TL;DR?

In a hurry? Here are the quick links, summarized for your pleasure:

• From Chris Walker of Hack Club HQ (for those not in Slack): permalink at RecapTime.dev community notes
• The tracking issue for Arcade
• Zach Latta in the wild: How do you do, fellow Hack Clubbers? (Changelog Interviews podcast), The Art of Code (TEDxYouth@Talinn), Hack Club AMA recording
• October 2024 General YSWS: Low Skies (no tracking issue for this 3-week event for now)
• Meanwhile in GitHub Universe 2024: High Seas (Acon Lin launch segment in day 2 keynote, donate link for adults)

It might be a bit silent on socials and hauling between autistic burnout and school, but GitHub and GitLab activity say something different, and this issue on my personal launchpad issue tracker in GitHub says it all (screenshot below 👇).

Hack Club what?

Chris Walker (2024) from the HQ described it as “hacker culture for teenagers, institutionalized” and “the hacker-oriented arm of the public education system.” It was founded by @zachlatta as a sixteen-year-old teen wished they had in high school.

If you let me go deeper into the introduction to the Hack Club crash course, it is:

• a global network of after-school clubs
• a US 501c3 fiscal host for after-school hackathons + clubs, open-source projects, and organizations without the headaches of forming a non-profit legal entity under its own platform
• an online global community of teenage hackers (no, not in a bad way, the definition is pretty messed up for some reason)
• collection of "You Ship, We Ship" programs (Blot, Sprig, OnBoard, etc)

Zach Latta (in the wild)

If you want to learn more about Zach Latta himself, I handpicked some podcast episodes and videos of him in the wild:

What about Low Skies?

For the uninitialized, I'll explain it myself this time. It's another general YSWS after the 10 Hours In Public, but this time:

• More than pudding fudge from a nearby store around the HQ. You can even get a smohåj if you spent too much on your projects (I settled with USD 20 HCB ​credits on Porkbun and some stickers).
• Uses WakaTime for project time-tracking, via its its own Wakapi instance. Well, RIP non-programming projects for now, but at least you can still use Hack Hour w/o the constant reminders to do more sessions.

The projects I built

Here's the rundown of what I have built during Arcade 2024 and Low Skies 2024. You can check their respective READMEs if you want all the details (and maybe give me some spare patches to review).

• proxypartylab - The Caddy edition of hackclub/proxyparty for Recap Time Squad’s domains and friends, with documentation and even GitHub issue forms for others to request to set it up on their domains and let us do the infra work. I'll archiving the project for now, mainly to avoid GCP bill shocks.
• golinks rewrite - A rewrite of my golinks (and now link shortener) in Cloudflare Workers and D1 (SQLite behind the scenes) for data persistence with a bit of wonk in Slack slash commands integration.
• dotenv-tools CLI - a CLI tool to centrally managed dotenvx-encrypted secrets over git a la gopass, currently in a rewrite to Deno but on hiatus for now.
• lorebooks.wiki Badges API - img.shields.io-like API, but using Deno KV for storing badge data, plus some Hack Club badges for things like HCB.
• leeksbot - React with the leek(s) custom emoji in Hack Club Slack (or use Flag as leeks) and it'll be forwarded to the leeks channel for you after a review.

That's a wrap for now!

If you are a high schooler 18 and below and want to join the event, you can join High Seas until January 31 by visiting the website for all the details (here's my referral link if you need it: https://ahoy.hack.club/1502). If you are now in Hack Club Slack, see you soon on my personal channel, #ajhalili2006-lair. Otherwise, have a field day building your projects, and happy holidays (belated happy Thanksgiving to those reading from the US and Canda)!

Andrei Jiroh (he/they) is an open-source developer and backend Node.js and Deno developer at Recap Time Squad and a Hack Clubber since Arcade 2024. He is an Autistic Filipino and is currently in their final senior high school year.