 17, from the Bay Area, combined his passion for code with his math and physics knowledge to build simulations in the C programming language that demonstrate several math, physics, and machine learning concepts.
Tarek, 16, from Houston built Secr, an open source and free application security tool that identifies and helps developers recreate and patch vulnerabilities.
Claire Wang, 17, from Boston, created MidiLab, a music visualiser inspired by Vaporwave design with Three.js. It's seriously awesome --- there's nothing like coding to your favorite tracks and cool visualizations.
We are grateful for your constant support -- Hack Club is possible because of you. Thank you for helping us create a new generation of young, highly-technical teen leaders capable of solving our world's greatest problems. Please reach out if you have any questions! -- Christina Asquith, Chief Operating Officer, Jessica Card, Education Engineer, and Abby Fischler, 15, and Belle See, 17, Hack Clubbers.