Hack Club takes to the High Seas

Alright, I am here with Acon, an 18-year-old high school grad and a member of Hack Club. You may recall Hack Club from a show we did last year with the founder, Zach Latta. If you don’t recall, that is a community where teen hackers from around the world can code together. Acon, thanks so much for joining me.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

So you’ve been up to some pretty cool stuff most recently on the GitHub Universe stage. You got to launch Hack Club High Seas on stage, at GitHub Universe.

[00:04:01.26]

Thanks, Kyle. And hello, Universe.

That had to be pretty cool, right?

Yeah, it was amazing. So High Seas is something that me and around 20 other teens have been working on for a few months now. Basically, it’s this program that Hack Club is running, where teenagers can log into our site, code cool things, submit their projects, and then after that, they can get a bunch of cool hardware and other prizes such as Raspberry Pi Zeros, 3D printers, MacBooks… A hell of a ton of really cool things.

That had to be cool. So tell me about your journey to Hack Club. We’re going to dive into all the nitty-gritty… But how’d you get involved in Hack Club in the first place?

Yeah, so currently I’m taking a gap year to work at Hack Club. But before then – so basically, I joined Hack Club around two-ish years ago. I joined their Slack. I wasn’t very active… Around a year ago I had the idea of running a hackathon. And the hackathon did actually happen. It’s called Apocalypse. It happened around six months ago. But basically, I had this idea, I put it into the Slack, and enough people were interested in it that I got an entire basically team to organize this thing with me. And basically, at Hack Club I’ve done various tons of things. I’ve made a few stickers for them, done things here and there. Apocalypse is the main thing. Apocalypse is the reason that I’m also here, currently, at Hack Club HQ, working for Hack Club.

Okay. So where did this idea for Apocalypse come from?

Yeah, so to give some context, Apocalypse is basically this hackathon where instead of solving for normal hackathon themes, such as, I don’t know, infrastructure, AI, things that, instead you try to just solve for the Zombie Apocalypse, which is this entirely fictional thing, that does not exist. You can build anything you want or dream of. Your creations basically don’t have to be grounded inside of the real world. And the reason why I came up with that theme is because I noticed that in a lot of hackathons people keep on building the same things over and over again. The creativity in a lot of projects are practically non-existent. They feel very corporate. So what I wanted to do with Apocalypse is use a theme to push people out of those zones, to make them create what they actually want to do.

So what was some stuff that people created?

I mean, there was a ton of cool stuff. There was a three-foot-tall pea shooter that shot out these balls… And it’s from the Plants vs. Zombies games. There’s a hell of a ton of RC cars, where you can control something remotely, and the car moves, and they build the car themselves. There’s a ton of just cool things that.

Do you recall the winners, and was there voting, or how did the whole thing work?

Yeah, so the way Apocalypse voting worked is that it was a pure vote hackathon. So in a lot of traditional hackathons you have a bunch of judges who are middle age, who you have to pitch in front of… At Hack Club and at Apocalypse the people who you want to appeal to are teenagers such as yourself. So we had people basically present their projects in the science fair demo style, and then at the end you’re able to vote for your peers, and you’re able to actually see all the projects that they made. Because oftentimes in other hackathons you’re just not really able to do that. And I think that my favorite part of Apocalypse was actually just being able to see all of the projects laid out in a bunch of tables. That was such a cool part of it.

[00:07:45.25] Well, I feel very seen, because as a middle aged man who has been asked to judge various hackathons and game jams, I oftentimes think I’m not probably the primary audience of this game, but here I am, trying to judge this game. And so what I do as a hack is I bring my kids into it, and I ask them what games they like. But pretty cool if you’re having a hackathon for hack clubbers, for us, by us; have the have the youth judge the youth and decide on which ones are awesome. So how did you even find Hack Club in the first place?

Yeah, so actually I found out about Hack Club through the GitHub education newsletter… Which is really funny, actually, because I have since then – at Hack Club I’ve written GitHub education newsletter takeover type things. But basically, Hack Club had this program called Sprigg that was going on - it’s still going on, actually - where basically you’re able to code a game and get a game console. And that was basically featured in the GitHub education newsletter. And I was interested enough to click on that, find out about Hack Club, and after that I joined the Slack.

And what were you doing on the GitHub education newsletter? How did you get involved in that? I’m just trying to follow the breadcrumbs here.

Yeah, okay, so long story short, this summer we ran a program called Arcade, which is our biggest thing… Other than High Seas. High Seas is going to be bigger. But Arcade is this program where you code cool things, and you get cool things. Basically, a model that High Seas also follows. But Arcade had these takeover newsletters that they needed somebody to write, so one of the other Hack Club employees called me up and was “Hey, do you want to work with me to write this takeover of this newsletter?” And basically, it would just be me writing as myself. I’d go “Hey, I’m Acon. I’m a Hack Clubber. And here’s a couple of cool things you should know about Arcade.” And that’s kind of how it started. Also, the newsletters were quite popular within GitHub. I can’t share exact numbers, but the numbers are pretty good.

Okay. So popular writing this Arcade thing, and then the GitHub newsletter thing, the Hackathon thing… What predates all of this? Why did you get into software, or game – I mean, it sounds you’re more interested in perhaps game design, or experience design… Where do your interests come from?

Yeah, so I have done a variety of things. I to think of myself more of a jack of all trades, master of none… But before everything, in middle school I got really into writing fiction. And then COVID hit, and I kind of stopped doing that. I started basically coding in Python.

I did a ton of competitive programming in high school. Basically, that got me into coding. When I was around 16, I joined Hack Club, started building some projects… Yeah, I’m pretty interested in game design and how to gamify things… Even outside of games. For example, at Apocalypse, which was a pretty gamified hackathon, I toyed around with this idea of basically having an economy in the hackathon. So at Apocalypse we had something bottle caps, which were just physical bottle caps that we bought from this one shop… But with these bottle caps, you’re able to buy swag. And then in order to get bottle caps, you have to go to activities and workshops.

So instead of laying all of our swag out in this one giant table and letting people just bloodbath for it, instead we had the system where you’re able to walk up to the shop we had inside of the hackathon, and you’re able to purchase swag using these physical bottle caps that we had.

Nice. That’s really cool. So did that pay off? Was that highly engaging?

I mean, definitely. People were obsessed with the bottle caps. Before the hackathon, I thought nobody would be interested in this, or very few people would participate in it. But at the hackathon, the inflation, firstly, was crazy. So we had these giant plushies that we bought previously, that we were selling with bottle caps. Before, these plushies, at the very start of the hackathon, they went for eight bottle caps. But the thing about having a shop in a hackathon is that as an organizer you can say that things within that shop cost however much as you want it to cost… Because guess what? We live in an apocalypse. So…

[00:11:52.11] [laughs] That’s a really good point.

So during the middle-ish of the hackathon on the second night we held this giant auction. There were 30 people just lined up at a table. We had a stage, and everything. It was epic.

Wow.

One of the plushies there sold for 102 bottle caps, which is crazy. But yeah. And then after that, the value of bottle caps just massively dropped, and nobody cared about it. But… It’s kind of crypto, when you think about it…

Yeah, I was gonna say, that sounds tulips.

Yeah.

Have you ever heard of pogs?

I don’t think so.

Okay. So now I’m going back to my childhood. You were evoking things from my childhood… Of course, full disclosure, I have a 16-year-old daughter, so you’re older than that, but there’s the gap there in our ages. And I go back to my childhood… Pogs were these - basically, bottle caps. And they were almost like pins, without the sticky part that you put in your shirt. And you would play games with them… I can’t remember the actual games, but people would just collect pogs. And it became a thing where you’d stack up your pile of pogs, and you’d – like trading cards. And the game became irrelevant, because it was all about which pogs you had… And then eventually, they fell out of favor, and then nobody wanted pogs anymore, and I’m sure there’s just boxes of pogs in various 40-something’s storage totes these days… But I’m just thinking about that because of the interest in the bottle caps almost outweighing anything else. It’s like “Gotta get the bottle cap.” So that’s pretty cool.

What have you learned through that about gamification? What works, what doesn’t work? Sometimes when you gamify things it can backfire, or not exactly produce the intended effect. Have you learned anything through these experiments?

Oh, yes. So much I’ve learned. Before I get to that, you talked about trading cards, pogs, something, something… I just wanted to say, I made a custom trading card game, a swag for Apocalypse, actually… It’s 18 custom cards, it’s entirely playable…

Just for Apocalypse?

Just for Apocalypse. I made it in a week. All 18 cards have entirely custom art done by community members.

That’s amazing.

Yeah. But just on what I’ve learned from gamification… I mean, there’s a ton of stuff. The first thing is probably just like - people get very into gamified things. I did not think bottle caps would be so valuable. But you have people who literally make a bag from an empty bag of chips that they literally tape to their hip, and they use it as a bag for their bottle caps. Or you have people just going to a bunch of workshops. Our workshop turnout was insane because of the way we gave out bottle caps. At a normal hackathon, what I typically see is you get maybe 10 percent of people going to every workshop, and that’s probably a pretty good number for larger hackathons… But at Apocalypse we literally had 50 to – I think it was 70 people go to one of our workshops. And that was pretty standard. So we just had a ton of people participating in our things.

As for what we could have done better, I think one of the problems is that going to workshops and activities oftentimes distracted from the actual hacking itself. What I want to try for another hackathon that I’m wanting to run is what if we have experience points as the currency instead, and how that would work.

But I think another thing I learned was just - I really need to actually price things better, because we had a bunch of hardware also for shop for bottle caps, and when you have a Raspberry Pi for 20 bottle caps, and you have a plushie for 10 bottle caps, and it’s worth way less, people are going to go for the Raspberry Pi. Things could have been priced way better on that scale.

[00:15:35.14] Yeah. One thing I’ve learned - I’ve seen this kind of gamification when it’s based on completion. Like, do a thing to get a thing. And then, of course, you can trade that thing in for something else. It’s like you said, sometimes it becomes more about the collecting of the item than it is about the actual engagement in the activity that you’re trying to promote… And so what you want to promote as the main objective becomes just this thing you have to do in order to actually win the game. I’ve seen this at conferences. So at a lot of conferences they have all these vendor booths… And of course, the vendors are there to meet people and show off what they’re up to, and stuff. So they want the attendees to come and talk to them. The attendees don’t necessarily have a reason to talk to them except for swag… And so we’ve seen conference organizers try to gamify that scenario, where they create a sub game where you’re collecting points, or you’re trying to complete them all in order to get some sort of a prize… And that gets the individuals to go and have a reason to go talk to each vendor, because you have to complete them all in order to win the game. And as somebody who’s been at these booths sometimes, the interactions are very - what’s the word…? Shallow. Almost like “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have to talk to you… Hey, can you scan my thing? Can I get that bottle cap? Can I get this completion marker?” You feel like you’re incentivizing the interaction, but you end up actually just creating a weird, awkward scenario, wherein they don’t really want the interaction, they want the end result.

I don’t know if there’s a workaround for that, but it’s just kind of an unfortunate thing sometimes, where it’s like, you don’t want it to become the main thing. You want it to be the thing that incentivizes the main thing. And if you make it too cool, it’s all people care about.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think that gamification should be something that makes people more encouraged to actually hack and do cool stuff and talk to people, rather than it is something that “Oh, you’re just doing it for the end result.” And that’s something I do want to play around with in later hackathons that I do run.

Yeah. How do you think you can do that?

I mean, once again, just trying to use experience points as the new currency, instead of having this middleman bottle caps, physical item as a thing. For example, instead of having “Oh, you go to workshops and activities to get these points” - which could definitely still happen, but just on a lesser scale - maybe encourage “Hey, if you work on your project and you show us the progress that you’ve had, then we will give you experience points, which you can then spend.” Or even have a ton of the swag we think that directly help you on your project. So for example, maybe you can get hardware through doing certain things, instead of getting other types of swag, which are less involved in the actual hacking itself.

No, I think that’s a really good point. Instead of focusing on participation or completion, actually have the incentive attached to some sort of meaningful progress, or practice in order to obtain progress. And then whether or not they want to be doing the practice or not - well, they’re getting it done anyways. They’re eating their vegetables as part of the process, versus just “Yeah, I showed up and I went to your workshop. Can I please have my bottle cap?” Interesting. Okay, so what are some games that you enjoy? I think you seem like a gamer. What’s interesting to you? What’s out there? What do you play? I think I read – is it Magic the Gathering, or something…?

Oh, yeah. Magic the Gathering is probably the more so recent one. When I was younger, I was really into Pokémon. I played Pokémon Shield when I was younger, when I was 13 or so. I’ve always been pretty big into the Pokémon franchise. Let me think what else is there…

Pokémon Go? Did you do any Pokémon Go?

Pokémon Go yes, but I like the actual games you can play on a game console.

You don’t want to go out in the real world, huh? You don’t want to walk around physical places…

No, I really don’t feel like touching grass right now…

[laughs] Alright, fair. Know what you want. That’s fair.

A ton of smaller indie games, such as Celeste - it’s a really cool 2D platformer. Their art is amazing. It’s been a lot of inspo for other things I’ve designed. Games like that, yeah.

Celeste, I haven’t heard of that one.

You haven’t heard of Celeste?

[00:19:50.26] No… You know, I’m old, so I don’t know the cool, new stuff. I’m also a Nintendo generation, so I’m not – Nintendo Switch. If it’s on the Switch, I might play it. If my kids are playing it, I might play it. But otherwise I’m just – I’m not gaming age anymore, unfortunately. So I haven’t heard of Celeste, but I’m looking at the artwork of it now, and I agree with you, it’s very beautiful.

Celeste has an amazing plot, or everything. When I was younger, I also played a ton of Splatoon 2.

Okay.

It’s also very heavy on the art, and the world building is actually pretty nice. There’s a plot and everything, but it’s a shooter game, where you go against people online. It’s on the Switch, so I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but…

Yeah, Splatoon I’m aware of. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Awesome. So I’m going to have to check out this Celeste game. It definitely looks cool. And now I’m just seeing… I’m searching for Celeste image search, and I see Earth Blade, which sounds like a new game from the makers of Celeste. Have you played that one?

No, I haven’t actually heard of that one, but I will check it out now.

Yeah, it looks like it’s pretty cool. Anyways, I get distracted easily, and here I am, looking at different artwork… So have you drawn for a long time? Is design and art something that you’ve been into, or is this a new skill that you’re developing with Hack Club?

So kind of both. Before COVID hit, I did a bunch of physical paper art things, with pencil and everything… After COVID hit, I kind of stopped doing art for a bit, but after I joined Hack Club, I actually started doing a ton of digital art, especially for Hack Club. I made a bunch of their stickers.

I actually really got into doing design and stuff in Figma, which is – you’ve probably heard of it. It’s very popular. But yeah, I love using Figma. I use it to design sites… I also use it for non – I’ve used Figma for a lot of unorthodox things, such as designing the 2D layout of this dinosaur bone thing that you can then basically put into another platform, extrude it a bit, and then 3D-print it. So I guess I can technically say I did 3D design modeling in Figma, which is… I mean, that’s pretty cool.

Oh, the dinosaur bones?

Well, you know those 2D cut out things you can – oftentimes they sell it in stores, and you can snap together the pieces…

Yeah.

One of those things I made, of our mascot at Hack Club, Orpheus.

Sweet.

I also do a bunch of logo design in Figma. The High Seas logo is actually made in Figma. I made it, it’s pretty cool.

Nice. So how do you find yourself adapting to web then for your deployment of your creations? Rather than on a physical bottle cap, or out there in the real world, or with pen and paper. You’re in Figma, you’re doing designs, and now you’re at the end of the day, you’re basically putting out websites. High Seas Hack Club is a website that you helped work on and help deploy live on stage at GitHub, which is cool… How do you find web development?

I mean, it’s pretty fun. I like being able to put the things that I create on a platform that’s accessible to people outside of what’s physically close to me. But also, on design and art itself, I do actually really enjoy vector art, and moving around points, and such… I find that when you do design things for web, things load much, much faster when it’s vector, just because of the nature of it, versus raster art. So honestly, it’s been pretty enjoyable.

Break: [00:23:17.21]

Tell me about Hack Club High Seas. “Build personal projects, get free stuff…” So, of course, there’s our incentives; lots of cool giveaways. What’s the big idea here? And maybe even some of the details.

Yeah, so Hack Club High Seas is this new program that we’re launching. It’s going to go until January 31st. We’ve partnered with GitHub in order to launch it. But the idea behind High Seas is that as a teenager, all you have to do is you code cool stuff, you code cool projects, and in return, you get cool stuff to help you keep on coding, keep on making cool projects. If you’re a teenager listening to this podcast right now, you should go check out highseas.hackclub.com. But basically, you’re able to get a bunch of these prizes that we have on the shop. It is very, very easy to get a ton of these things.

High Seas basically came almost from Arcade, which is a previous program that we launched this summer with GitHub. But the idea behind Arcade was also code cool stuff, get cool stuff in return. High Seas is basically a second version of that, that is on a web platform instead of in our Slack. And basically - yeah, you’re just able to get cool stuff. The logistics are way better here this time around. Total – we have around 10,000 teenagers already participating and signed up into High Seas on our platform. We have almost 30,000 hours currently logged. We have a ton of projects currently already submitted on the platform, and you’re able to see these projects when you log on, and stuff.

Very cool. Very cool. I was scrolling the High Seas website and it said “What will you make this winter?” And then I’ve found this – is it Dino? I assume it’s Dino. Click the Dino, or Deno… Is this the mascot?

That’s our mascot, Orpheus.

Well, I made the mistake of clicking the Dino for ideas, and only a mistake because I’m trying to hear what you have to say. But then the Dino started talking to me [unintelligible 00:29:57.08] “Did you ever hear the tall tale of the invisible treasure map that reveals hidden snacks?” So potentially a cool idea you could build, I suppose, for Hack Seas High Club, or Hack Club High Seas. Is that the idea here? If you don’t have an idea, you’re going to spit out a few for them.

Yeah. Even if you don’t have an idea, there’s always a Dino you can click on to spit out some ideas.

And also, Hack Club has a variety of other programs you can participate in, that will also be submitted to High Seas. For example, Sprigg, as I mentioned earlier - you can code a game with our custom game engine platform thing, and you can get a game console, but you can also submit it to High Seas. We also have things like – a ton of PCB design, just workshops, and things you can get in return, such as that. There’s just a variety of programs on the Hack Club page. If you’re a teenager listening to this, you should definitely check them out. There’s a ton of tutorials and workshops teaching you how to make a ton of stuff.

So cool. So who all is eligible then for this? You said teenagers, but is it more specific than that?

Basically, if you’re in high school or younger, you’re able to participate. So basically 18 and under.

Okay. So you are not participating in this, you are just merely a facilitator, I assume.

Yeah.

“Yeah”, she says remorsefully. Okay, how much does it cost?

Oh, it is completely free. Hack Club and GitHub is paying for everything. You do not have to pay a cent. It’s completely free. We ship everything out to you.

Some of these prizes cost a lot of money. If you’re actually going to go out and buy an iPad or a Framework laptop, which I’ve recently spec-ed out… So this is just out of the goodness of GitHub’s heart, or - how does the money come in?

Yeah. So GitHub gave us a ton of money. Not sure if I’m allowed to disclose how much. Also, a ton of the prizes on the shop are actually sponsored by the companies themselves. For example, Framework just gave us a bunch of laptops. I think they also did that with Arcade, which is pretty cool. If you’re a part of a company and you want to put a product into our shop, feel free to contact us. We’re always looking for more cool stuff to give out to teenagers. But yeah.

[00:32:05.26] I need to show this to some of my teenagers, because we have been playing this game called Nitro Type - by “we”, I mean my sons have been… Which is basically a gamified typing website, like teach them to type… And the amount of engagement that sucker has drawn, especially out of my 10-year-old, is somewhat miraculous. If I show them - and they can’t win anything with that. I think it’s just you get points, and then you can build a team… It’s like a racing-themed learn-how-to-type program. If you show them actual, real hardware that they can potentially win, such as a Bamboo A1 Mini or a Flipper Zero… I mean, I can imagine that this is the easiest sell in history to get people involved, isn’t it?

Yeah, definitely. If you’re a teenager and you want awesome prizes…

If you qualify, right?

Yeah. Just go to highseas.hackclub.com, and… Also, we ship everyone who signs up free stickers. So you don’t even have to do anything technically to get the first thing shipped to you; literally, just sign up and we will give you stickers of the High Seas logo, among other things.

Nice. And so I see now perhaps your bottle caps idea moving over to this, because now we have doubloons. This is basically the equivalent of your – this is your purchasing power here.

Yeah. It’s funny, because I’m pretty sure that the inspiration of the Arcade shop, which is the thing that came before High Seas, is directly from Apocalypse economy; the idea of being able to purchase things using a currency, instead of just “Do something, get something directly in return.” There’s like this middleman that the currency kind of acts as.

Right. Which kind of gives you some more agency, right?

Definitely.

Because instead of saying “Well, if I do eight hours, I get a domain for a year”, it’s “If I get eight hours, I get 40 doubloons.” Roughly. I’m just making the numbers up. “And I can spend those on a domain for a year, or I can save up for the bigger thing, and I can continue to go.” And so I get agency on what I actually am going for, versus like “At this threshold, you get this prize”, which I may not necessarily want.

Definitely.

That’s cool.

That’s something that we’re trying to do with High Seas, because we’ve noticed that people want a lot of different prizes and stuff, and they all have different tastes and opinions and what they do want to spend their things on… So the model of High Seas basically gives them so much more freedom. And in return, they’re able to actually create better. Because if you always wanted a Raspberry Pi Zero, but somebody else wants, I don’t know, a 3D printer to be able to prototype things… Well, now these two people can get these two different things.

Now, imagine a 17-year-old Jerod; a little coder Jerod at 17… Which - when I was 17, I could code exactly zero things. In fact, I was so impressed by one of my high school friends who was in coding class - I didn’t even know there was one - and he could change a sprite on a web page. It was a Secret of Mana sprite. I’m not sure if you know that video game. It’s an old one, but a really good one.

The main character would be Color. And in the game Secret of Mana, if you die, you turn into stone at some point. There’s a spell cast, and you turn into stone. And he actually could change it to where he – and I remember him being like “Dude, you’ve got to see this. Come look what I did.” And he brought me over to the computer terminal. And it was GeoCities…. I’m just giving out nouns now for the old people to also remember the nostalgia… And if you hovered over that thing, it would turn from full-colored sprite to stone. And it was amazing. And I was so impressed. I’m like “This guy is a computer hacker.” So that was me probably at 17. But imagine me at 17 with a little bit of coding skills. Maybe I’ve been hanging out in Hack Club for a little bit, maybe I’ve been doing some stuff… I can handle an on-hover event inside JavaScript… And I want a Framework laptop, gosh darn it. And I’m broke, because I’m 17. I’ve got a bunch of time, but not a lot of money. It says here that’s going to cost me 4,980 doubloons. What’s my straightest line between here and there? How do I get that many doubloons?

I mean, the easiest way is just to build a cool project that other people also like. In High Seas - and this is what’s different in Arcade - when you submit a project, other people are going to also be able to vote for your project between like another project. And so you’re constantly pitted against other projects. This is how we’re testing for whether something is quality or whether or not it’s just [unintelligible 00:36:48.21] And this also kind of ties into the gamification thing. People are much more likely to actually submit and build cool things, rather than, I don’t know, a simple site, and say it took them 50 hours. They’re actually going to put time and effort into something. They think that it’s actually going to be compared against other people, and that better projects actually get this multiplier that we have, that gives them more doubloons. So the best way to just get doubloons is just to build cool things and submit them.

Okay. So I have to impress people, basically. I can’t merely put the time in. I also have to produce something of quality.

Yes, that’s what we’re trying to encourage people to do within High Seas. And quality is quite subjective, but generally it’s things that are technical, creative. Don’t try to be corporate. Just build things that other teenagers such as yourself also probably want and like to see.

Right. We’re here to hack, we’re not here to make the next Facebook. We’re not trying to be corporate. We’re trying to be cool.

Yeah.

And so if I build my thing… Let’s imagine that 17-year-old Jerod goes out and builds an invisible treasure map that reveals hidden snacks, as Dino has suggested. Then what do I do? I’ve got my app, I’m done… What happens next?

Yes. So after you log into High Seas - and you log in using your Hack Club Slack… So yeah, join our Slack. After that, you’re able to submit it to our harbor, and you’re able to basically ship out your project. After that, you have to vote for a few projects yourself before your project is officially shipped out. But your project then goes into this Wonder Dome, which is where it’s pitted against other projects. After a certain amount of people have voted on your project, you then get a doubloon payout. And when you get those doubloons, you’re able to spend them in the shop that we have.

Okay. So did you build all this?

No. I only made the High Seas landing page, which is a pretty small part of it. We have a ton of people working on the High Seas web page in total, around probably 20-ish people working on High Seas. Probably five main people on it. But we have a ton of people… One of the main ones, Ben - cool guy - built a hell of a ton.

Shout-out to Ben.

Yeah, shout-out to Ben. He built a ton of the site himself. Really cool.

Okay. I’m just imagining Zach, who created this whole thing… Kind of like – it’s a gross analogy, but kind of like Peter Pan. Just hanging out with these awesome hacker kids, who are building amazing stuff, and having awesome ideas… And it probably keeps him young, and it keeps him creative and youthful. Do you think that’s accurate? Do you think Zach’s having fun with this project?

Yeah. I mean, Zach is mostly in the team. He’s the guy who makes sure that everything’s actually done on time, and makes sure that –

Yeah, because –

He’s the guy that makes sure we’re not just goofing off, and makes sure that things are shippable to people.

Right. So he’s kind of like Peter Pan when he has to leave Neverland and go back to the real world and be like “Okay, this thing has to actually ship, because GitHub gave us a bunch of money and we have to do the thing.” So yeah, you’ve got to get stuff done, but it’s still really cool stuff that y’all are working on.

[00:40:06.11] Yeah. Zach is a very motivating person to be around.

I bet. He’s definitely inspired quite a movement here. Here’s something that’s really cool for our developer audience who’s listening to this, is that there’s special prizes. So of course, I pointed out the most expensive one, or what looks the most expensive, which would be the Framework laptop. Maybe the iPad’s actually – no, I mean, by doubloon count, it’s about twice as much as an iPad. So there you go. There’s the most expensive hardware. However, there’s also special prizes, which - you can’t buy this with money: access to really smart people.

So there’s two special prizes, and if you’re lucky enough to win, you can get a one-on-one call with Guido Van Rossum, who of course our listener knows. Creative Python. Or a one-on-one call with Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C# and TypeScript. That is cool. Have you met these guys?

I mean, personally, no. But as somebody who uses Python a lot, and that was my first coding language… I mean, they sound amazing. They sound really dope. And that’s not even all the special prizes we’ve got lined up. We’ve got more just amazing people who are coming on to just AMA with a Hack Clubber who built something cool with their things. We have a ton of just really cool things in the shop.

That’s really awesome, because we’ve been talking with really cool, smart people for many years here on this podcast, and we’ve had Anders on this show, but we’ll say that, you know, a one-on-one with Guido… I’ve definitely tried to line that up a few times, and for some reason he’s been elusive for us. So this is priceless right here. I can’t even get this with money. But you can get this if you build something cool on Hacks Seas.

Yeah. And if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re somebody who has built something really cool, that a lot of people use, feel free to also come in contact with us, and see if you want to also host an AMA with us.

Sounds good. A couple of other things that people might be wondering… Can you build more than one project? Or is it just like one and done? Can you blast, can you go for the quantity?

You can build as many projects as you want. And the nice thing about High Seas is the projects that you go against in the Wonder Dome are projects that also spent a similar amount of time. So just build as many as you want, ship as many as you want.

Love it.

Break: [00:42:25.10]

So what’s next for you, Acon, inside of Hack Club, or outside? What are you up to? What are you interested in? What are you working on?

I mean, recently I went to Counterspell, which is this most recent hackathon that Hack Club had… And it basically makes me want to get onto that hackathon organizing wave again. I’ve previously organized two; one was Apocalypse, the other one was Jam Hacks 8. But basically, both of those, both pretty big, in-person hackathons.

Other than that, I’m also trying to run a few smaller programs of my own. One of those is pretty similar to Sprigg, called Hackapet. Basically, I’m trying to get into PCB design a little bit. It’s like, you code a virtual pet and you get this basically Tamagotchi. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It’s a game that’s pretty popular…

Tamagotchi… Now you’re going back to the time of pogs, actually. Tamagotchi goes way back.

Yeah. Basically, trying to make a Tamagotchi clone for Hack Clubbers.

Now you got me curious. Tamagotchi, Wikipedia. Frst released in 1996. So that’s pretty old, right?

Yeah.

And now let’s go Pogs, Wikipedia, and let’s see what time frame. It’s gotta be right in there. Oh, this is interesting… So Pogs is based on the game of Milk Caps, which originated in Hawaii during the 1920s or 1930s. And then of course, the Pog brand was the one that came around and got it going… And that was 1991. So a little bit older than Tamagotchi, but definitely in that same ’90s time frame. Cool. So you are on a gap year…

Yup.

What are you going to do after that?

I mean, I’m planning to just – current plan is to go off to university.

Okay.

And I’m from Canada, so… Yeah.

Somewhere in Canada, or somewhere here in the States?

Yeah, somewhere in Canada.

And studying computers? Are you going to move on to something else? You’re a jack of all trades, as you call yourself, so… Are you interested enough to stay in the software industry at this point? Or are you more interested in game design, and moving on? I know you – you haven’t said it on the show yet, but you’ve also had some experience in debate, and other things… Maybe writing? What are you thinking?

Yeah, so I’m currently looking to major in math, but probably going to minor in something else. I’m pretty interested in the computer science field, and wanting to maybe get jobs later on in it. But yeah, there’s a lot.

Alright. Well, the website is highseas.hackclub.com, for teenagers 18 and under. So if you are listening to this as a teen, check it out. If you’re listening to this more of my age group, pass it off to your niece or nephew, or son or daughter, or somebody who might find value here, and maybe earn some stuff as they build cool things. Anything else, Acon, that we didn’t cover yet?

I mean, I think that was pretty good coverage. Just, once again, High Seas has a lot of teenagers in it. You get to meet a community full of people, and you get to join our Hack Club Slack which has 40,000 teenagers on it, which is pretty big. If you’re somebody who is really into tech, or want to get into tech, High Seas is a great starting point for doing all of that. Just meet cool people, build cool things and get cool things in return.

Sounds like a great deal. Alright, that is our show for this week. Acon, thank you so much for joining me and explaining this cool project coming out of Hack Club. And to our listener, thanks for sticking around, and we’ll talk to you on the next one.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.