VIP Newsletter 025

ChristinaAsquith@ChristinaAsquithZachLatta@ZachLatta

Hi Hack Club friends,

4 days ago, Hack Clubbers topped Hacker News with SineRider, a new game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers. It went viral, with 400K+ impressions over the weekend.

Sinerider Tweet

As summer wraps, a few more highlights from Hack Clubbers, thanks to you: Teenagers returned for the first and largest high school hackathon since the pandemic. Earlier this month, Hack Club's Assemble in San Francisco had 600 registrants for 42 hours of nonstop building. 40% were girls and nonbinary.

Hack Club is now collaborating with FIRST® Robotics to bring software engineering to tens of thousands of technical high school students in 100 different countries enrolled in their robotics competitions. Together, we’re encouraging teenagers to start hackathons in their community by offering $500 grants and free services on Hack Club Bank this fall.

With all the new attention generating interest in clubs, we just launched a new 2-minute clubs video with Hack Clubbers sharing the magic.

...and now we’re going to turn the newsletter over to Ishan Goel, a 17-year-old Hack Clubber who recently completed an internship here at HQ. He’s sharing the community newsletter that’s going out to Hack Clubbers around the world this month.

— Christina Asquith

👀 What’s up at Hack Club this time? 👀

Hey friends! I'm Ishan, I'm 17, and I'm a Hack Clubber emailing you again! A special thank you to Belle and Sam for helping out so much with today's newsletter.

This email is a 5-minute monthly rundown of what your fellow Hack Clubbers have been up to the past month! You're receiving this email because you're in the Hack Club Slack.

Five Fun July Ships 🚢

Maggie shipped Replbio, an easy way to make one of those fancy bio pages you've seen on the net: you just define your name, profile picture, and social links in JSON, and it gets hosted on Replit, complete with a guestbook 😮!! Check out Maggie's own bio page here. I asked her how she got the idea for Replbio: "Glitch has a cool glitch-in-bio project, so i thought it would be fun to make one that worked on Replit and add more features!"

↗️ Check out Replbio

Jaden made Dino Explorer, his first ship! It lets you view multiple dinos at once instead of scrolling through the hackclub/dinosaurs repo. Here's Jaden's motivation behind the JavaScript project was: "I made dino explorer to see all the amaazing dinos at once :0"

↗️ Check out Dino Explorer

Aiden pushed an update to Million.js, a lightweight Virtual DOM, that makes React 11 times faster . Why? Because "facebook is slow so lets make react fast"

↗️ Check out Million.js

Japroz made arc, their own compiled programming language that uses LLVM! It even has smart error messages!

"I wanted a high level language with a strong type system that compiles (zig does exactly that) but i wanted to implement my own compiled language". Truly

↗️ Check out arc

John made GuessThatRank, a neat social game where you guess players' rank based on clips of gameplay and submit your own! It just hit 500 users 🎉. You can find the code (mostly TypeScript) on GitHub.

When asked why he made GuessThatRank, John had a really relatable answer:

↗️ Check out GuessThatRank

Feel free to reach out to anyone here on Slack, and post updates about your own projects in #scrapbook. Let everyone know when you're done by posting it in #ship!

Milkshakes, Stupid Sh*t Nobody Needs & A Rogue Dinosaur.

Yes, I'm talking about Assemble. Or rather, Sam is:

    How does one put fourty-two hours of chaos into a couple of sentences? I'm not sure, but I'm going to give it a shot. On August 5th, 175 Hack Clubbers descended on Market Street in San Francisco for the first high school hackathon in 🌁 San Francisco since the pandemic! Together, we built projects based on the prompt "Stupid Shit Nobody Needs", fought The Organization, chugged down (potentially) dangerous amounts of caffeine, had a late-night disco and much more.

    The highlight for me, however, was getting the chance to meet so many Hack Clubbers! We had folks from 12 different countries and 20+ US states, each of them incredibly special individuals who I wish I could have spent hours more talking to. Words really can't describe the ✨ magical ✨ atmosphere that took over Figma's office that weekend.

    I'd recommend checking out our 📸 collaborative photo album, 🚢 everyone's projects on Scrapbook and Arianna's vlog of the entire event.

    Last but not least, we're open sourcing every part of Assemble: github.com/hackclub/assemble!

    - Sam Poder

image

💸 Grants!!! For your hackathon!!! 💸

You get $500, Oprah meme

At Assemble, Zach announced that Hack Club and FIRST are offering a ✨ $500 grant ✨ to in-person high-school hackathons hosted before the end of 2022!!! All you need for the grant is a high-school team, a venue, and a custom website, and you get free tools and support too. Learn more at hackclub.com/hackathons/grant and APPLY HERE!

Here's what Maggie's going to do with her grant:

I’m running Leland Hacks, an in-person hackathon in the Bay Area, and we got the grant :money_with_wings: after applying through the awesome grant dino slack bot. We’re planning to spend the money on making Leland Hacks even more special, with swag and boba !

Things to do while procrastinating on math homework:

Thanks for reading this email!!! You can help make the next issue here on GitHub. (using a pull request!)

Until next time, Ishan

(like in all Hack Club emails, we respect your privacy and don't track whether you open this email or click links in it. if you'd like to unsubscribe, click here)


PS. So many trends are going 'round the Slack! We remember the super-cool neon profile picture fad (thanks DALL-E): . You can get your own ⚡️ neon ⚡️PFP in #neon.

Also, apparently Hack Clubbers now send each other letters?

View on GitHub