I recently supervised a Hackclub Counterspell event at our office. I was there only in the capacity of being an adult in the room, for health and safety and safeguarding reasons.
The entire event had been organised by a single teenager, with mini workshops, hack time and a global show and tell.
Kids that attended were not only coders, but musicians and artists as well.
The whole event was amazing, with more pizza than I thought it possible to eat.
The kids produced some genuinely interesting games, learned some new skills, and had a great time socially.
I fully intend to support more events in the future.
> Kids that attended were not only coders, but musicians and artists as well.
Creatives are Creatives. Don't reduce yourself as a programmer purely to a scientist. There is an art in what we do.
Edit: if you disagree then tell me why I have a religiously strong opinion on spaces vs tabs
I agree - programming is it's own medium for creation - not just a tool to produce other media.
HackClub is great. I feel like I aged out of their target demographics recently though.
I can share my single and very positive experience with them. In summer 2020 (I was 18 then), they were going to host/sponsor some hackathons (IIRC), but because of Covid they couldn’t do that so instead they gave away that money to students who had some project idea. If your project was accepted you got $100 for it - but you had to share the result with the community.
I applied and got that 100, and used it to make a remote-controlled mobility scooter [0] with my friend. Not the most useful thing in the world but it was ton of fun!
I saw the Hack Club presentation at the Ubuntu Summit 2024 ("How 30K teenagers build open source software") and it was an unexpected highlight of the conference for me. I'd expected it to be a boring kids program, but Hack Club looks very cool! https://youtu.be/AdgU-_1vDco
Love to see these youths reclaim the word "hacker."
And in such a positive light
which is the original meaning.
Hackclub is currently running a program for high schoolers until January 31st where time spent working on hobby projects is rewarded with prizes. By my understanding the pay rate is about $2-5 dollars per hour, so no replacement for a full time job but if you have kids that code for fun something is better than nothing!
ArchiveBox uses HackClub Bank, their FSP platform (like Open Collective but better) and we love it. I enjoy using it more than any other billing/invoicing system I've used, and I'm constantly amazed at the quality of software they're able to put out with a team of teenagers!
Changelog did a great interview with Akon from Hack Club recently: https://changelog.com/podcast/620
this is so cool. hats off to the creators. I bet it's a ton of logistics to manage. I surfed around the site but couldn't find any information re: volunteering with them? I wonder if they need them and what kind of commitment it would be? I'd be interested!
They mostly seem to be "by and for high schoolers". This is what I was told when I was asking how I could help with my son setting something up.
Hey! I work here. Happy to answer any questions!
We'd be happy to help some of these kids do Show HNs of their projects. Would that be of interest?
Absolutely - they’d fit right in here. My email is malted@hackclub.com.
Couple of questions:
1) I see the mention of highschool throughout, what about younger hackers that are 13+ (7th & 8th grade)?
2) The directory (https://directory.hackclub.com/) is not working for me. Are there existing clubs in Asia? Specifically Taipei, Taiwan.
For 2), there is a much more comprehensive map at the top of https://toolbox.hackclub.com/ that you can look at
I see that in-person clubs are for High Schoolers only. But, is everything else for only high schoolers?
Hey, what’s the best way to sponsor this?
Bit of an aside, I found this bit from https://hackclub.com/clubs/ interesting:
> in the Hack Club Slack (Discord-style online groupchat), you'll find a group of 27,253+ fabulous ...
See, in my head Slack comes first before Discord. It was released, after all, 2 years prior. My mental shortcut for Discord is that it's like Slack but for games so it has better audio support. But here it's the other way around.
It's ok ~ perhaps the on-ramp path is Discord -> Slack -> IRC :).
Seriously though, this is really impressive. Not just flashy UIs, they actually have an intro to Assembly: https://github.com/hackclub/some-assembly-required
Kudos to these teenagers.
Big fan of Hack Club and everything you guys are doing! Such a phenomenal initiative
This is awesome. Love the site too.
Keep going!
There's a Japanese-language club if that's of interest to anybody: https://onecodeclub.io/
I was in TPU when I was a teen: teenage programmers unite. Not sure if they still exist but maybe all us old members can start a construction company together!
Ahh: http://www.tpu.org/
This is awesome! I love to see projects like this.
Ahh to be young again.
Does this exist for adults/non-teens? And not in the professional, career sense but a chiller, more human sense.
Yes, depending on where you live. There are many such events on meetup.com. Although the pandemic shut down a lot of this stuff. The open source world also has a lot of this spirit, although the "hacking together" is often virtual rather than in-person (although conferences provide a good venue for in-person meetups for people who are geographically distributed).
So, I ran a few of those, called them Hacking Society. In Fort Collins we have a Linux Users Group that meets on Tuesdays, in Boulder it meets on Thursdays. So the remaining Tue/Thu of the month I would secure space, often at a coffee shop, for us to get together and work on projects. It has worked very well, I did it for ~20 years, I know the Fort Collins one is still going strong. If you want a location page on HackingSociety.org, let me know and we'll figure out a way to set you up one.
But mostly it's about just finding and announcing a place with a regular schedule. For the first ~10 years, I took "meeting notes" about what people did, which I felt helped keep people in mind of the "working on projects" component.
See if there’s a hackerspace or makerspace near you. Many have regular nights/days where they get together and work on stuff.
Our local one does Tuesday nights and Friday days where everyone who’s available comes on and works on projects, either their own or group projects.
Not that there’s anything wrong this this, but I tend to see them focused around 3D printer stuff and rarely much software. I’d love to see more software hangouts
The Ruby Meetup I attend used to have hack nights once a month where you could work on what you wanted.
Makerspaces might be a good place to contact?
wondering the same thing as a 30yr kind of person who is a not a professional dev but would love to find a community out in SoCal!
www.recurse.com
This.
Does grey hair hacker club exists somewhere ? Need to join.
Are those that are keeping their color but suffering from rapidly receding lines allowed to join too?
I'm sure someone will chime in to say there are plenty of these "clubs" but honestly, I grew up in a small town with no real "hacker" peers then have gotten so bogged down with work (and worked in areas without HUGE cultures like this) that I'm now starting to feel quite disconnected.
I just want to make silly things, learn some new skills and have fun -- having a "Safe" space to share that would be a boon.
Perhaps there is one in your area: https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces
I'm in Asia so no luck, but on the bright side, tools are quite affordable here.
Also in Asia, I know of a few smaller ones, but they come and go - and with space at a premium I’ve not found them that useful.
I think it’s more about the community than the physical space though (to a point)
Makerspaces? If you're lucky enough to have one close by. The nearest one to me is a plane ride away.
wish there was one for us old guys 50+
> wish there was one for us old guys 50+
I don't know about 50+ who code together. But if you're interested in a community for old folks who enjoy reading computing stuff together, there is a small and cozy reading lounge on IRC (and Matrix) here: https://bitwise.codeberg.page/
I assume you know about 2600? Its a very fun and global hacker community, with monthly meetings, yearly conferences, a radio show, and great magazine. 2600.com
But why does it have to be "for" a certain age? Just ditch ageism.
Go to a tech conference of your prefered language?
they are too far away and too expensive
There are a ton of open source things to participate in and contribute to. Obviously anything that involves travel costs money.
Contribute to an open source project?
Fosdem in Brussels is free. But that might still be far away for you?
present day demoparties (as in, demoscene events) are pretty much that these days
2 years ago I created a private slack and invited a bunch of old colleagues (in both senses), we now meet weekly to hack on side projects, participate in CTFs, all low expectations. Sometimes we just catchup and bitch about work.
I think they call that GitHub.
First it was women-only communities, now it's only teens, where is the world going?
/s
Unacceptable; we must now create a community only for fans.
cc Daniel Gross