The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Hack Club takes to the High Seas (Interview)

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Jerod is joined by Hack Clubber Acon, who is fresh off the GitHub Universe stage and ready to tell us all about High Seas, a new initiative by Zach Latta and the Hack Club crew that's incentivizing teens to build cool personal projects by giving away free stuff.

What up, fellow Hack Club nerds? I'm Jared, and you are listening to The Change Log, where each week we talk to the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world to pick their brain, to learn from their mistakes, to be inspired by their accomplishments, and to have a whole lot of fun along the way. Today I'm joined by hack clubber Akon, who is fresh off the GitHub Universe stage and ready to tell us all about Hi-C's, a new initiative by Zach Lauda and the Hack Club crew that's

incentivizing teens to build cool personal projects by giving away free stuff. But first, a quick thank you to our partners at Fly.io. Yes, you know we love Fly. It's the home of changelog.com after all, and it's the public cloud for developers who ship. Learn all about it at fly.io. Okay, Akon from Hack Club on the changelog. Let's do it. What's up, friends? I'm here with Jasmine Cassis from Sentry. They just wrapped up their launch week and they're always shipping.

So, Jasmine, what do you think about sentry's mantra of always be shipping so to me century always shipping is just in the spirit of iteration and constantly improving what we're doing to make developers ship with more confidence we're always listening to our customers needs and pain points we're always iterating on products that we have launched and on top of that we are also even if we look at things that customers haven't explicitly asked for, we are trying to innovate and provide solutions that I think would be really beneficial to help developers debug with more confidence. I love that. So I know there's been an addition to one of the features out there that kind of exemplifies that. Can you share more? Yes. So something that the team has been developing for a long time

and is currently in open beta is our mobile replay product. So historically, replay has always been for web, but now we have brought it onto mobile, specifically Android, iOS, and React Native. So this allows our developers, no matter what stack they're using to get video- Android, iOS, and React Native. So this allows our developers, no matter what stack they're using, to get video-like reproductions that actually help users see the repro steps

that led to an error and also understand the user impact of an error. Okay, Sentry is always shipping, always helping developers ship with confidence. That's what they do. Check out their launch week details in the link in the show notes. And of course, check out Session Replay's new edition mobile replay in the link in the show notes as well. And here's the best part. If you want to try Sentry, you can do so

today with $100 off the team plan. Totally free for you to try out for you and your team. Use the code changelog. Go to sentry.io. go to sentry.io again sentry.io all right i am here with akon an 18 yearold 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 Lada. If you don't recall, that is a community where teen hackers from around the world can code together. Akon, 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 Hat Club High Cs on stage at GitHub Universe. And so we've decided to do more with Hat Club and invite all of you here, even if you're not a teen, to help us out. But there was one person who impressed me so much that I wanted them to join me on stage for the next announcement. So people of universe, please join me in welcoming one of Hack Club's students, Akon. thanks kyle and hello universe

that'd be pretty cool right yeah no 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 a very various like 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 Various, like, 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, like, I don't know, infrastructure, AI, things like that. Instead, you try to just solve for the zombie apocalypse, which is like this entirely fictional thing does not exist. You can like build anything you want to 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 like in a lot of hackathons, people keep on building the same things over and over again. The creativity in a lot of projects are like practically non-existent. They feel very corporate. And 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 like a three foot tall pea shooter that shot out like these balls. And it's like from that Plants vs. Zombies games. There's a hell of a ton of like RC cars where you can control something remotely

and the car moves and like they built the car themselves. There's a ton of just cool things like 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. like 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 peer vote hackathon. So in a lot of traditional hackathons, you have like a bunch of like judges who are like 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 like 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 like a bunch of tables. Like that was such a cool part of it. 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, right. For us by us, you know, 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, uh,

since then, like, at Hack Club, I've written GitHub Education Newsletter, like, takeover type things. But basically, Hack Club had this program called Sprig that was going on, 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? Like, 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 like our biggest thing. Other than high Cs, 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 something to write so one of the other hat club employees called me up and was like hey do you want to like work with me to write this takeover of this newsletter? And basically, it would just be me writing as myself. I go like, hey, I'm Akon. I'm a hat clubber. And here's a couple of cool things you should know about Arcade.

And that's kind of how it started. And I've read 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 like 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 like to think of myself more of a like 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 um i did a ton of like 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 like pretty interested into like game design and how to gamify things

even like outside of games for example at apocalypse which was a pretty gamified hackathon i toyed around with this idea of basically like having an economy in the hackathon so at apocalypse we had something called like 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 like this one giant table and letting people just like 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. Like people were obsessed with the bottle caps. Like before the hackathon, I thought like nobody would be interested in this or like very few people would participate in it but at the hackathon like the inflation firstly was crazy so we had like these giant plushies that we bought previously that we were like selling

with with bottle caps before these plushies at the very start of the hackathon they went for like 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 costs however much as you want it to cost because guess what we live in an apocalypse so that's that's a really good point yeah so during like the middle ish of the hackathon on like the second night we held like this giant auction there were like 30 people just lined up in a table we had like a stage and everything it was epic one of the plushies there sold for like 102 bottle caps which is crazy but yeah and then after that the value bottle caps just massively dropped and nobody cared about it but it's it's kind of like crypto yeah i was gonna say that sounds like a like tulips. Yeah. Have you ever heard of pogs? I don't think so. Okay. So now I'm going back to my childhood, you are evoking things from my

childhood, of course, full disclosure, I have a 16 year old daughter. So you know, you're, you're older than that. But there's the gap there in our ages. So 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 trade in cards. And the game became irrelevant because it because all about which pogs you had

and then eventually you know they fell out of favor and then nobody wanted pogs anymore and i'm sure there's just like boxes of pogs and various 40 somethings you know storage totes these days but i'm just thinking about that because of the interest in the bottle caps you know almost outweighing anything else it's's like, gotta get the bottlecaps. So that's pretty cool. What have you learned through that about gamification? Like 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 yeah, so much I've learned. Before I get to that, you talked about trading cards, 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 on just 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 like i did not think bottle caps would be so valuable but you have people who literally like make a bag from like an empty bag of chips that they like literally tape to their hip and they use it as like a bag for their bottle caps or like you have people just like going to a bag of chips that they like literally tape to their hip and they use it as like a bag for their

bottle caps or like you have people just like going to a bunch of workshops like our workshop turnout was insane because of the way we gave out bottle caps like at a normal hackathon what i typically see is you get like maybe 10 of people going to every workshop that's like probably a pretty good number for larger hackathons but But at Apocalypse, we literally had like 50 to like, I think it was like 70 people go to one of our workshops. And that was like pretty standard. So we just had a ton of people participating in our things. As for what could have done better, I think one of the problems is that like going to workshops and activities oftentimes distracted from the actual hacking itself. What I want to try for another hackathon that I'm like 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 like 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 like a raspberry pie for 20 bottle caps and you have a plushie for 10 bottle caps and it's worth way less like people are gonna go for the raspberry pie things could have been priced way better on that scale yeah one thing i've learned i've seen this kind of gamification when it's like you know based on completion like do a thing to get a thing and then of course you can trade that thing in for something else is 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 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, right? 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 ahead and have a reason to go talk to each vendor because, you know, 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? You know, like, can I get that bottle cap? You know, can I get this completion marker? Where you feel like you're incentivizing the interaction, but you end up actually just like 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 like 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 just gamification should be something that makes people more encouraged to actually like hack and do cool stuff and like talk to people rather than it is something that like oh you're just doing it for the end result and that's right 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 it's just like trying to use experience points as the new currency

instead of having like this middleman, like bottle caps, physical item as a thing, right? So for example, instead of having like, oh, you go to like workshops and activities to get these points, which could definitely still happen, but just on a lesser scale, maybe encourage like, hey, if you work on your project and you show us a progress that you've had, then we will give you experience points, which you can then spend or even have like a lot a ton of the swag we think that directly help you on your project so for example maybe you can get like hardware through doing certain things instead of getting other types of swag which are like 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. You know, they're eating their vegetables as part of the process versus just, yeah, I showed up and I,

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, uh, what's interesting to you? What's out there? What do you play? I think I read, is it Magic the Gathering? Something that you're- Oh yeah. Magic the Gathering is probably like the more so recent one. When I was younger, I was really into Pokemon. I played Pokemon Shield when I was younger, when I was like 13 or so. I've always been pretty big into the Pokemon franchise. Let me think what else is there.

Pokemon Go. Did you do any Pokemon Go? Pokemon Go, yes, but I like the actual games you can play on like 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. All right, fair. Know what you want. That's fair.

A ton of smaller indie games, such as Celeste, is 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 for other things I've designed. Okay. Games like that, yeah. Celeste, I haven't heard of that one. You haven't heard of Celeste? No, you know, I'm old, so.

Okay. I don't know the cool new stuff. You know, I'm also a Nintendo generation, so, like, I'm not, like, 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, you know, 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, like, plot or everything. When I was younger, I also played a ton of Splatoon 2. Okay. It's also very heavy on, like, the art, and the world building is actually pretty nice there's like a plot and everything but it's like 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 um yeah it's pretty cool awesome so i'm gonna have to check out the celeste game 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 Hat Club? So kind of both. Before COVID hit, I did a bunch of like physical like paper art things with like, you know, pencil and everything. After COVID hit, I kind of stopped doing art for a bit. But after I joined Hat Club, I actually started doing a ton of like digital art, especially for Hat Club. I made a bunch of like their stickers i actually really got into doing design and stuff in figma which is you've probably heard of it um it's very popular but yeah i i love using figma i use it to like design sites i also use it for

like non i've used figma for a lot of unorthodox things such as like 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 a like 3d design modeling in figma which is okay i mean that's pretty cool of dinosaur bones well you know what those like 2d cut out like things you can sometimes they sell it in stores and you you can snap together the pieces. Yeah. They got one of those things I made of our mascot at Hat Club, Orpheus. Sweet.

I also do a bunch of logo design in Figma. The High Seas logo was actually made in Figma. I made it. It was pretty cool. So how do you find yourself adapting to web then for your deployment of your creations? Like 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 at the end of the day, you're basically putting out websites, right?

Like Haxes High Club is a website that you helped work on and helped 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, unlike 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 it is things load much much faster when it's vector just because of the nature of it versus like raster art so right honestly it's been pretty enjoyable What's up, friends?

I'm here with Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly. As you know, we love Fly. That is the home of changelog.com. But Kurt, I want to know how you explain Fly to developers. Do you tell them a story first? How do you do it? I kind of change how I explain it based on almost like the generation of developer I'm talking to. So like for me, I built and shipped apps on Heroku, which if you've never used Heroku,

is roughly like building and shipping an app on Vercel today. It's just it's 2024 instead of 2008 or whatever. And what frustrated me about doing that was I didn't, I got stuck. You can build and ship a Rails app with a Postgres on Heroku the same way you can build and ship a Next.js app on Vercel. But as soon as you want to do something interesting, like as soon as you want to, at the time, I think one of the things I ran into is like, I wanted to add what used to be like kind of the basis for elastic search. I want to do full text search in my applications. You're kind of hit this wall with something like Heroku where you can't really

do that. I think lately we've seen it with like people wanting to add LLMs kind of inference stuff to their applications on Vercel or Heroku or Cloudflare or whoever these days they've, they've started like releasing abstractions that sort of let you do this. But I can't just run the model I'd run locally on these black box platforms that are very specialized. For the people my age, it's always like, oh, Heroku is great, but I outgrew it. And one of the things that I felt like I should be able to do when I was using Heroku was run my

app close to people in Tokyo for users that were in Tokyo. And that was never possible. For modern generation devs, it's a lot more Vercel based. It's a lot like Vercel is great right up until you hit one of their hard line boundaries and then you're kind of stuck. There's the other one we've had someone within the company, I can't remember the name of this game, but the tagline was like five minutes to start forever to master. That's sort of how our pitching flies. Like you can get an app going in five minutes, but there's so much depth to the platform that you're never gonna run out of things you can do with it.

So unlike AWS or Heroku or Vercel, which are all great platforms, the cool thing we love here at ChangeLab most about Fly is that no matter what we wanna do on the platform, we have primitives, we have abilities, and we as developers can charge our own mission on Fly. It is a no limits platform built for developers, and we think you should try it out. Go to fly.io to learn more. Launch your app in five minutes. Too easy. Once again,

fly.io. And I'm also here with Kyle Carberry, co-founder and CTO at Coder.com. And they pair well with Fly.io. Coder is an open source cloud development environment, a CDE. You can host this in your cloud or on premise. So Kyle, walk me through the process. A CDE lets developers put their development environment in the cloud. Walk me through the process. They get an invite from their platform team to join their coder instance.

They got to sign in, set up their keys, set up their code editor. How's it work? Step one for them, we try to make it remarkably easy for the dev. We never gate any features ever for the developer. They'll click that link that their platform team sends out. They'll sign in with OIDC or Google, and they'll really just press one button to create a development environment. Now that might provision like a Kubernetes pod or an AWS VM, you know, we'll show the user what's provisioned, but they don't really have to care. From that point, you'll see a couple buttons appear to open the editors that you're used to, like VS Code Desktop or, you know, VS Code through the web, or you can install our CLI. Through our CLI, you really just log into Coder and we take care of

everything for you. When you SSH into a workspace, you don't have to worry about keys. It really just kind of like beautifully, magically works in the background for you and connects you to your workspace. We actually connect peer-to-peer as well. You know, if the Coder server goes down for a second because of an upgrade, you don't have to worry about disconnects. And we always get you the lowest latency possible. One of our core values is we'll never be slower than SSH, period, full stop. And so we connect you peer-to-peer directly to the workspace. So it feels just as native as it possibly could. Very cool. Thank you, Kyle. Well, friends, it might be time to consider a cloud development environment, a CDE. And open source is awesome. And Coder is fully open source.

You can go to Coder.com right now, install Coder open source, start a premium trial, or get a demo. For me, my first step, I installed it on my Proxmox box and played with it. It was so cool. I loved it. Again, Coder.com. That's C-O-D-E-R.com. Tell me about Hat Club High Seas.

Build personal projects, get free stuff. So, of course, there's our incentives, like 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 but we 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 high seas.hacklub.com but basically you're a teenager listening to this podcast right now you should go check out high seas dot hat club dot 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 hat with github but the idea behind arcade was also code cool, get cool stuff in return. HiSees 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 like way better here this time around. Total, we have around like 10,000 teenagers already participating and like signed up into HiSees in our platform. We have like almost 30,000 hours currently logged.

We have a ton of projects currently already submitted in the platform, and you're able to see these projects when you log on and stuff. So, yeah. Very cool. Very cool. I was scrolling the HiSeas website, and it said, what will you make this winter? And then I found this, is it Dino? I assume it's Dino. Click the Dino or Dino?

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 after it had thought up of an idea. You ever hear the tall tale of the invisible treasure map

that reveals hidden snacks? So, you know, potentially a cool idea you could build, I suppose, for Hack Seas High Club or Hack Club High Seas. Is that the idea here? Is you don't have an idea, you're going to spit out a few for them.

Yeah, like 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 submittable to high seas for example sprig as i mentioned earlier you can code a game with her like custom like 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 like pcb design just workshops and like things you can get in return such as that. There's just like a variety of programs on the Hat Club page. If you're a teenager listening to this, you should definitely check them out. There's a ton of like tutorials and workshops teaching you how to make a ton of stuff. So cool. So who all is eligible then for this? You said teenager, 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 remorseful. Okay.

How much does it cost? Oh, it is completely free. Hat Club and GitHub is paying for everything. You do not have to pay a cent. Yeah, no, it's completely free. We ship everything out to you. Some of these prizes cost a lot of money. Like if you're actually going to go out and buy an iPad or a framework, which I recently specced out. So this is just out of the goodness

of GitHub's heart or is this, or this, how does the money come in? Yeah. So GitHub gave us like 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 like 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. I need to show this to some of my teenagers

because we have been playing this game called NitroType. 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 like 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. Yeah, and you qualify, right?

Yeah. Just go to highseeds.hotclub.com. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, 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 Hi-C's 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, right, of 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 like do something get something directly in return there's like this like middle man that the currency kind of access right which kind of gives you some more agency, right? Definitely. Instead of saying, well, if I do eight hours, I get a domain for a year. 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, that's cool. That's something that we're trying to do with high seas because we've noticed that like 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 like actually create better because if you always wanted like a raspberry

pi zero but somebody else wants like i don't know a 3d printer to be able to prototype things right well now these two people can get these two different things. Now imagine 17-year-old Jared and a little coder, a little coder Jared 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 webpage. 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. You get a spell cast on, you turn into stone.

And he actually could change it to where he, and I remember him being like, dude, you gotta see this. Come look what I did. And he like brought me over to a 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. 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 like, amazing. And I was so impressed. I'm like, this guy's 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 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 about it in arcade, is 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 like whether or something is quality or whether or not it's just slop and this also kind of ties into the gamification thing people are much more likely to actually submit and build cool things rather than like i don't know a simple site and say it took them like 50 hours like they're actually going to put into like time and effort into something they think that it's 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, just build cool things, 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 Cs. And quality is quite subjective, but generally it's things that are like 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, right? We're not trying to be corporate. We're trying to hack. We're not here to make the next Facebook, right? We're not trying to be corporate. We're trying to be cool. And so if I build my thing, let's imagine that 17-year-old Jared goes out and builds an invisible treasure map that reveals hidden snacks, as Dino has suggested. Then what do I do? I got my app. I'm done.

What happens next? Yeah, so after you log in to Hi high seas and you log in using your hat club slack um 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 products 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 onto 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 uh no i 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 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 um around probably like 20 ish people working on high seas probably like five people who work like main people on it but we have a ton of people um one of the main ones ben cool guy bill like a hell of a ton. Yeah, shout out to Ben. He built a ton of the site himself. Really cool, yeah. Okay.

I'm just imagining Zach who created this whole thing. Kind of like, you know, it's a gross analogy, but kind of like Peter Pan, you know, just like hanging out with these awesome hacker kids who are building amazing stuff and like having awesome ideas. And it probably keeps them young and keeps them keeps them uh creative and and youthful you think that's accurate you think zach's having fun with this project yeah i mean zach is mostly like in the team he's the guy who like makes sure that everything's actually done on time and make sure right because he's the yeah

yeah yeah he's the guy that like makes sure we're not just like goofing off and make sure that things are shippable to people. 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, you know, GitHub gave us a bunch of money and we have to do the thing. So yeah, you got to get stuff done, but it's still really cool

stuff that y'all are working on yeah zach is a very motivating person to be around i bet he's uh 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 what looks like the most expensive, which would be the Framework laptop. Maybe the iPads 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, created Python, or a one-on-one call with Anders Heilsberg, the creator of C Sharp and TypeScript. That is cool.

Have you met these guys? I mean, personally, no, but as somebody who like uses Python a lot, and that was like my first coding language. I mean, they sound amazing. They sound really dope. And that's not even all the special prizes we got lined up. Like we got more just amazing people who are coming on to just AMA with a hack club or who builds 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 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 HackSees. 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 other things that people might be wondering, can you build more than one project? Is it just like one and done or 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.

What's up, friends? I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Assembly AI, founder and CEO, Dylan Fox. Dylan, tell me about Universal One. This is the newest, most powerful speech AI model to date. You released this recently. Tell me more. So Universal One is our flagship industry leading model for speech to text and various other speech understanding tasks. So it's about a year long effort that really is the culmination of like the years that we've spent building infrastructure and tooling at Assembly to even train large scale speech AI models. It was trained on about 12.5 million hours of voice data, multilingual, super wide range of domains and sources of audio data. So it's super robust model. We're seeing developers use it for extremely high accuracy, low cost, super fast,

speech to text and speech understanding tasks within their products, within automations, within workflows that they're building at their companies or within their products. Okay automations, within workflows that they're building at their companies or within their products. Okay, constantly updated speech AI models at your fingertips, well, at your API fingertips, that is. A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free

right there in the browser, or you can get started with a $50 credit at assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI. So what's next for you, Akon, 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 basically makes me want to get onto that hackathon organizing wave again. I've previously organized two, one was

Apocalypse, the other one was Jamhacks 8 but basically both of those both like pretty big in-person hackathons. Other than that I'm also trying to run a few smaller programs of my own. One of those pretty similar to Sprig called Hack-A-Pet. 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 like Tamagotchi. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's like a game that's pretty popular. Tamagotchi.

Now you're going back to the time of Pogs, actually. Tamagotchi goes way back. Trying to make a Tamagotchi clone for hack lovers now you got me curious tamagotchi wikipedia first released in 1996 so that's pretty old right and then to the and now let's go pogs wikipedia and let's see what time frame it's got to 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, 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 yep what are you gonna do after that i mean i'm planning just like current plan is to go off to university okay and like i'm from canada so yeah somewhere in canada or somewhere here in the states yeah so i'm 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 like stay in the software industry at this point or are you like more interested in game design and moving on or i know you've you haven't said on the show yet, but you've also had some experience in debate and other things, maybe writing. What are you thinking? Yeah, so currently looking to major in math, but probably going to like minor in something else.

I'm pretty interested in like the computer science field and wanting to maybe like get jobs later on in it. But yeah, there's that. All right, 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, Akon, 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. You get to join our hat club Slack, which has like 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 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.

Akon, thank you so much for joining me and explaining this cool project coming out of Hat 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. All right. That is our interview for this week. Thanks for riding along on the high seats. Did you know our seventh annual State of the Log episode is right around the corner? You should totally leave us a voicemail

that we can play and respond to on that episode. And yes, we are doing Breakmaster Cylinder remixes again this time around, so you definitely want to get your voicemail submitted in time to get your remix on. Head to changelog.fm slash S-O-T-L. That's short for State of the Log. And submit yours today. It's linked up in your chapter data and show notes too. Thanks again to our awesome partners at Fly.io, to Sentry, and to Assembly AI for sponsoring this episode. Coming up next, Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert join us to talk shop.

That's on Change Talking, friends. And that's on Friday. But that is all for now. We'll talk to you again on Friday. Thank you. Game on.