6 |
7 | *Hack Clubbers hosts for our upcoming AMA with SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell.*
8 |
9 | *This is our 14th VIP update, your 2-minute read on how we’re building Hack Club—sent to 92 recipients, including our major donors & friends. Thanks for this time together.*
10 |
11 | **Thank you:**
12 |
13 | * To Craig Newmark Philanthropies for donating $100k to Hack Club!
14 | * To Vercel for running a Next.js event with Hack Club students
15 |
16 | **Hack Club Highlights This Month**
17 |
18 | * Female Hack Clubbers (Claire, Belle, Dina & Abby) will be hosting our upcoming AMA with Gwynne Shotwell, the President & COO of SpaceX, next Thursday. We’ve already got more than 200 RSVPs.
19 | * Hack Club’s [workshop bounty program](https://workshops.hackclub.com/workshop-bounty/) has picked up steam, now with [14 student-written coding tutorials](https://workshops.hackclub.com/) published this fall. Our curriculum had 12k views this month.
20 | * In the #counttoamillion channel on our Slack, for 2 years (starting Oct 20, 2018), students have been counting up from #1. We're nearing 45,000 and community members have built infrastructure around it:
21 | * [Avi](https://github.com/abby9664) (Daly City, CA) built their first-ever Slack bot, [Million Stats](https://github.com/abby9664/million-stats), using Bolt.js, to post a daily summary update on progress & projected milestones
22 | * [Victor T.](https://scrapbook.hackclub.com/ifvictr/) (20, Los Angeles, CA) built [Jia](http://github.com/ifvictr/jia), a bot that notifies you if you've counted incorrectly
23 | * Our Slack sent 62,000 messages last week (~9k/day), with 850 weekly active members. In total, students have posted 225k messages in the last 30 days. We’re the most active community of high school hackers on the web.
24 |
25 |
26 | Hack Club was excited to be part of [Next.js Conf.](https://nextjs.org/conf) Eighty-one Hack Club students [signed up](https://scrapbook.hackclub.com/r/vercel), and Vercel is donating proceeds from their [merch drop](https://vercel.kidsuper.com/) to Hack Club. Check out [Hack Club’s Next.js workshop for students.](https://youtu.be/WJYgyOyDvQI)
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
31 | **Students keep [shipping](https://scrapbook.hackclub.com/r/ship/)**
32 |
33 | * Linus S. and community used Swift to launch [Rudolph](https://github.com/hackclub/Rudolph), a holiday game to reward students for making meaningful contributions to open source on GitHub.
34 | * Muhammed S. (India), working with fellow members at the KMEA Engineer College Hack Club, made [a video and image face detection app.](https://cloud-56wrlne8g.vercel.app/1img-20201101-wa0015.jpg)
35 | * [Cole W.](https://colewilson.xyz/) built [AssignmentLogger](https://github.com/cole-wilson/assignmentlogger), a collaborative homework planner built in Python and JavaScript that creates automatic task lists per class to track due dates & tests.
36 | * [Alex K.](http://alexkesin.me/) and [Kevin Y.](http://bykevinyang.com/) (New York) entered into the Congressional App Challenge their new multi-level educational game [Save Dave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLlujuoMZ0A), built in Unity, about the immune system.
37 | * Harsh B. (India) published the [Hack Club India blog](https://indiablog.hackclub.com/), made with Next.js ([open source](https://github.com/hackclub/india-blog)), featuring their community members’ projects & stories from clubs & events.
38 | * We’re more focused than ever on building an inclusive, wholesome, stimulating place for teenagers to grow up & become the leaders we all want. Young people need to deeply know they have potential they can themselves unlock on the internet.
39 |
40 | From Malaysia, Hack Clubber Belle S., 16, recently said: "*I want to learn to code. It's a really magical power. If you have a laptop you can do anything. Outside of a computer I wouldn’t have the resources to do much. But with a laptop the possibilities are endless.*"
41 |
42 | We agree. Stay safe & well this month. Thanks for reading.
43 |
44 | —Christina Asquith & Lachlan Campbell
45 |
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1 | Hi and happy 2021 from Hack Club,
2 |
3 | We start the new year with a major $500,000 gift to Hack Club from our founding board member Tom Preston-Werner and his wife Theresa, co-founder and managing director of Preston-Werner Ventures. Thank you Tom and Theresa!
4 |
5 | This gift will help thousands more teenagers join and lead Hack Clubs for free, from anywhere in the world. Already, we are growing our team, hiring 2 more talented engineers in student-facing roles that help make Hack Club the best place on the internet for technical teenagers.*
6 |
7 | 
8 |
9 | *Arianna Martinelli, 16, leads a new Hack Club in Louisville, Kentucky.*
10 |
11 | *Here’s your 2-minute read on how we’re building Hack Club—sent to 92 recipients, including our major donors and friends. Thanks for this time together.*
12 |
13 | Special thanks to:
14 |
15 | Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, for speaking to 125 Hack Club students in November, 48 hours before she put 4 astronauts into space
16 | Alex Fishman of Empros Capital for his donation and for mailing his entire client base about Hack Club
17 | Chris Van Pelt of Weights & Biases for his generous donation
18 | Ryan and Tessa Bone of Silver Lake Partners for their gift, and also time advising our leadership team
19 | Hack Club is a totally-free, student-led space for high school students to tinker and build with tech, make friends, and learn to code.
20 |
21 | **A Year in Review: These are Hack Club's 2020 Highlights:**
22 |
23 | - Hack Clubbers became extremely active online: daily active students on the Hack Club Slack grew 700% after COVID
24 | - 500 after-school Hack Clubs (new applications in Sept 2020 during COVID were equal to 2019)
25 | - 40 new technical workshops for Hack Club meetings were created by Hack Club leaders teaching JavaScript, Go, Rust, 3D graphics, and CSS
26 | - 1,000 Hack Club teenagers attended 14 Hack Club AMAs
27 | - 100 free laptops/iPads distributed to Hack Clubbers in need, with girls receiving 40 percent
28 | - Gained 10.8k new Twitter followers
29 | - $1.3 million donated to support Hack Club students in 2020, including $500k from Elon Musk's foundation
30 | - 13 new major donors made first-time gifts to Hack Club
31 |
32 | Hack Club is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and our finances are 100% transparent and available in real time.
33 |
34 | Check out a few amazing student projects from the last month:
35 |
36 | - In Curitiba, Brazil, 16 year old Vitor Vavolizza, a teenage Hack Club leader, translated Hack Club’s website, and a workshop, into Portuguese for the 30 students in his club. “Most students here don't get the chance to code,” Vitor says.
37 |
38 | - In Washington state, high schooler Gary Tou set up LED lights inside his room that anyone on the internet could change. Gary connected a strip of NeoPixel RGBW LEDs to a Feather Huzzah ESP8266, which, using code, he connected with a Firebase database and a custom web frontend. You can change the colors of his bedroom lights right now at https://lights.garytou.com
39 |
40 | - After his neighbor fell, 16 year old John Lins of Walnut Creek, California, built “Fallen AI” a pose-detection AI built with TensorFlow.js to monitor the elderly and send notifications to their guardians in case of an emergency. With support from Hack Club, he built an email API with Go and trained a custom neural network by filming himself falling. He won 1st place in the category “most advanced” at HackTable, an online hackathon. Congrats!
41 |
42 | - In Louisville, Kentucky, 2 new Hack Club students, Arianna Martinelli, and her brother Lorenzo, run separate clubs but they synced up their members for a “Hack Night” event where everyone got to hang out and share their first coding projects. Check out their project page.
43 |
44 | *“today was our last hack club meeting of 2020! we started our hack club when we went into quarantine with this crazy year and i am so glad we did! it's helped me grow as a leader and person and helped me learn so much. i am so excited to see what 2021 will look like for the world and for our club!” *
45 |
46 | *- Risha Jhangiani, 16, Hack Club leader in Washington state
47 |
48 | Thank you again so much to the Preston-Werners for their landmark gift, making it possible for more teenagers to have the opportunities they had as young people. We are so humbled by their support for Hack Clubbers.
49 |
50 | Wishing you all a beautiful 2021. Thank you so much for reading and supporting us.
51 |
52 | best, Christina
53 |
54 | --
55 | Christina Asquith
56 | COO and Board, Hack Club | christina@hackclub.com | [Donate](https://hackclub.com/donate/ "Donate Page")
57 |
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1 | Hi,
2 |
3 | It's Christina, COO of Hack Club, and this February's newsletter includes all our latest news - thanks for this time together!
4 |
5 | **Hack Club is a totally-free, student-led space for high schoolers to tinker and build with tech, make friends and learn to code.** With so many students still isolated and schooling remotely, we're making Hack Club the best place on the internet to be a technical teenager.
6 |
7 | Check out this Arduino Nano-compatible PCB built in January by Hugo Hu, 12, of New York. He made it in the shape of his Corgi. Also, give a clap to Betsy Zhang, 16-- she's about to launch her first Hack Club with friends, none of whom have ever written a line of code. She built her first website for her club: https://flhs-hacks.flhshacks.repl.co/index.html
8 |
9 | *Every month we send this 2-minute read on how we’re building Hack Club to our major donors and friends.*
10 |
11 | 
12 |
13 | *Hugo's The Corginator is a custom corgi-shaped PCB, designed, manufactured, and shipped to Hack Clubbers across the US. He's selling it to the public online here.*
14 |
15 | **Our ask to you:**
16 |
17 | -We’re hiring for a Creative Director and Bank Operations Lead, and need help spreading the word. Please share our job descriptions.
18 | - Creative Director: [https://hackclub.com/jobs/creative-director/](https://hackclub.com/jobs/creative-director/)
19 | - Bank Operations Lead: [https://hackclub.com/jobs/bank-ops-lead/](https://hackclub.com/jobs/bank-ops-lead/)
20 |
21 | *(technical applicants can apply by running $ ssh jobs.hackclub.com in their terminal)*
22 |
23 | **Our special thanks to:**
24 |
25 | - Blake Lieberman, 25, a credit analyst with MSD Capital, for making a personal donation of $50,000 to Hack Club. Blake says he “super supports the mission of decentralization and greater access/opportunity for entrepreneurs.” Thank you Blake!
26 |
27 | - SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and Hack Club students are chatting on email now, as Gwynne continues to inspire Hack Clubbers by sharing advice, insights and support.
28 |
29 | - Ryan Caldbeck, co-founder and executive chairman of CircleUp, has just gifted Hack Club its first stock donation.
30 |
31 | - We made a dedicated thanks page to Tom and Theresa Preston-Werner for their $500,000 gift to Hack Club, and all their support. See why they support Hack Club at [https://hackclub.com/preston-werner/](https://hackclub.com/preston-werner/).
32 |
33 | **News**:
34 |
35 | In January, Hack Club founder Zach Latta was profiled in The Shelburne News, a local Vermont paper. It's here: [https://www.vtcng.com/shelburnenews/news/local_news/from-silicon-valley-to-shelburne/article_2c1962ee-5680-11eb-aba3-e7ab8baeb1d1.html](https://www.vtcng.com/shelburnenews/news/local_news/from-silicon-valley-to-shelburne/article_2c1962ee-5680-11eb-aba3-e7ab8baeb1d1.html)
36 |
37 | See our team page to meet our two new engineers, Julie, 25, a coder artist, hardware maker, and former coding teacher, and Zach Fogg, 29, a highly-technical home-schooled engineer.
38 |
39 |  
40 |
41 | Getting physical mail is so exciting to students, so we built a mail station at Hack Club and we’ve been shipping out dozens of packages a week. We just finished sending 6,000 packages of Hack Club stickers to students from 128 different countries who requested them.
42 |
43 | Hack Club teenagers collaborated to design a custom-manufactured Hack Club microcontroller, designed, manufactured and shipped by Hack Clubbers called the Orpheus Leap. Can we send you one?
44 |
45 | 
46 |
47 | **Magic Happening at Hack Club:**
48 |
49 | High school junior Kunal Botla, 15 of Massachusetts, fixed 5 broken laptops and shipped then to Hack Club in Zambia, where Club leader Parity is distributing them for free. Hack Club helped cover shipping costs via the **Ron Conway fund.**
50 |
51 | GitHub is featuring hackclub/dns, our open source DNS repository, as the first example project for [OctoDNS](https://github.com/octodns/octodns).
52 |
53 | **Projects Hack Clubbers have built:**
54 |
55 | - With International Women's Day coming up March 8th, 5 Hack Clubbers have teamed up to create a beginner HTML workshop honoring female leaders
56 |
57 | - Ishan, 15, UAE, shipped a “recycle bin for the command line” and it got on the front page of ProductHunt https://www.producthunt.com/posts/rem
58 |
59 | - Khushraj. 15, India, ported all of Slack’s API packages to Deno: https://github.com/slack-deno (he now owns 0.5% of all Deno modules)
60 |
61 | - Arianna Martinelli, 16, of Kentucky just won her state's top 2021 NCWIT award
62 |
63 | - Lux, 17, California, made their own modular synthesizer https://hackclub.slack.com/archives/C0M8PUPU6/p1611778230283700
64 |
65 | - Rishi, 16, Canada, rewrote Hack Club’s gp currency from the ground up, making it much more stable and easy to use. It’s called Hack Notes (HN) now: [https://github.com/rishiosaur/hn](https://github.com/rishiosaur/hn)
66 |
67 | - Students keep building workshops for each other. Check these out:
68 | - Sam (15, Singapore) wrote an experimental “Hacking Kahoot” workshop: https://workshops.hackclub.com/kahoot/
69 | - Charalampos Fanoulis (15, Greece) and Panos (16, Greece) wrote a text adventure in Rust: https://workshops.hackclub.com/rust_text_game/
70 | - Jeffrey Harmon (17, Indianna) wrote a particle physics simulator workshop: https://workshops.hackclub.com/particle_physics/
71 |
72 | Hack Club engineer Matthew Stanciu, 18, regularly writes notes to Hack Club leaders around the world. Here's one reply he received recently from a Club leader in Brazil: *“These messages from Hack Club HQ give me so much happiness and inspiration, like wtf. The workshop bounty program has helped my club get an income, work as a team creating workshops, be better in English, and learn a lot more JavaScript.” -- WollyZR*
73 |
74 | Thanks for reading. See you in the Spring! best, Christina and Zach
75 |
76 | --
77 | Christina Asquith
78 | COO and board member, Hack Club
79 | christina@hackclub.com | [Donate](https://hackclub.com/donate)
80 |
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1 | Hi, It's Christina, COO of Hack Club.
2 |
3 | One of the biggest challenges to improving CS education is the lack of trained teachers. This month, Hack Club engineer and alum Matthew, 19, took a step towards solving for that by rolling out [Hack Club Meetings](https://meetings.hackclub.com/), where Hack Club leaders record their best meetings as a resource to train friends and other student leaders.
4 |
5 | By and for students -- that's Hack Club.
6 |
7 | 
8 | *Slack post, above, from Risha Jhangiani, 16, Washington.*
9 |
10 | *Here’s your 2-minute read on how we’re building Hack Club—sent to 92 recipients, including our major donors and friends. Thanks for this time together. Happy spring!*
11 |
12 | Special thanks to:
13 |
14 | - **Ron Conway** for doubling his gift to Hack Club in 2021
15 | - **Kimberly Bryant**, founder of Black Girls Code, for a Clubhouse conversation on girls and coding
16 | - **Kartik Talwar, Amjad Masad, Blake Lieberman, Gerry Ohstrom and Guillermo Rauch** for taking time to talk with us, brainstorm ideas and make introductions
17 |
18 | **Activity Update:** Looking back over the last 3 years, the number of weekly active teenagers on the Hack Club Slack roughly doubles each year, from 206 teenagers active each week in April 2019 to 743 teenagers last week.
19 |
20 | We think this is because we're intensely focused on building a beautiful student experience, with increasing support from generous donors.
21 |
22 | **Hack Club March News:**
23 |
24 | We’re all about embracing the latest tech, and decentralized finance has been the talk of Hack Clubbers, with many teenagers buying crypto, building on top of Ethereum, minting their own tokens, and experimenting with practical applications.
25 |
26 | Our newest hire, engineer Zach Fogg, has worked closely with Rishi, 16 from Ontario, who created a Hack Club-wide currency called Hack Notes in Typescript. It has a GraphQL API and Hack Clubbers are building bots that require Hack Notes payment to use them, awarding Hack Notes to friends, and creating whimsical games on top of it.
27 |
28 | Also, meet Hack Club's AI Cow, built by Benjamin Ashbaugh, 16 from Colorado, after he got access to the OpenAI GPT-3 API. The Hack Club Cow roams around our online Slack community, where students have intelligent conversations with it, ask it to write Python, do advanced math, and push the limits of what GPT-3 is capable of.
29 |
30 | 
31 |
32 | *Above, a screenshot of just one of hundreds of interactions students have with the Ben's GPT-3 powered cow in our online community.*
33 |
34 | Spring updates:
35 |
36 | - More than 50 new Hack Club students have applied to start clubs; including in new places like rural Vermont and northern England.
37 | - At least 300 students have shipped projects in recent months, including developer tools, APIs, songs, frameworks and, custom-designed PCB boards including the [Orpheus Leap](https://leap.hackclub.com/), an Arduino-compatible board shaped like Orpheus, Hack Club's mascot. Designed by a 14-year-old who partnered with another Hack Clubber to find a manufacturer and ship 300 of them to fellow Hack Clubbers around the world.
38 | - Starlink arrived at Hack Club’s headquarters last month, and we live-streamed our installation for students
39 | - A Hack Club alumni’s company, [Hightouch](https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/16/hightouch-raises-2-1m-to-help-businesses-get-more-value-from-their-data-warehouses/), hired its 13th employee
40 | - South African 10th grader Esperanza, 15, is the latest student to receive a need-based free iPad from Hack Club, 1 of 15 donated via Hack Club.
41 |
42 | Check out just a few of the incredible student projects shipped at Hack Club
43 |
44 | - Lux, 17, of California, created Victus, a zero-dependency JavaScript game framework in 2.05 kilobytes of code, check it out: [https://sporeball.dev/victus/](https://sporeball.dev/victus/)
45 | - Adison Lampert, wrote a workshop for her Hack Club, demonstrating how to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build a word cloud generator. [Code on her GitHub](https://github.com/addybug/workshop-word-cloud).
46 | - Using a laptop donated via Hack Club, Sam, 15, Singapore, ran his school’s Innovation Week, a series of technology events that introduced hundreds of students to coding, robotics and more. [Replit founder Amjad Masad tweeted about it](https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1369359246425427968).
47 | - Rishi, 16, Ontario, shipped a new marketplace for Hack Notes, the new virtual currency for Hack Club that he built. [See Hack Notes on GitHub](https://github.com/rishiosaur/hn).
48 | - Ishan, 15, Dubai, shipped [Devsat](https://github.com/quackduck/devsat), which is a simple chat app directly in your terminal. Try it out by running `$ ssh sshchat.hackclub.com` in your terminal.
49 |
50 | Our thoughts are also turning to the post-pandemic future, and we’re preparing for a major opportunity for growth with a big summer program and the return to classrooms in September. Students are hungry for in-person collaboration, and we’ll be ready to help grow new clubs in more locations than ever.
51 |
52 | We've received $550k in philanthropic gifts from 5 different donors since December. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for providing Hack Clubbers with the experiences we wish we had as teenagers.
53 |
54 | warm regards, Christina, with Zach
55 |
56 | --
57 | Christina Asquith
58 | COO, Hack Club | christina@hackclub.com | [Donate](https://hackclub.com/donate/ "Donate Page")
59 | [@christinaasquit](https://twitter.com/ChristinaAsquit) / [web](https://christina.cool/) / [github](https://github.com/christinaasquith)
60 |
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1 | Hi everyone, I hope you're having a great start to the spring.
2 |
3 | For a teenager, $7/month to host an app is pricey. So, this month a group of 12 Hack Clubbers teamed up to build [Hack as a Service](https://cloud-6v739uwqe-hack-club-bot.vercel.app/0screen_shot_2021-05-04_at_10.53.01_am.png), a free Heroku alternative for Hack Clubbers. It's written in Go and Next.js by Hack Clubbers from New Hampshire, Greece, California, Texas, Malaysia and Rwanda, collaborating on GitHub. Check out their [internal progress updates and README](https://gist.github.com/zachlatta/a21f0272a85daa91f63590cd813d0b88).
4 |
5 | ***Here’s a 2-minute read on how we’re building [Hack Club](hackclub.com)—sent to 87 recipients, including our major donors & friends. Thanks for this time together.***
6 |
7 | 
8 |
9 | *18 year old Prithul from Bangladesh built this [self-balancing robot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzPTqPwZzSg) using 3D printed parts and a custom printed circuit board for the hardware.*
10 |
11 | **Special thanks from Hack Club to:**
12 | - Adam Ross of Goldcrest Capital for his incredibly generous gift of $100,000 to Hack Club
13 | - Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, for a conversation with Zach Latta about the future
14 | - SpaceX's Gwynne Shotwell for privately mentoring 5 Hack Club students in April
15 |
16 | Nearly half of US high schools still don’t offer any quality computer science education. Hack Club is a special place for teenagers curious about computers and coding. When successful, we'll create a new generation of leaders with hard technical skills, an optimistic engineer's mindset, and a powerful network of creative, technical friends.
17 |
18 | **News:**
19 |
20 | Three of the five projects selected for [Replit Ventures](https://blog.replit.com/ventures) are led by Hack Clubbers, who will each receive $2,000 and additional support. Thanks to Amjad Masad, Replit founder, Hack Club donor, and friend. (Zach and Amjad will be on Clubhouse this Thursday night talking about coding education.)
21 |
22 | Remember [@cow](https://cloud-bpoi9i4vy-hack-club-bot.vercel.app/0screen_shot_2021-05-04_at_11.22.03_am.png), the AI bot built by [Benjamin Ashbaugh](https://benjaminashbaugh.me/), 15, from Colorado using GPT-3? Last Friday, his Hack Club friend, Jason Antwi-Appiah, also 15, of Texas created another bot named @goat that uses a more powerful GPT-3 model called davinci:
23 |
24 | 
25 |
26 | **Summer at Hack Club:**
27 |
28 | Zach and Hack Club's 3-person engineering team are making big summer plans for live events, internships and supporting Hack Clubbers to make major ships. [Last summer](https://summer.hackclub.com/), we distributed $50,000 in hardware and supported 5,628 projects by teenagers in 28 countries. Stay tuned for our upcoming announcement!
29 |
30 | **Hack Clubbers build and ship projects for their friends in our online community:**
31 | - Ishan, 15, of Dubai, used Go to build [Devzat](https://github.com/quackduck/devzat), a new way to chat through SSH. The server has Markdown support (including syntax highlighting), emojis and many different commands. Anyone is able to join by running $ ssh devzat.hackclub.com in their terminal.
32 |
33 | - Sam, 15, of Singapore, used Next.js to build a [custom waiting room](https://zoom.sampoder.com/) for Zoom so that gives other participants fun facts to cheer them up while they wait for him. He built an API to control the site, and he uses a Raycast Bash script to control it.
34 |
35 | - Abby, 14, of California, used Xcode and Swift to build her first ever app, [VacLA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pcx7WAxlmU), which matches LA’s age qualified residents to a vaccination center near them, for the Technovation Girls competition.
36 |
37 | - Faisal, 15, of India, created a Slack bot, [@carbon-slack](https://github.com/faisalsayed10/carbon-slack/), that allows users to create beautiful images of code with Carbon directly in Slack and without needing to go to Carbon’s website.
38 |
39 | - Matthew, 17, of California, has been posting to [Hack Club's Scrapbook](https://scrapbook.hackclub.com/) every day for the last 300 days, and just used JavaScript to build a [website](https://scrapbook-countdown.vercel.app/) that counts down the days until he's posted to Scrapbook for a full year.
40 |
41 | - Lux, 17, of California, recorded her [first song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3tzNWRwFw0) on the analog modular synthesizer that she built from scratch.
42 | I appreciate your time in reading this, and all the support you give Hack Club. As always, I welcome your responses, questions, and suggestions.
43 |
44 | Happy spring! best, Christina
45 |
46 | --
47 | Christina Asquith
48 | Chief Operating Officer, Hack Club | christina@hackclub.com | [Donate](https://hackclub.com/donate/ "Donate Page")
49 |
50 | [GitHub](https://github.com/christinaasquith) / [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinaasquith)
51 |
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1 | Dear Hack Club supporters,
2 |
3 | As we approach the end of COVID-19 pandemic, we are taking 42 Hack Club teenagers on a trip of a lifetime.
4 |
5 | We're calling it [The Hacker Zephyr](https://zephyr.hackclub.com/). It's a train trip starting in July at [Hack Club HQ](https://goo.gl/maps/jNQB5kwYoLH11JqM6) 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.
6 |
7 | Onboard, we're hosting the world's longest hackathon on land: 3,502 miles long.
8 |
9 | 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.
10 |
11 | 
12 |
13 | *Here’s a 2-minute read on how we’re building [Hack Club](https://hackclub.com)—sent to 88 recipients, including our major donors & friends. Thanks for this time together.*
14 |
15 | **Special thanks from Hack Club to:**
16 |
17 | - Joe Liemandt for donating $500k to Hack Club
18 | - Vitalik Buterin for a $300k gift in Ethereum to Hack Club
19 | - Tom Preston-Werner for his reverse 42nd birthday gift: buying train tickets for 42 Hack Clubbers
20 | - Elan Lee, former chief design officer of Xbox, for his AMA with Hack Clubbers
21 | - Elizabeth Stark, founder of Lightning Labs, for talking cryptocurrency with Hack Clubbers
22 |
23 |
24 | 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.
25 |
26 | **Hack Club’s snapshot of activity**
27 |
28 | - 2.6 million minutes spent in Hack Club Zoom meetings since Jan 1, 2021
29 | - 960,458 messages sent in our online community in 2021 as of May 8, 2021, a 210% increase over last year
30 | - 1,465 new Slack accounts created, bringing us to 13,463 total accounts
31 |
32 |
33 | **STUDENT SHIPS:**
34 |
35 | **Look what Hack Clubbers are building**
36 |
37 | - Benjamin Ashbaugh, 16, Colorado, built [Tetris for Slack](https://cloud-i1szgd6ge-hack-club-bot.vercel.app/02021-06-10_at_18.19.33.gif), employing the most “insane and impressive” use of the Slack API our team has seen yet. [See the code](https://github.com/scitronboy/slack-tetris).
38 |
39 | - Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin hung out with Hack Clubbers on [Devzat](https://github.com/quackduck/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.
40 |
41 | - Ngoc Khuat hacked SpaceX's Dragon2 capsule simulation to [autonomously dock the capsule](https://youtu.be/7i4xp-mwQZY) using chromedriver and Common Lisp. Watch the video, it's truly incredible. The entire docking process is entirely controlled with code. [See the source](https://github.com/qnkhuat/spacex).
42 |
43 | - 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.
44 |
45 | - Belle, 16, from Malaysia made her first [open source contribution](https://github.com/hackclub/hack-as-a-service/pull/76) to [Hack as a Service](https://github.com/hackclub/hack-as-a-service), a community project to build a free Heroku alternative, by adding a dark mode toggle.
46 |
47 | - 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.
48 |
49 | - A 16 year old Hack Clubber built [Lucia](https://github.com/aidenybai/lucia/), a lightweight frontend JavaScript framework. Lucia is now the first open source library to run on Hack Club Bank.
50 |
51 |
52 | **Hi Hack Club Africa!**
53 |
54 | 
55 |
56 | **Looking Ahead**
57 |
58 | 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.
59 |
60 | 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.
61 |
62 | Reach out if you'd like an invitation to meet us in San Francisco the evening of July 22nd!
63 |
64 | Hack Club is possible because of you. Thank you.
65 |
66 | Have a great summer! See you in July. Christina
67 |
68 |
69 | --
70 |
71 | Christina Asquith
72 |
73 | Chief Operating Officer, Hack Club | christina@hackclub.com | [Donate](https://hackclub.com/donate)
74 |
75 | [github](https://github.com/christinaasquith) / [linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinaasquith)
76 |
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/020/README.md:
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1 | Dear Hack Club friends,
2 |
3 | Every summer Hack Clubbers do something special. This Thursday, we’re embarking on our greatest investment in leaders yet: [The Hacker Zephyr](https://zephyr.hackclub.com/), a cross-country hackathon on a train for 42 Hack Club leaders.
4 |
5 | *Here’s your 2-minute read on how we’re building [Hack Club](https://hackclub.com/)—sent to 92 recipients. Thanks for this time together.*
6 |
7 | 
8 | *Rishi, 15, Claire, 16, and Belle, 16, hackin’ away at HQ this month, and writing this newsletter!*
9 |
10 | 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.
11 |
12 | 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.
13 |
14 | 
15 | *Engineers Zach Latta, Zach Fogg and Max Wofford with the server we're taking aboard the Zephyr.*
16 |
17 | 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!
18 |
19 | **This month, we thank:**
20 |
21 | **SpaceX’s Jamin Gallman, Amy Fels, and Emily Shanklin** for offering to host Hack Club's closing ceremonies at SpaceX's Hawthorne facilities.
22 |
23 | **John Abele, founder of Boston Scientific,** for lunch with Zach and connecting Hack Club to some amazing builders, thinkers, and collaborators.
24 |
25 | **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.
26 |
27 | **Hack Club’s snapshot of June activity:**
28 |
29 | 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.
30 |
31 | 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.
32 |
33 | Read our op-ed about Hack Club Bank in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the leading publication for nonprofits in America. [Here is the link](https://www.philanthropy.com/article/nonprofits-need-to-embrace-transparency-even-if-the-supreme-court-rules-to-protect-donor-privacy).
34 |
35 | Also, check out this recent television spot on Hack Club from a student leader in Mauritius: [https://fb.watch/6fSLqZ2PXh](https://fb.watch/6fSLqZ2PXh)/ (it's in French).
36 |
37 | **🚢 Student Ships! Look what Hack Clubbers are up to this month**
38 |
39 | **Jacky, 20**, from Vancouver, Canada, built a peer-to-peer encrypted file syncing tool, [Portal](https://github.com/jackyzha0/portal/).
40 |
41 | **Amy, 16**, in the UK, [wrote a game in 24 hours](https://github.com/00p513-dev/pong) using the open source devKitARM toolchain for the Nintendo 3DS.
42 |
43 | **Aiden, 16**, and Will, 14, in Washington, created [Million](https://github.com/aidenybai/million), a library-agnostic Virtual DOM in JavaScript library. It currently has 904 stars on GitHub and counting.
44 |
45 | **Abishek, 20**, in India, built [Vaccine Finder](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.abishek.vaccinechecker), an app that makes finding a vaccine in India easy. It was even featured in a local newspaper.
46 |
47 | **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](https://youtu.be/iIzVqXPNoow) won the THINK award in Dallas.
48 |
49 | **Lavi, Sam, and Jacky** are three Hack Clubbers that were featured in MLH’s [top 50 hackers list](https://top.mlh.io/2021)
50 |
51 | Hack Club is possible because of you. Thank you. Have a great summer! We'll write again in August.
52 |
53 | —Claire and Rishi (Hack Club summer 2021 interns), and Belle, Hack Clubber
54 |
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/021/README.md:
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1 | Dear Hack Club friends,
2 |
3 | Hack Club’s most ambitious summer project is mission complete. Now, the 42 Hack Club teenagers on [The Hacker Zephyr](https://zephyr.hackclub.com/) are heading back into their schools this September more technical and more energized to run and be part of incredible Hack Clubs for their community. Read [this feature article](http://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/teens-code-while-traveling-across-the-country-with-shelburne-based-hack-club/Content?oid=33479099) about how Hack Club teenagers coded 500 projects during an epic 10-day train adventure from our headquarters in Vermont to SpaceX in Los Angeles. [Trip photos here](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Flby6pXgl0k9CjOwCrSLB4Oy6_rIrvOB6Mmb9edcpn0/edit#slide=id.ge46ec97f5d_0_0).
4 |
5 | 
6 | *A bunch of Hack Clubbers on a tour of SpaceX in Hawthorne, California.*
7 |
8 | Hack Club can become the new Girl and Boy Scouts for teenagers who love building with technology. We are in hundreds of US public high schools already, and we’re growing, thanks to you. Here’s your 2-minute read on how we’re doing it.
9 |
10 | 🙏 **Special thanks to:**
11 | - Elon Musk for a 30 minute video call last week with Zach and Christina to discuss a fun hacker project together
12 |
13 | - Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, for arranging Hack Club's visit to SpaceX; and for the 6 SpaceX engineers who gave Hack Clubbers tours
14 |
15 | - Hack Club board member Quinn Slack (co-founder Sourcegraph) and supporter Adam Ross (co-founder Goldcrest Capital) for visiting Hack Club HQ in Vermont
16 |
17 | - Gavin Baker, managing partner for Atreides Management, for his first-time gift of $10k to Hack Club
18 |
19 | **An email of thanks from Hack Club parents**
20 |
21 | *“Our sincere thanks to the Hack Club team and also to the generous donors like Tom Preston-Werner that made this possible and offered this experience free to all the kids. ....we appreciate all the vision, careful planning, good-will and thoughtfulness you brought to the trip. We know our son will never forget it!*
22 |
23 | *Even before this trip, our son's enjoyment and appreciation for your club and online opportunities was obvious. He has always spoken to us with high regard, respect and appreciation for all you do and the quality, the creativity, the fun, and the integrity of this organization and its leaders.” -- With gratitude, Julie and Scott, parents of a Hack Clubber*
24 |
25 | 
26 | Day 7: Ella, Swarnya and Labdhi coding projects as The Hacker Zephyr train passes through Utah
27 |
28 | **👀 Looking ahead**
29 | School starts in a few weeks; and we're busy supporting hundreds of teen leaders launch and run their own after-school Hack Clubs for thousands of teenagers. We’ve hired Leo McElroy, a programmer with a background in hackerspaces, to run our clubs program, and he is expecting a busy fall as the sole staffer overseeing clubs. He has nearly 170 technical workshops built by other Hack Clubbers for leaders to use in clubs, and HQ will be running live events, sending stickers and hardware, and creating exciting new projects to support Hack Clubbers, some of whom are now as young as 12.
30 |
31 | **Transparency** is a core Hack Club value, and we are open-sourcing everything about the Zephyr—from finances on Hack Club Bank to the systemd services and code running on the ZephyrNET, our server on the train. All will be hosted on Hack Club Bank and GitHub. We encourage more nonprofits to publicly open-source their finances. And we were excited when the [recent article I wrote with Zach](https://www.philanthropy.com/article/nonprofits-need-to-embrace-transparency-even-if-the-supreme-court-rules-to-protect-donor-privacy) in The Chronicle of Philanthropy—the largest nonprofit-focused publication in the United States—was chosen to be published as the lead op-ed in August's print edition.
32 |
33 | **Growth**: We rented a 2nd office next to our HQ location in Vermont to house all of our new Bank operations, along with hiring a new operations associate for Bank, Olivia Cook-Churchill.
34 |
35 | 🚢 **Ships by Hack Clubbers:**
36 | Check out a few of the 500 projects Hack Clubbers built entirely on The Hacker Zephyr trip (and our infrastructure surrounding it, the ZephyrNET).
37 |
38 | **Claire Wang**, 16, and **Ben Aubin**, 18, used JS and WebSockets to build a real-time type racing game, enabling hackers to test their typing speeds against each other without needing an internet connection.
39 | 
40 |
41 |
42 | - - -
43 |
44 | **Ishan Goel**, 16, from Dubai, built a search engine called Zoogle in Go, capable of searching thousands of files in just milliseconds, and sparked a 4 other “competing” search engines: “Roogle”, built in Rust by **Kai Musk**, 15, from California; and “Zing”, by **Will Lane** are two competitors that sparked up and built on top of Zoogle.
45 | 
46 |
47 |
48 | - - -
49 |
50 | **Aiden Bai**, 16, from Washington, built Fingers Up Camera Kapture - a joke tech project that takes a photo when it sees a middle finger. This was his first machine learning application onboard the train in Tensorflow.js— and it was a fun fan favourite all across the train!
51 |
52 | 
53 |
54 | - - -
55 |
56 | **Matthew Gleich**, 16, from New Hampshire, built his first project using Next.js, creating a mini-graph network of every person that Hack Clubbers met on the Zephyr.
57 |
58 | 
59 |
60 | - - -
61 |
62 | The Zephyr also attracted some nifty gambling-focused projects! **Abby Fischler**, 14, of Los Angeles built a blackjack game in vanilla JS, and alongside **Charelle Constantino**, 16, who also built her own casino, which included HackJack, Sleep Memory, and various other mini-games!
63 |
64 | 
65 | 
66 |
67 |
68 | - - -
69 |
70 | Hack Club is possible because of amazing people like you. Thank you. Have a wonderful August!
71 |
72 | Warm regards, Christina
73 |
74 | --
75 | Christina Asquith
76 | COO and board member, Hack Club
77 | christina@hackclub.com
78 |
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/022/README.md:
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1 | Dear Hack Club friends,
2 |
3 | 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](https://useresolute.com/) 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](https://amtrak.cc/) to track Amtrak's major routes.
4 |
5 | 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.
6 |
7 | 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.
8 |
9 | ****
10 |
11 | *On Wednesday, Hack Club was on Vermont's WCAX. Watch [here](http://www.wcax.com/2022/01/12/shelburne-based-hack-club-helps-teens-get-interested-computers/).*
12 |
13 | **Meet Cedric, 19, a new hire at Hack Club:**
14 |
15 | 
16 |
17 | 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.
18 |
19 | Welcome Cedric!
20 |
21 | **What's new at Hack Club this month:**
22 |
23 | - Nearly 200 new Hack Clubs started in the US and around the world including Portugal, Zambia, and Ghana.
24 |
25 | - 4 new hires, including engineers to run our Clubs program and our online community, and an operations person to lead Bank.
26 |
27 | - 400 organizations now run on Hack Club Bank, our fiscal sponsorship platform, and we're kicking off a partnership with** [Givebutter](https://givebutter.com/fiscal-sponsorship), a fundraising platform.
28 |
29 | **In case you missed it, 2021's highlights:**
30 |
31 | 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.
32 |
33 | 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.
34 |
35 | 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
36 |
37 | 
38 | *Hack Club in Shelburne, Vermont, meets every Thursday 4-5:30pm.*
39 |
40 | **What are Hack Clubbers building right now?**
41 |
42 | Maggie, 16, from California, built a [GitHub CLI extension](https://github.com/maggie-j-liu/gh-star) to easily star GitHub repositories.
43 |
44 | 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.
45 |
46 | Joshua, 13, from Seattle, created [Coin Tunnel](https://www.coin-tunnel.ml/)**, an open source crypto platform to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers of goods.
47 |
48 | Anirudh, 17, from California, worked on [rust2nix](https://github.com/anirudhb/rust2nix), a build tools written in Nix which allows you to build Rust applications entirely in Nix.
49 |
50 | Jinmay, 16, from India built [tinypages](https://github.com/Borrus-sudo/tinypages), a static site generator based on Markdown files with Preactjs integration.
51 |
52 | Cedric, 19, and Kognise, 17, spent all weekend on a Zoom call making a [game](https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T0266FRGM-F02T99YB35Y/image.png) in JavaScript about growing trees to house squirrels.... It's a lot of fun
53 |
54 | Lastly, this 2D visual novel video game built by Eleeza, 16, from London, UK:[Double-Edged Blade: All Under Control](https://e-lee-za.itch.io/double-edged-blade-all-under-control)was recently featured in Indiepocalypse, a [game zine](https://pizzapranks.itch.io/indiepocalypse-23). 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.
55 |
56 | **
57 | **Wishing you a wonderful 2022!**
58 |
59 | "Hack Club is the community that I have been looking for, for so long," Charelle, 17, Canada
60 |
61 | 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.
62 |
63 | See you next month!
64 | Christina, [Abby](http://abbyfischler.com/), and [Belle](https://github.com/bellesea) (Christina's interns)
65 |
66 | ****
67 |
68 | *Hack Club leader JeeWoo Chung, Vancouver, BC, leads a coding workshop for friends*
69 |
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/023/README.md:
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1 | Dear Hack Club friends,
2 |
3 | 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.
4 |
5 | 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.
6 |
7 | 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.
8 |
9 | 
10 |
11 | *Hack Clubbers from India at a hackathon in Mumbai*
12 |
13 | **News at Hack Club**
14 |
15 | Special thank you to **Tom and Theresa Preston-Werner** for their [generous gift of $500,000](https://hackclub.com/preston-werner-2022/) - which is their 4th gift over 4 years to Hack Club. Reliable, early-stage and generous support like this makes Hack Club possible.
16 |
17 | Thank you to **Hack Club alum [Conrad Kramer](https://conradkramer.com/)** for donating $25k. (Yep - if you've used Shortcuts in iOS, you're using what Conrad built.)
18 |
19 | In the last few months, there have been **100+ highly technical ships** by Hack Clubbers (sample ship: [Building a Transport Protocol on ARP](https://github.com/kognise/arpchat)) and they have hosted 15+ community events and you can watch the entire [AMA with Vitalik here.](https://hackclub.com/vitalik/) Teenagers hosted a talk and live coding demonstration[](https://hackclub.com/vitalik/)about the Remix framework from [Kent Dodd](https://kentcdodds.com/), and numerous Hack Clubbers led workshops, including [Build A Custom Blockchain](https://events.hackclub.com/build-a-custom-blockchain/) hosted by Hack Clubber [@Rajan](https://www.heyrajan.com/). Hack Clubbers also presented to hundreds at Replit's recent conference.
20 |
21 | **With 21 new clubs this year**, we're focused on building learning tools like [Game Lab](https://gamelab.hackclub.com/), 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!
22 |
23 | **Our team is growing:** We hired [Jessica Card](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicard/), 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](http://contribute.hackclub.com/), making our organization even more hackable by teenagers. We hired [Rick Blount](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-j-blount-a722bb12) to lead philanthropy, after he helped raise $17.2m in Vermont for a new YMCA in downtown Burlington. And [Kara Massie](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kara-massie-551a2392)is Hack Club's new executive assistant and project manager, coming to us from lead production role at Activision.
24 |
25 | **We have more open positions:** Currently, we are looking for a senior-level Ruby on Rails engineer to join us as the [Tech Lead](https://hackclub.com/jobs/lead-hacker/)for Hack Club Bank and would appreciate introductions.
26 |
27 | **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](https://microworlds.hackclub.dev/) for workshops and growing our team of engineers to work directly with Hack Clubbers.
28 |
29 | **See what Hack Clubbers are building:**
30 |
31 | 
32 |
33 | **[Sam Poder](https://sampoder.com/)**, 17, from Singapore, and Dev, 16, from Mumbai, worked with other Hack Clubbers to run [CodeDay](https://www.codeday.org/) 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](https://event.codeday.org/mumbai), 80% of attendees wrote code for the first time ever.
34 |
35 | **[Kognise](https://kognise.dev/)**, 15, from San Antonio, shipped[arpchat](https://github.com/kognise/arpchat)-- a chat app built on the arp protocol. The project gained 1.2k+ GitHub stars in under 2 weeks!
36 |
37 | **[Caleb Denio](https://calebden.io/)**, 17, from New Hampshire, created a Slack app for [Hack Club Bank](http://hackclub.com/bank) that allows Hack Clubbers to easily check the transactions on projects with [Transparency Mode](https://www.philanthropy.com/article/nonprofits-need-to-embrace-transparency-even-if-the-supreme-court-rules-to-protect-donor-privacy) turned on.
38 |
39 | **[Tejas Agarwal](https://tejas.dino.icu/)**, 14, from India, built [Hera](https://github.com/tejasag/hera) -- a simple programming language that is really fast! When executing a Fibonacci sequence program, Hera was 33x faster than Python.
40 |
41 | **[John Lins](https://www.johnlins.com/)**, 17, from the Bay Area, combined his passion for code with his math and physics knowledge to build [simulations](https://simulations.johnlins.com/) in the C programming language that demonstrate several math, physics, and machine learning concepts.
42 |
43 | **[Tarek](https://github.com/DGKSK8LIFE)**, 16, from Houston built [Secr](https://www.secr.dev/), an open source and free application security tool that identifies and helps developers recreate and patch vulnerabilities.
44 |
45 | **[Claire Wang](https://www.clairebookworm.com/)**, 17, from Boston, created [MidiLab](https://midilab.netlify.app/), a music visualiser inspired by Vaporwave design with [Three.js](https://threejs.org/). It's seriously awesome --- there's nothing like coding to your favorite tracks and cool visualizations.
46 |
47 | 
48 |
49 | 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!
50 | -- Christina Asquith, Chief Operating Officer, Jessica Card, Education Engineer, and Abby Fischler, 15, and Belle See, 17, Hack Clubbers.
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/024/README.md:
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1 | Dear Hack Club friends,
2 |
3 | This summer, hundreds of Hack Club teenagers are flocking to SF for a 3-day hackathon at Dylan Field's Figma HQ, a new 25,000-square foot building. Thanks Dylan!
4 |
5 | Hack Clubbers from around the world are leading the effort. As a Hack Club supporter, you are part of the team that makes this free for everyone.
6 |
7 | This is your 2-minute read on what’s happening at Hack Club, and how you can join in.
8 |
9 | 
10 | _Hack Club's registration page for Assemble, our upcoming hackathon_
11 |
12 |
13 | Summer is starting strong: Just yesterday, we hit number 1 on Hacker News. In the last couple of months we have had some inspiring new gifts. In early June, we announced 14 new hires, including 10 teenagers.
14 |
15 |
16 | **News from the Hackerverse:**
17 |
18 |
28 |
29 | 
30 |
31 | **Hack Clubber Projects:**
32 |
33 | - [Aiden](https://aidenybai.com/), 17, from Camas, WA, landed on the front page of Hacker News for a project called [Millionjs](https://million.js.org/), which he describes as a “super-speedy virtual DOM (the engine that React uses to put content on your screen).” Million has 2100 stars (and counting) on Github and won 3rd Grand Prize in System Software at ISEF2022.
34 | - [Rishi](https://www.rishi.cx/), 16, from Toronto, ON, and a couple of other high schoolers created [Otto](https://otto.pet/) (a “pet parenting system”) because they wanted a dog tag that “didn’t suck.” Last year, their pre-seed round of funding raised $125k. This year, the team–all of them still under 18–raised $1.6 million.
35 | - [Cara](https://devcara.com/)**,** 19, from Massachusetts, shipped homeworld, which provides a central data source for things like OS installation images (and, soon, bootstrap files for auto-creating users and SSH keys), as part of the solard project, which is designed to simplify remote virtual machine management.
36 | - Hack Club connected [Pranav](https://pranav.land/), 17, of Redmond, WA, to Atlas Fellowship, which just awarded him $50k. This summer he is also joining the team at the startup [Jupe](https://www.jupe.com/) in San Francisco.
37 | 
38 |
39 | - Hack Clubbers [Audrey](https://audreyolaf.github.io/) of San Francisco, and [Sam](https://sampoder.com/), 17, of Singapore, were selected as [WWDC22 Swift Student Challenge](https://developer.apple.com/wwdc22/swift-student-challenge/) winners.
40 | - [Ella](https://ella.cx/), 18, from the Bay area, didn’t want to miss anything exciting at the recent [Rails](https://railsconf.org/about) conference, so she built an app that pulls events from their website straight to a calendar. This month, Ella started working for Hack Club full-time as she takes a gap year. She is now living in Burlington, Vermont, and riding her bike to our HQ.
41 | - [Belle](https://belle.is-a.dev/), 17, from Malaysia, is also joining the team here at HQ for a gap year before attending Wellesley as part of being chosen among the inaugural class of prestigious Schmidt Futures/Rhodes Trust Rise Global Winners.
42 |
43 | By teenagers for teenagers: Hack Club’s mission is to create a new Boy and Girl Scouts for the 21st century. You’re part of the excitement happening this summer. Thank you!
44 |
45 | Warm regards, Christina Asquith, Chief Operating Officer; Interns Abby Fischler, 15, and Ishan Goel, 17; and Rick Blount, VP of Philanthropy.
46 |
47 | 48 | 49 | 50 |
51 |
61 |
62 | Want to Jump Into the Hack Club Community? Here’s how…
52 | 53 |Since you receive this newsletter, you’re already an insider at Hack Club. So we trust that you know how crucial it is that we keep supporting our community of highly technical teens. Here’s how you can help right now:
54 | 55 | - [Meet Rick](mailto:rick@hackclub.com), the new VP of Philanthropy to talk about a gift or make an introduction. 56 | - Email us an encouraging message that we can pass along to Hack Clubbers. Attend a Hack Club event 57 | - Watch Zach’s recent interview on [American Optimist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaB5ltDmD0Q) or relive the [Zephyr Hackathon.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BID8_pGuqA) 58 | - Stop by our [Shelburne, Vermont HQ](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hack+Club/@44.3805618,-73.229284,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x4cca7df09a009e9b:0xd3a527022dfe1a3e!8m2!3d44.380558!4d-73.2270953) to meet the team. 59 | 60 |63 | (like in all Hack Club emails, we respect your privacy and don't track whether you open this email or click links in it. we only send this update to a small group of friends and supporters, if you'd prefer to not receive these, that's ok! click here) 64 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /025/README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | Hi Hack Club friends, 2 | 3 | 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. 4 | 5 |  6 | 7 | As summer wraps, a few more highlights from Hack Clubbers, thanks to you: 8 | Teenagers returned for the first and largest high school hackathon since the pandemic. Earlier this month, Hack Club's [Assemble](https://assemble.hackclub.com/) in San Francisco had 600 registrants for 42 hours of nonstop building. 40% were girls and nonbinary. 9 | 10 | 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](https://hackclub.com/hackathons/) on Hack Club Bank this fall. 11 | 12 | With all the new attention generating interest in clubs, we just launched a new 2-minute clubs [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sxRdKtKNa0) with Hack Clubbers sharing the magic. 13 | 14 | ...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. 15 | 16 | — Christina Asquith 17 | 18 | --- 19 | 20 | ## 👀 What’s up at Hack Club this time? 👀 21 | 22 | Hey friends! I'm
[Ishan](https://hackclub.slack.com/app_redirect?channel=U01ACA3M90C), I'm 17, and I'm a Hack Clubber emailing you again! A special thank you to 
[Sam](https://sampoder.com) for helping out so much with today's newsletter.
23 |
24 | 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](https://hackclub.com/slack/).
25 |
26 | ### Five Fun July Ships 🚢
27 |
28 | 
29 |
30 |
31 | 
. Why? Because _"facebook is slow so lets make react fast"_
48 |
49 | ↗️ [Check out Million.js](https://millionjs.org/)
50 |
51 | ---
52 |
53 | 
54 |
55 | 
58 |
59 | ↗️ [Check out arc](https://github.com/japrozs/arc)
60 |
61 | ---
62 |
63 | 
64 |
65 | 
70 |
71 | ↗️ [Check out GuessThatRank](https://www.guessthatrank.com)
72 |
73 | Feel free to reach out to anyone here on Slack, and post updates about your own projects in [#scrapbook](https://hackclub.slack.com/archives/C01504DCLVD). Let everyone know when you're done by posting it in [#ship](https://hackclub.slack.com/archives/C0M8PUPU6)!
74 |
75 | ### Milkshakes, Stupid Sh*t Nobody Needs & A Rogue Dinosaur.
76 |
77 | Yes, I'm talking about Assemble. Or rather, [Sam](https://sampoder.com) is:
78 |
79 | -
80 | 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.
81 |
82 | 
83 |
84 | 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.
85 |
86 | 
87 |
88 | I'd recommend checking out our 📸 [collaborative photo album](https://hack.af/assemble-album), 🚢 [everyone's projects on Scrapbook](https://scrapbook.assemble.hackclub.com) and 
!
107 |
108 |
109 |
110 | ### Things to do while procrastinating on math homework:
111 |
112 | - Check out 
[Hack Club's latest YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sxRdKtKNa0) explaining what Hack Club is! [I love the ending 🐴](https://youtu.be/-sxRdKtKNa0?t=120)
113 | - Add your own 
[Orpheus](https://workshops.hackclub.com/orpheus/) drawing (there are HUNDREDS!!): [github.com/hackclub/dinosaurs](https://github.com/hackclub/dinosaurs)
114 | - Meet other Hack Clubbers (via 
Zoom) on 
[#hack-night](https://hackclub.com/night/), grab some 🍿 popcorn to join 🎞 [#movie-nights](https://hackclub.slack.com/archives/C025QEVNRPW), find a quick laugh at 
[#memes](https://hackclub.slack.com/archives/CB19EP4MC), or explore the best messages of the [Hack Club Slack](https://hackclub.com/slack) in ⭐️ [#hall-of-fame](https://hackclub.slack.com/archives/C028VGT0JMQ).
115 | - Code something small and special in HTML, CSS, & JS (no frameworks) and share it with other Hack Clubbers through [#freewrite](https://hackclub.slack.com/archives/C03TE1RLR7V/p1660684775476709)!
116 | - Play games 🎮 made by fellow Hack Clubbers (or code your own) using 
[Sprig](https://sprig.hackclub.dev), a beginner-friendly game engine: [Sprig Gallery](https://sprig-gallery.hackclub.dev/)
117 | - Join [#amas](https://hackclub.slack.com/archives/C03QPB0SU3V) and help 
59 |
60 |
61 | _(FYI: you're receiving this email because you're in [the Hack Club Slack](https://hackclub.com/slack).)_
62 |
63 | ## 🎒 Hacking The Back To School
64 |
65 | Incredible Hack Club meetings are happening in schools across the world this month, like 
68 |
69 | My club in Singapore meets Monday’s during lunch, and in October we’ll be doing -- @sam what will y'all be doing?
70 |
71 | To prepare for the new school year, clubs have been busy shipping new websites to pitch their club to prospective members. Here are a couple of my favourites:
72 |
73 | 
74 |
75 | [CCHS Hack Club (Chicopee, MA)](https://cchshackclub.hackclub.com) - website built by 
78 |
79 | [Edison Hack Club (Queens, NY)](https://edisonhack.club) - website built by 
82 |
83 | [Pomperaug Hack Club (Southbury, CT)](https://pomperaug.hackclub.com) - website built by [Sprig](https://sprig.hackclub.com), a handheld gaming console where every player is a creator! In total, :sparkles: _**430 consoles**_ :sparkles: are going to be manufactured & shipped out to Hack Clubbers who make games.
90 |
91 | 
92 |
93 | Any teenager can get a console by:
94 | > :video_game: Building a Sprig game in [the online JavaScript game editor](https://editor.sprig.hackclub.com).
95 | >
96 | > 🔀 Making a pull request to add your game to the Sprig gallery in [the GitHub repository](https://github.com/hackclub/sprig)
97 |
98 | It's been so special seeing the Hack Club community banding together to create games. On our recent Sprig Jam, I tried my hand at building my own game called [The Reactor](https://editor.sprig.hackclub.com/?file=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hackclub/sprig/main/games/reactor.js). Everyone in [#sprig](https://hackclub.slack.com/archives/C02UN35M7LG) was so wonderfully kind & helpful as I made my way through the process.
99 |
100 | The games that everyone's been shipping & submitting are incredible; here are some of my favourites from [the Gallery](https://sprig.hackclub.com/gallery):
101 |
102 | | | | |
103 | |---|---|---|
104 | | [](https://editor.sprig.hackclub.com/?file=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hackclub/sprig/main/games/kindless.js) | [](https://editor.sprig.hackclub.com/?file=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hackclub/sprig/main/games/raycasting.js) | [](https://editor.sprig.hackclub.com/?file=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hackclub/sprig/main/games/nomis.js)|
105 | | [](https://editor.sprig.hackclub.com/?file=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hackclub/sprig/main/games/friendship.js) | [](https://editor.sprig.hackclub.com/?file=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hackclub/sprig/main/games/minesweeper.js) | [](https://editor.sprig.hackclub.com/?file=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hackclub/sprig/main/games/multiplayer_soccer.js)|
106 |
107 | Sprigs are going to start shipping in October; I'm looking forward to receiving mine, assembling it & playing these games on the console! In the meantime, I've heard whispers of seeds coming in the mail 👀
108 |
109 | ## ✨ The Return of IRL Hackathons
110 |
111 | What excites me the most in Hack Club right now is the return of IRL [high-school hackathons](https://hackclub.com/hackathons)! Hackathons are a big part of how I got into programming and seeing them return in-person is incredible. Last week, for example, 
114 |
115 | _(
135 |
136 |
137 | Once again, I hope you'll check out **[🎬 The Assemble Documentary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnK4gzO6S3Q)**: a film on Assemble to help answer the question _"what is a hackathon?"_. It showcases the magical experience of attending a hackathon, and our hope is that it can help organisers share what’s in store for attendees at their hackathons.
138 |
139 |
140 |
141 |
142 |
143 | So that's what's been happening this month! Looking to escape school & get more involved? Here a couple of great ways to get more involved in the community at the moment:
144 |
145 | - 👋 Join a [Hack Night](https://hackclub.com/night/) call! Every Saturday evening (in America, for me its Sunday morning!), we all jump on a Zoom call to hang out and code together.
146 |
147 | - 🌈 Organise a hackathon using [Hack Club Bank](https://hackclub.com/bank), with the help of fellow organisers in [#hackathon-organizers](https://hackclub.slack.com/archives/C03QSGGCJN7) and with one of [our $500 high-school hackathon grants](https://hackclub.com/hackathons/grant).
148 |
149 | - 🎒 Bring together a group of friends & bring the hack to your school by starting a club: https://apply.hackclub.com!
150 |
151 | - 🍃 Procrastinate by playing games in the [Sprig Gallery](https://sprig.hackclub.com/gallery), or, even better, "productively procrastinate" by [making a Sprig game](https://editor.sprig.hackclub.com/).
152 |
153 | - 🔥 Start a streak on [Scrapbook](https://scrapbook.hackclub.com). (Personally, I've just started posting about learning Redwood [on mine](https://scrapbook.hackclub.com/sampoder)!)
154 |
155 | Thanks for taking the time to read this email! I'll leave you with this teaser from 
158 |
159 | _Over & out,_
160 | Sam
161 |
162 | (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)
163 |
164 | PS: check out some of this incredible art using [Stable Diffusion](https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement)! 
| 
| 
|
168 |
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/027/README.md:
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1 | Dear Hack Club friends,
2 |
3 | Teenagers often say Hack Club changes their lives. You make this possible.
4 |
5 | 5,000 teenagers have coded at Hack Club in 2022. Meet Aileen, 14, of Texas and Toby, 14, of London, below. Hack Club delivers inspiration, real-world skills, income and hope. Please [make a donation](https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/) today.
6 |
7 | Thank you for your past gift. Wishing you and your family a happy holidays. Latest news is 👇
8 |
9 | 
10 |
11 | Your support recently helped these Maryland teenagers run their hackathon, BlairHacks Mini
12 |
13 |
14 | *This December:*
15 |
16 | - 600 teenagers are building hardware projects together over the Christmas holidays, thanks to our [Winter Wonderland hardware grant](https://hackclub.com/winter)
17 | - 300 high school students are attending Hack Club’s winter [hackathon series](https://epoch.hackclub.com/) in India, Texas, Bay Area, and Vermont
18 | - George Hotz and Justin Truman just met with Hack Clubbers, and David Heinemeier Hansson is coming in January
19 | - 3 teenagers active in Hack Club were accepted early to MIT– congrats!
20 | - Thank you Craig Newmark, Liz Danhakl, Andrew Reed and the Danhakl Family Foundation for making major gifts to Hack Club in December
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 | *Meet a Hack Clubber!*
25 |
26 | *Aileen, 14, of Texas* attended her first ever hackathon with Hack Club this summer. Now, she is learning new coding languages, and collaborating on [Sinerider](https://sinerider.com/), a graphing game alongside other Hack Clubbers. “These are one of the most memorable moments of my life… ever,” Aileen said this summer. See her at min 5:45 in the [video of our hackathon](https://youtu.be/PnK4gzO6S3Q?t=345).
27 |
28 |
29 | 
30 |
31 |
32 | *Big Picture in 2022:*
33 |
34 | 300 new teen-led coding clubs have started, serving thousands of teenagers in the US, Brazil, India, Portugal, Sweden, and Ghana and 23 other countries.
35 |
36 | You’ve helped us scale Hack Club Bank, which unlocks the financial system for teenagers. $2.8 million has been transacted in 2022!
37 |
38 | More than a dozen in-person, teen-led hackathons have run, with +1k teenagers in attendance— this is amazing!
39 |
40 | That’s just a snapshot of your impact. See our [full annual report](http://hack.af/2022) for more.
41 |
42 | *Looking ahead*, we’re dedicating 2023 to making sure more teenagers know about Hack Club, leveraging our incredible new collaboration with FIRST Robotics. We want to help beginners grow as coders. And we will increase our dedicated outreach to girls and low-income teenagers, building on partnerships with Girl Scouts and Girls Who Code.
43 |
44 | Your support will bring Hack Club’s life-changing programs to 10,000 more teenagers in 2023. Please donate today!
45 |
46 |
47 |
48 | *See what Hack Clubbers have built just in this past month:*
49 | - [Cole](https://github.com/cole-wilson), 17, from Washington shipped an interactive [FIFA World Cup bracket website](https://worldcup.cole.ws/) that has 100k+ page views and was on the front page of Hacker News!
50 | - [Faisal](https://fayd.me/), 17, from India hacked together an [Arc boost](https://github.com/faisalsayed10/gpt-search) that gives you a GPT-3 generated answer to your Google searches.
51 | - [Jianmin (Amanda)](https://www.jianminchen.com/), 16, from Massachusetts coded her own [Markdown parser](https://jianmin-chen.github.io/markdown-parser/) with a full stack application (using Express, MongoDB, and AWS S3) on top of it.
52 | - [Peter](https://www.cytronicoder.com/), 14, created incredible [workshops](https://www.saishack.club/projects) for his Hack Club in Singapore!
53 | - [Hack Club Bank](https://hackclub.com/bank) is built with teenagers in our community and this past month, [Tinu](https://tinu.tech/) (16, MD), [Jaden](https://jadenhou.net/) (15, DC), [Ian](https://github.com/YodaLightsabr) (14, CA), and [Caleb](https://calebden.io/) (18, VT) shipped incredible new features like the ability to name cards, new settings and transfers page UI, and a welcome screen for new users!
54 |
55 |
56 |
57 | *Toby, 13, of London*, joined Hack Club and came to his first in-person hackathon this summer:
58 |
59 | 
60 |
61 | “The sheer amount of care and love that has gone into the community is so incredible, and I honestly have no idea what I’d be doing today without it,” he says.
62 |
63 | Please [donate now](https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/) to Hack Club and let’s keep going! Thank you! See you in 2023.
64 |
65 | Warmly,
66 |
67 | Christina
68 |
69 |
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/028/README.md:
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1 | Dear Hack Club friends,
2 |
3 | This month, Hack Club hosted its 24th AMA guest! Since we launched in March 2020, thousands of teenagers have spoken directly with incredible tech founders and creative engineers. Watch our trailer to see Dylan Field rapping, Elon Musk on cryonics, Patrick Collison on tabs vs. spaces, and Gwynne Shotwell on values.
4 |
5 | Your introductions and donations have given teenagers from every background this opportunity– thank you! Here’s a 2-minute read from Hack Club, sent to 122 recipients, including our major donors & friends.
6 |
7 |
8 | 
9 |
10 | *Our ask of you:*
11 |
12 | *Do you know female tech role models in New York City?* In March, Hack Club is partnering with Girl Scouts to host a hackathon for 55 teen coders. We are looking to invite a few female role models for the dinner. Please send us suggestions!
13 |
14 | *Special thanks to:*
15 |
16 | **David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, [for spending an hour Saturday morning talking to Hack Club teenagers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVWtWwBydB8&themeRefresh=1)
17 |
18 | **Ron Conway, Lizzy Danhakl and Andrew Reed, and Craig Newmark for making a gift to support Hack Club in December
19 |
20 | *What Hack Clubbers have been up to:*
21 |
22 | Hack Club’s mission is to inspire a new generation of teen engineers to build and solve problems with code.
23 |
24 | Since fall, the number of teenagers active in our online community has doubled and teenagers have started 126 new clubs, reaching an estimated 2000 high schoolers. In 2022, with your help, we raised another [$3.2m](https://bank.hackclub.com/hq) for 2023 and we grew our team of engineers and teen coders from 9 to nearly 20, allowing us to support more teenagers with our programs.
25 |
26 | And Hack Club Bank keeps growing as a critical tool for teen leaders to raise and spend money on their projects. Get this: more than $7 million has been transacted on Hack Club Bank in total – and in 2022 we brought 287 new organizations, double the number of new orgs in 2021.
27 |
28 | Thanks to you, new teenagers joining Hack Club find life-changing opportunities to gain technical skills, improve their community and inspire others to do the same.
29 |
30 | *Three things we're excited about right now:*
31 | *1. Live events*
32 | On Dec 30, Hack Club teenagers in India organized and attended a [3 day hackathon in New Delhi,]https://epoch.hackclub.com in which 50 technical projects were built and shared. In partnership with Indian nonprofit, ATAL, many attendees travelled from rural areas of India, including many girls.
33 |
34 | 
35 |
36 | Srijit, a first time hackathon attendee, shares “honestly it was the best new year of my life… my experience was beyond expectations.”
37 |
38 |
39 | 
40 |
41 | *2. Partnerships*
42 |
43 | We’re now collaborating with FIRST, GitHub Education and Girl Scouts STEM to support coding education. In December, we launched a collaboration with FIRST, which serves 538,000 students in America and worldwide.
44 |
45 | We’re working directly with FIRST’s leadership team to solve 2 problems for teenagers. We built a fiscal sponsor / financial platform at Hack Club Bank that is best in class, solves major operational challenges for teams, and being used by parents, teachers and teenagers running FIRST teams to manage money for their robotics clubs. More importantly, we are working with FIRST to design ways to support teenagers in FIRST to develop skills in software engineering, including a massive, collaborative online puzzle with dozens of steps that nearly 1,000 teenagers are currently trying to solve together.
46 |
47 | As of today, 34 robotics teams in FIRST are currently running or getting started on Hack Club Bank.
48 |
49 | *3. Grants*
50 |
51 | **We launched the [Winter Hardware Wonderland](https://hackclub.com/winter/), in which we distributed $250 electronics project grants to 200 teenagers in 20+ countries including Cameroon, Spain, and Ukraine
52 | **Supporting 20+ high school hackathons — reaching thousands of students — across the US and around the world with a total of $12k in grants
53 |
54 | **Travel stipends totalling $17k to teenagers to attend our 3 day hackathon in New Delhi, India
55 |
56 | **Distributing laptops to teenagers in need so they can further their coding journey
57 |
58 | Hack Club Bank can direct grants to teenagers in need, within minutes. This is the power of an engineering-led organization. And a reminder: all our finances, and theirs, are [transparent to the public.](http://bank.hackclub.com/hq)
59 |
60 | *What are teenagers up to? Ships from Hack Clubbers:*
61 |
62 | **Ishan, 16, of Washington created [Aces](https://github.com/quackduck/aces) a library to define your own encoding and read/write data bit by bit
63 |
64 | **Xev, 18, from Germany shipped their own [personal website](https://xev.dev/) with live music and coding updates
65 |
66 | **Lux, 19, from San Jose created a JavaScript library for Haskell-style strings in Javascript: [hss.js](https://github.com/sporeball/hss.js)
67 |
68 | ****Gregor, 16, in Edinburgh, UK built an [electric go kart](https://cloud-cdjugofb8-hack-club-bot.vercel.app/0clip8.mp4) with his team that can go up to 12 miles per hour
69 |
70 | **Audrey from the Bay Area coded [Affective Cookies](https://www.affectivecookies.com/), which includes a tool to filter your Twitter feed for positivity
71 |
72 |
73 | *Meet Lucas, 13, from São Paulo, Brazil,* who's building a game console with our hardware grant for Winter Hardware Wonderland:
74 |
75 |
76 | 
77 |
78 | Thank you for making Hack Club possible. See you next month!
79 |
80 | Warmly,
81 | Christina
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/README.md:
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1 | # VIP Newsletters
2 |
3 | Starting on March 16th, 2020, we started sending out VIP newsletters every month to Hack Club's largest supporters.
4 |
5 | We send these to three types of supporters:
6 |
7 | 1. Major, major individuals (>$250K)
8 | 2. Major individuals (>$10K)
9 | 3. Corporations (as I'm writing this, GitHub is our only current corporate supporter)
10 |
11 | The hope is that we'll publish our VIP updates with approximately a 6 week delay between being first sent out and going open source on GitHub, so our largest supporters get the updates first. If it feels right, we'll remove that delay in the future.
12 |
13 | VIP newsletters are written by Christina with final edits from me. We aim to send out approximately every month.
14 |
15 | \- Zach
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 | ### Associated Web Pages
20 |
21 | This repository only contains the newsletter's content, the associated web pages are generated in the [`hackclub/workshops`](https://github.com/hackclub/workshops) repository.
22 |
23 |
24 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------