The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - How do you do, fellow Hack Clubbers? (Interview)

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

This week we're joined by Zach Latta, the Founder of Hack Club. At 16, Zach tested out of high school and moved to SF to join Yo as their first engineer. After playing a key role at Yo, he founded Hack Club to help teen hackers start coding clubs around the world. Today, teen hackers can meet IRL, online, at a hackathon, or leverage Hack Club Bank a fiscal sponsor to create their own organization. Hack Club is the program Zach wished he had in high school.

What's up, welcome back. This week on the Change Log, we're talking to Zach Latta, the founder of Hack Club. At 16, Zach tested out of high school and moved to SF to join Yo as their first engineer. Put your hands up if you remember Yo. Yo, yo, yo. After playing a key role at Yo, he founded Hack Club to help teen hackers start coding clubs around the world. Today, teen hackers can meet IRL, online, at a hackathon, or leverage Hack Club Bank as a fiscal sponsor to create their own organization. Hack Club has the support of the likes of Tom Preston Warner, co-founder of GitHub, Quinn Slack, CEO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, and even Elon Musk. Wow. More than 25,000 teen hackers from all over the world meet online every single day at HackClub.com.

And today, Zach shares the behind the scenes of this cool movement. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at Fastly and Fly. This podcast got to you fast because Fastly our partners at Fastly and Fly. This podcast got you fast because Fastly, well, they're fast globally. Check them out at fastly.com. And our good friends over at fly.io, well, they help us put our app and our database close to our users with no ops. Make sure you check them out at fly.io. What's up, friends? This episode is brought to you by DevCycle.

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a PR that says, hey, here's a PR, remove this flag, it's no longer being used from your code base. And you can choose to merge it or not. So that's another thing that I fundamentally believe that like, yes, flags can become tech debt. And we've got to work on that full developer workflow from end to end that it's great that it's super easy to add flags to your code base, but your flags should be visible to you all throughout your development pipeline, everywhere from your IDE to your CLI, to your Git repository, to your alerting and monitoring system. And then we should tell you when you should remove those flags from your code base and help you clean them up automatically.

So it's just as important to clean them up as it is to create flags easily. Very cool. Thank you, Jonathan. So DevCycle is very developer-centric in terms of how it integrates into your workflows, very team-centric in terms of its pricing model.

Because this is usage-based pricing means everyone on your team can play a role in feature flags they also have a free forever tier zero dollars so you can try out feature flags yourself in your environment check them out at devcycle.com slash changelog again devcycle.com slash changelog We're here with Zach Lada. Zach, you reached out late last year sometime. I want to see you actually called us.

Did you call us? Yeah. Yeah, I called your number on your website. That's right, man. You're one of the few and one of the proud that actually take the phone number, put it into a phone, and make it ring, and then somebody answers. And that somebody is almost always me because jared doesn't have this connection like i don't i'm not gonna answer i can forward a call

to you jerry but it goes to me usually because i set it up forever ago it's grasshopper turned something else i don't know what it is but yeah we have a phone number and zach called us which was the coolest so maybe this is related. I actually noticed today, Zach, as I was on your website, hackclub.com, that in the footer there, you got a phone number in your footer. And I thought either Zach likes to get phone calls or maybe he was inspired by Adam actually answering or maybe that pre-existed. I don't know. Was your 800 number, was that a new thing or did that pre-exist this phone call you made? No, we've had it for a few years, but it rings my phone number among others on the team.

Nice. And yeah, I mean, I think that it's important that you can get in touch with a human. And I think that the beauty of technology is it allows us to take away all the things that robots can do to let us focus on the things that humans can do. And I think that human-to-human connection is kind of important.

Yeah, for sure. How did you feel whenever I answered the call, like a human, given your position? Well, I think you were driving and you were like, who is this? Why are you calling? And then we got into it. And I was like, oh my god, I'm so excited to be talking to you one-on-one, you know. So I was excited when you picked up. And the reason I called was every few months, a bunch of teenagers at Hack Club come together

to build some sort of open source project. And we had just shipped one of our most recent projects, which was an open source game console called Sprig. It's super cool. It's like a combination of a piece of hardware. It's like a custom PCB board that you can hold. And it's an online game engine that's like perfect for people who are just starting to get

involved in programming with game development. And we were reaching out to a few different folks. Hackaday did a profile at FrontPageHackerNews. It was getting popular in different parts of the open source community. So I was reaching out because I want to share with you. I recall that. I like those phone calls. And I'm sorry because sometimes I get those

calls and I always answer because I can't not answer. I have to answer and then sometimes I forget that it's potentially this number, our business number calling and I'm like why are you calling? Who's this again? But either way, we did have, we talked

for like 30 or 40 minutes and I was just like man, you all have something cool happening at hat club i found out about you i think by way of quinn slack he was on founders talk a while back and i know that if i understand correctly tom preston warner one of the co-founders of github is an investor i believe you can correct me if i'm wrong but like i knew of hat club to some degree and i was like i was happy that you called basically you know long term i was like after we were in the call with you i was like man this is uh this is exciting i i mean we've always been a fan of the younger hacker generation jared i both have children so we aspire to have you know children who respect technology and understand it and can use it the same way we do it if not better

hopefully better yeah but we love the past, present, and future hacker generation just as well as anybody. Awesome. Yeah, and you know, Quinn and Tom have both been incredible supporters of the mission. As a non-profit, we rely on the generosity of the technology community to make Hack Club free and available to teenagers today.

And both Tom and Quinn have been founding board members of Hack Club. They've been involved since the very beginning and really so much of the amazing work happening in the community would not be possible without either of them. So a big thank you to both of them. Since we're naming Quinn and Tom, anybody else you can name that's founding board members or integral folks that are helping the mission of Hack Club? The beauty of Hack Club is Hack Club isn't me.

It's not the staff at headquarters. It's not, you know, our board members. It's the community of teenagers all over the country of the world that make this open source movement possible. And there are hundreds and now over a thousand, you know, teenagers who develop and spend their time every week building the communities and projects that they themselves want to have and want to participate in. And they're the ones who really make Hack Club possible. You know, we're very lucky to have a great donor community. We operate with 100% transparent finances. So anyone, the public, a teenager, you know, anyone curious can go to bank.hackclub.com

slash HQ. And you can literally see our bank account balance, every transaction, every donor. Our supporters range from people who have built prominent open source projects in their free time, like the guy who created Cydia from the jailbroken iPhone, Jay Freeman. He's a monthly supporter of Hack Club.

There's a number of technology founders that are supporters of Hack Club. Elon Musk is a big supporter of Hack Club. And really, all of these different people are coming together because they have had their lives touched in a way where it transformed them in some way, shape, and form through technology. And they want to make that something that's free and available and something that's more supported for the next generation of hackers and makers and doers. And really, thank you both for having me on and a chance to kind of share more of the Hack Club mission with the broader audience.

It takes a big tent to, I think, reach lots and lots and lots of young people, and our partners are so much more than open source contributors or donors. It's like we rely on people like you to get the word out as well, so thank you. Happy to have you on. I know that Jared, I was looking through our transcripts and I was looking for Hack Club.

Like, how have we talked? Thank the good Lord we've got these beautiful, open source, black and white, anybody can contribute transcripts of our podcast because they're even a treasure for us even. I was on episode 369 of The Changeog here, this show with Quincy Larson, five years of Free Code Camp. And on that show, Quincy was talking about the financial viability of Free Code Camp and what they had done before they kind of got their situation in order, so to speak, to take better donations and have a more financially sound funnel, I suppose, to support the cause. And Zach, you'd be happy to know that, I don't know if you know Quincy personally,

but he's a fan of you, and before they were taking donations themselves directly, they were suggesting Women Who Code or Hack Club, and this is directly from and Hacker Dojo, this is directly from the transcript, so he was suggesting donations to you all as well as a by-proxy supporter.

That's cool. Yeah, and a huge thank you to Quincy and the broader Free Code Camp community. I don't know if they know how big the impact of that at the time was. When they added us to their donate page, I was 17 on my own. I think I had one team member.

So desperately trying to make Hack Club something that existed in the world. And that single donate page on their site drove more donations than any other source that year. And it literally meant that we could pay rent. So really, thank you so much to him. And I know we have a lot of crossover and collaboration in our communities. Free CodeCamp is amazing. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Well, let's dive into your story a little bit. You know, Silicon Valley and tech people, the lore of the founder has a lot of college dropout vibes.

I was happy to see that you have one-upped the founders of many Silicon Valley companies. Who drops out of college? Anybody can drop out of college. Zach actually drops out of high school his freshman year to get this thing going. You want to tell that story? Yeah, sure. By way of background, I'm Zach. I'm the founder of Hack Club. And I grew up in Southern California where both my parents were social workers.

My mom worked in foster care and my dad in homelessness. And I went to public schools that like most schools in America still today didn't offer any coding classes. And I was really lucky enough to be part of, I think, one of the first generations that really didn't know a world without the internet. And when I would get home from school, starting in like third grade, I would just, like, I could not pull myself away from the computer. I felt like, oh my god, like, this is where the secrets of the universe lie. And when I realized that you could learn how to code and not just consume stuff from the computer, but be one incredibly lonely because it felt like the one thing I wanted to do with all my time, which was make things with code, was also the one thing I couldn't do

at the one place where I had to spend all my time, which was school. And I think generally, I kind of had felt like there's this whole path that's set up for young ambitious people. First, you do X and you do Y, then you do Z. And I always felt like a bit of a misfit within that. And I ended up dropping out of high school after my freshman year. I moved to San Francisco when I was 16 to become a programmer. I helped make one game that became the most popular game at the app store at the time. It's called Football Heroes. You can still download it. I was like a junior programmer on the team and probably held us back more than I contributed. And that was like an incredibly meaningful chance to work on a real piece of software for the first time.

And then I helped build an app called Yo, which was like Facebook Messenger, but the only word you could send to people was the word Yo. And the idea was like, what if we build an app that's like so silly, so ridiculous that it can become viral just from that premise? Guys, something interesting just happened. So I downloaded Wajid's bro app out of curiosity and found it very sticky.

I've never felt like I was anyone's bro before. The only people who have used that term with me were assailants. But I started broing people and getting broed back. And all of a sudden, I'm bros with all kinds of people, including a guy from Branscom Ventures. Branscom? That's a solid shop. So we bro-ed about this and that, and then when he heard I worked at Pied Piper,

he got excited, he triple-liked my bro, and he asked about meeting us. Jared, what did you tell him? I was waiting a bit to bro him back so that I don't seem overeager. Bro him back. Bro him back. Bro him back. Bro him.

We're not dead yet, guys. And that just absolutely blew up and became the number one app on the App Store. I remember that. What year was that? That was 2014. Okay. And there were like, like the BBC was doing stories on how people in Israel were using Yo for like, but people know people know like missile strikes that were happening I mean it was really

really crazy now did they develop Morse code style ways of being more complicated or is it literally they just say yo and that meant there was a missile strike

do you know it was you get a yo from an account called like you know Israel missile strike alert or something like that

that just said yo it's kind of like I am Groot I am Groot he says like I am Groot yeah it means everything that's groot he says like i am groot yeah he means everything that's all he says but people take away different things for sure yeah totally and that was like the most ridiculous introduction i think to the world of technology i mean we literally had mark and

dreeson write an article about one bit communication i'm like we ourselves i think we're still like trying to figure out if we were serious about this or not. And I used the money from those two opportunities I had, which for me felt like an enormous amount of money, but really in the grand scheme of things was like $25,000 to start Hack Club to really try and create the sort of community that I so desperately wish I had when I was a teenager. And Hack Club today is a network of over 25,000 teenage programmers from all over the world. We're in all 50 states. We're in 38 countries around the world. There's afterschool hack clubs in high schools. There's amazing open source projects built by our community. I mean, if you use an iPhone or an Android phone or anything that runs, I mean, you literally run

code written by hack clubbers every single day. And some of the things that alumni do are just amazing. And I think the broader mission of the organization is, like, every day, thousands of young people are having some sort of spark with technology. Where they're like, oh my god, I can be a creator and not just a consumer. That is the most exciting idea on the planet. And then there's just absolutely nothing to help them carry that forward. And I think we want to live in a world where, you know, in the same way you can pursue varsity sports or the same way you can pursue

different subjects as a teenager, where you make that like the primary thing you do outside of class. We want to live in a world where there's an ecosystem for the coders and for the makers and for the doers, where you can make building things for the joy of it, the primary thing you do outside of class as a teenager. And I think that ultimately, when I think about the long term, I think young people today need a new cultural institution that really works for them. It needs to be something that's positive. We're gaining real skills. We're connected with like-minded people across zip codes. And I want to live in a world where Half Club can become as ubiquitous and as universal and as culturally foundational for young people today as groups

like the Girl and Boy Scouts have been for young people in the past. And I think young people need this and they want it and they're trying to find it. And when you look at what happens in the community, I mean, it's amazing what teenagers are capable of when we really give them belief and support and create a community. Take that, put that on a t-shirt, really long. I want to put everything on a t-shirt, Jared. That's my thing. I want to put on a t-shirt. Yeah, for real though. I mean, like that's, while we don't quite embody what you do i want to put on a t-shirt yeah for real though i mean like that's while we don't quite embody what you do zach we are there in spirit because you know we say like that's one of the reasons why we have the explicit tag not on our shows we bleep out you know curse words and

things like that because not just for that younger generation but just to make sure that everybody who can listen to podcasts and gain value from this, you know, that that's possible. But it's also for those folks out there that are either young and listening to our show teenagers and making sure that they're included and welcome, but also those parents or aunts and uncles or whatever it might be listening to our shows with younger generations in the car,

either by us, most of the get interested, but it's also just like, you know, that protective layer but we want to make sure that everyone is welcome to this community this change on community we have and whatever it is currently and wherever it will go in the future we're not out there doing hackathons and doing the things you're doing but we're definitely there in spirit that's why i thought when that phone call happened that i was talking about in the first part of the show like i knew we had to get you on the show. I knew we had to kind of dig into your personal story. I did not know.

This is a terrible researcher of me. I did not know about yo kind of reminds me of bro from Silicon Valley, but I did not know about your involvement in, you know, and that's kind of like the cherry on top of this, this little cake we got here called Zach. Well, I'm really happy to be here with you guys. And thank you for saying that. What's up? This episode is brought to you by Postman. Our friends at Postman help more than 25 million developers to build, test, debug, document, monitor and publish their APIs. And I'm here with Arnold LeRae, API handyman at Postman. So Arnold Postman has this feature called API governance, and it's supposed to help teams unify their API design roles. And it gets built into their tools to provide linting and feedback about API design and adopted best practices.

But I want to hear from you. What exactly is API governance and why is it important for organizations and for teams? I think it's a little bit different from what people are used to because for most people, API governance is a kind of API police. I really see it otherwise. API governance is about helping people create the right APIs in the right way, in order not just for the beauty of creating right APIs, beautiful APIs, but in order to have them do that quickly, efficiently, without even thinking about it, and ultimately help their organization achieve what they want to achieve.

But how does that manifest? How does that actually play out in organizations? The first facet of API governance will be having people look at your APIs and ensure they are sharing the same look and feel as all of our APIs in the organization. Because if all of your APIs look the same, once you have learned to use one, you move to the next one. And so you can use it very quickly because you know every pattern of action and behavior. But people always focus too much on that.

And they forget that API governance is not only about designing things the right way, but also helping people do that better and also ensuring that you are creating the right way, but also helping people do that better and also ensuring that you are creating the right API. So you can go beyond that very dumb API design review and help people learn things by explaining, you know, you should avoid using that design pattern because it will have bad consequences on the consumer or implementation or performance or whatsoever. And also, by the way, why are you creating this API? What is it supposed to do?

And then, through the conversation, help people realize that maybe they're not having the right perspective creating their API. They're just exposing complexity in our workings instead of providing a valuable service that will help people. And so I've been doing API design reviews for quite a long time and slowly but surely, people shift their mind from,

oh, I don't like API governance because they're here to tell me how to do things to, hey, actually I've learned things and I'd like to work with you. But now I realize that I'm designing better APIs and I'm able to do that alone. So I need less help, less support for you. So yeah, it's really about having that progression

from people seeing governance as, I have to do things that way, to I know how to do things the correct way. And, but before all that, I need to really take care about what API I'm creating, what is its added value, how it helps people. Very cool. Thank you, Arno. Okay, the next step is to check out Postman's API governance feature for yourself.

Create better quality APIs and foster collaboration between development teams and API teams. Head to postman.com slash changelowpod. Sign up and start using Postman for free today. Again, postman.com slash changelowpod. Sign up and start using Postman for free today. Again, postman.com slash changelowpod. I hate to do it because Adam will derail this conversation, but if I just pull that thread on the Silicon Valley thing, bro, right? Is that bro? That's is that yo, that was yo, wasn't it? Like they're basically riffing on yo, aren't they? And that's to you, Zach. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I, I mean I mean, when I first moved to San Francisco,

I was 16 and I was living in a house of college dropouts who were all three or four years older than me, which felt like enormous at the time. And we would have different, and we were all different people trying to make it in Silicon Valley in some way, shape or form. And when the TV show came out, we started watching the episodes as they streamed each week together. And when season two hit, the first episode, we kind of had this, oh my God, moment because it was about, they got a bunch of people together at the AT&T Stadium in San Francisco for like a silly VR type event. And one of the people in the house like ran that event. Like she was an associate at the firm that put that together. We were like, this is getting too close to real life.

And then the following week, in the second episode of season two, they did an episode where one of the plot lines was about this ridiculous app called Bro, where the only way we can send this word Bro, they get tons of VC money. It totally blows up. I think we're going to have to crunch our burn rate again. Even with the $50,000 from TechCrunch, we're not going to last very long. Wait, wait, wait. No, no, no. Richard said we were going to split that money, right?

$10,000 each? I don't think we can afford to do that anymore. I just donated $5,000 to my cousin Wajid's Kickstarter campaign. He's trying to get an app called Bro off the ground. Bro? It's a messaging app that lets you send the word bro to everyone else who has the app. So it's exactly like the Yo app. Yes, but less original.

For me, I was hired as the first engineer on it, and my job was to make it something that could process millions of push notifications quickly. We were trying to figure out what the real business behind it would be, but it was just this completely ridiculous, larger-than-life kind of moment and introduction. And I feel like that era of Silicon Valley, like 2012 to 2018, I feel so lucky to play the small part in that.

Because that was a really magical time. I think everyone felt like anything was possible. And that was before a lot of the cynicism today kind of set in. And it's interesting working with hack clubbers because, you know, as teenagers are entering technology today, they read the articles about the cynicism. They read the articles about, you know, maybe all this isn't so good. And it's interesting because I think that, you know, young people want to feel like they can go on an adventure. They want to do the really exciting, interesting things. And in some ways, I think it's starting to feel like a lot of the paths that are open in technology

are feeling a little closed off. And I think that's part of where the excitement around things like AI and whatnot are, where it's like, oh my God, there's this new exciting thing that hasn't really been walked yet as a path. For sure. What's interesting is how uncanny that was to your life in the moment. I mean, how could you be watching Silicon Valley and season two, episode two comes out and it's like basically, I mean, it's riffing on what you had done with Yo. I mean, it's totally, I mean, they're trying to mimic what happened in real life in real life, Silicon Valley. What's even cooler is how that went on to play. Like Bro was acquired by a different company and they sold to somebody else and wajid i believe is his name dinesh's cousin who this is all like playing out in real

life and this may be to some degree like part of your life he ends up with like 60 million dollars as part of this acquisition like so this silly idea this yo slash bro app was acquired by somebody else and then they were acquired by somebody else. And here's Dinesh trying to essentially do well in Silicon Valley and get rich. His cousin gets rich and that money fueled them to buy Hooli later on.

And it was part of the entire story of the whole story arc of Silicon Valley. And that was season six. This silly app, Yo Slash Bro. I haven't seen that season yet adam i'm sorry don't spoil the end well you you say you're not gonna do it watch it already jerry well i reserve the right to act like i'm gonna do it and be disappointed i mean definitely don't have to watch it now okay well they're okay well spoiler alert delayed my bad rewind yeah it just played a

critical role basically and like this silly thing played a critical role and that's just so wild because i mean i guess one of the pushbacks when i ask people they've seen this tv show is like i can't watch it is too close to real life and it's kind of like traumatic and i guess in your case it was probably not traumatic but uh maybe it was what do you think well i mean after those two episodes we all felt like we had to stop watching it because it felt like a parody that was too close. I haven't watched past season two because just after that, I was like, this is crazy. You just spoiled it for both of us.

Here's me ruining it for both of you then. I had no idea it played a larger role later in the story. Well, I mean, the actual application itself, but I suppose the ramifications of the app being created, the silliness that it was it became so critical to the long-term story of silicon valley the show so actually i hear in

season eight there's going to be a hack club you heard this yeah season well they're coming back for season seven and they're beginning with hack club yeah that's why i picked eight i figured i'd go way out there on a limb it's gonna going to be for elementary school. When you two talk to people, how are you hearing people talk about the future of tech for young people? And how are you hearing people talk about the cynicism as well? Good question.

I guess I don't hear many people talking about the future of tech for young people. Right. So they aren't, I guess, to us at least. And maybe that's some of it is selection bias. The closest I've gotten so far is my son is in gt and he's uh he's in first grade and he's getting to play with three printers and he's got you know special classes he goes to that are like gifted and talented is a program you have

to get uh selected into you test for it and things like that and you just learn at a different pace you learn differently and i haven't seen the cynicism but i guess what i have seen or i guess what i've interpreted from this is in this world of hack club or in this world where you want to live in a world where this kind of thing is available whether it's gt or a hack club type thing they're they're very similar in nature not the exact same because gt is more focused on like all things rather than just some coding i gotta imagine that at some point you have a lack of educators right that's got to be you know one you've got you know political oversight and you know financial funding for schooling and just

different stuff like that that sort of gets limited but you know it's great to get the program out there but you have to have the right kind of people involved to lead the classes and smart enough to lead the classes. Because this stuff moves so fast. So I guess my personal citizens might be, okay, great, Zach, you've got people buying into this idea of a hack club or a GT type thing for schools. But how do you then get the educators in place to ensure that it actually functions? Totally. I mean, this is what everyone on the education side is trying to figure out. And it's a huge challenge because on one hand, if you spend a lot of time training someone as a teacher to learn how to code so they can teach it, their job opportunities and

their potential salaries are just so much larger outside of that. So there's a real, you know, one of the biggest problems of the computer science education space right now is hiring teachers. And one thing that's very unique about Hack Club is that there are no teachers. Everything within our community is led by teenagers for teenagers. And that really came out of my own experience being a 16 year old being like, wait a second, like I can run hackathons. I can create these spaces that I want to be a part of. And I think with that vibe inside the community, you get this kind of interesting dynamic where in the same way you see this kind of competitive or semi-competitive dynamic at open source where everyone's trying to build the best JavaScript

web framework and you see these new things popping out, people forming opinions, you see some things that lots of people get behind, we see a lot of the same dynamics in Hack Club, where everyone wants to run the best hack, everyone wants to run the best hack. And people are sharing their learnings, but there's this almost competitive vibe to make your thing the best. And I think that what that means is that when you are a teenager and you're a part of Hack Club, you're always seeing new stuff at each event, and you're always seeing new stuff in each meeting. You don't have to wait for the state standards to be updated so you can learn JavaScript instead of Java.

If it's cooler to teach JavaScript, people are just going to do JavaScript in all their meetings and stuff like that. One thing I've been thinking about, and we're trying to figure out right now, is around the role of AI. And when I think about the operations of Hack Club today, we are only possible because of the open source community. And I think a lot of developers today take open source as a concept for granted. It's like, oh yeah, obviously all the technology that we use in the software world is open source by default. But in my view, that was something

that was only really possible because 20 to 40 years ago, a handful of individuals had some radical ideas, worked really, really hard to build foundational technology and a foundational ethos around open source. And we're really benefiting from it today. And I think something I'm seeing from a lot of hack clubbers is they're excited about stuff like AI, but it's so much less approachable than things like web development because you need expensive GPU clusters. A lot of the stuff is quite impenetrable. Not all of the interesting stuff happening is being open source. And I'm curious for both of you, how do we create a world where the future of AI and some of this new tech is going to be fully open and something that's by the people for the people rather than

owned by the few? That's a big question. We just talked about that a couple weeks back with Simon Willison, and we are seeing open source moves into this space. I think one of the most hopeful messages that I've learned of late with regarding to large language models is that it doesn't have to get continually larger in order for them to be really, really good, especially once you are able to plug and play different info sources into them. They get to a point where they can be good enough to go find answers and not have them all baked in by training. And that's going to hopefully democratize access to running your own language models on your own hardware. We're already seeing the software get out there for running these things on commodity devices.

And so there are also open source efforts in this space that are like six months, eight months, a year behind the bleeding edge, which in a competitive landscape is not good enough. But over the arc, the S curve of technology quality increase, I can't put that phrase together, but that curve of innovation, eventually you get to the tail end of it

and the open source stuff can be right there alongside the proprietary stuff, lacking certain data sources, of course. So I don't have an answer like, we need to take steps one, two, and three in order to do this, but I am hopeful now more than i was three months ago four months ago because we're actually starting to see pretty good open source alternatives

pop up yeah stuff like alpaca and whatnot alpaca and let me just grab my notes there's a new one uh nope it's just an open tab i don't have it just an open tab well there is lots of effort in this front you know it's the critical mass right now like it's the hype curve slash you know rapid innovation curve and you know there's a lot happening in this moment and i think it's you know it's been compared to you know the invention of the iphone the invention of the internet in terms of like its criticalness of the long-term future of, I would even say not just computing, but humanity, you know, like this is going to change, this is going to change everything. Like we just did the show with Simon that you're referencing,

Simon Willison. And, you know, on there, I said, it's already changed so much for me. You know, it's, it's kind of given me, I guess, confidence in a way because, you know, you can search on the internet for a solution to X, but you have to rely upon somebody else ever having that problem. And then you also have to have the time and the willingness to search until the answer is found. And that might live in docs, that might live in a forum post or wherever it might be. And these language models are really good at matching, pattern matching and things like that. And so within an instant, you know, chat GPT or Copilot X or Kodi or what have you can

pretty much get you to like, at least when it comes to programming answers to keep giving you direction. It may not be the final production version of it. Simon mentioned how he has scaffolded the majority of a Python-based application or website or something like that. And he said, well, sure, this isn't my final production code, but it's almost there. It needs that final human touch to kind of get it past everything else. And I'm just hopeful that even though we're in that moment where there's innovation and there's the

hype train, so to speak, that somewhere in there, there's enough that has said open source is one, that it makes sense to make this free and available to humanity. Cause we talked about that before again with Simon, like if it's locked behind one organization's hands or, you know, will there be a great consolidation?

Yeah, that's quite possible. You know, that's, that's still quite possible. But I'm hopeful that this last decade or more, like even of this show, we began this show in 2009 right alongside of GitHub being founded.

GitHub was founded in 2008, and we saw open source moving fast. We said we've got to keep up, and we started the blog, and we started the show, and here we are almost 14 years later still riding this open source train, so to speak. And I think it's one. Like you said, you take it for granted almost that years later still riding this open source train so to speak and i think it's one like like it said it's kind of you take it for granted almost that it's going to be open source i'm hoping that that truth and the power that that truth brings carries forward into this ai world that that there's some open models that we can all adopt and will i do it of course

not but am i hopeful i think i am yeah And the really hard math and statistics side of things are hard also for practitioners who are like working in the industry. And so of course it's going to be overwhelming to youngsters coming to these things, but it's also overwhelming to us, you know, quote unquote mature adults who are like working in software development. We're very intimidated by those things, but I what we're finding is that a lot of the really difficult concepts are being, you know, lowered down to a place where you don't have to know exactly how this works, but you do have to know how to leverage it. And that's, I think, the power of abstractions. And I think ultimately what you have is a person who learns how to leverage things. And then as they're going about leveraging, I know some people

hate the term leverage, but I'm using it in its literal sense here. As you're doing that, you know, you run into problems and you get to a point where you've crossed the bounds of what you understand and what you don't understand. And that's where just like natural, you know, autodidacts take over and you learn what you need to learn in order to get to that next phase. And eventually over time, you become the expert. But I think that very much in the spirit of Hack Club, Zach, is that there's no teachers there, right? So, I mean, it's a lot of people who are at least willing to learn on their own or to be with other people who learn.

Was that part of the mix from the start? You're like, we're not going to have teachers. We're just going to hang out. Like, I guess maybe backing up a step. What's the exact structure? What is Hack Club operationally today? I know it's hackathons, but what else is there for people to actually interact with?

Yeah, so Hack Club today is a few key programs. The first is that there's a massive online community. It's all ran through Slack. There are 25,000 teenagers that are a part of it. We're about to cross 10 million messages sent. And it's one of the most active online discussion spaces for teenage coders anywhere. And the discussions range from what it's like being a teenager

to people do really highly technical stuff in there. One of the projects that was built now a few years ago by Hack Clubber was called Nearly.js. It's a parsing library for JavaScript. It is now downloaded 2 million times a week on NPM. And jQuery is downloaded 6 million times a week on NPM, just to give that some perspective. And this is something where it's like,

that was built by an 18-year-old at the time in their hack club meetings and talking about some of that work on the hack club Slack as they were doing it. The second part of hack club is just hackathons. So these are 24 hour long coding marathons that happen on weekends, and they're all teenager organized. There's roughly 50 to 100 that happen a year regionally, and those are all led by teenagers. The third is there's hundreds of after school hack club chapters where teenagers get together weekly to code together. These tend

to be more beginner-oriented because, again, over 50% of high schools in the U.S. don't offer a single coding class. And in a lot of the schools we're in, this is the coding thing that exists. And what's cool is when you come to a meeting, it's not like you're signing up for a semester-long commitment as a young person. You're just seeing, is coding something I'm into for an hour? And as a result, you're also writing code that's meaningful and relevant to you. You're shipping a project every week.

So it's real contextual, everything you're doing. And then finally, and this is where, the areas where I think Hack Club is really interesting and it's really unique is we are really the first major educational organization structured and formed after the internet already existed. And what that means is that the internet is part of Hack Club's DNA in a way where you look at other organizations, they're still kind of trying to figure out how the internet

affects their organizing. And one thing that happens at Hack Club is anytime teenagers run into problems, internal tools that are open source get built by the community that everyone starts using. And that brings me to our final program, which we call Hack Club Bank. And this is a financial tool. It's almost like Stripe Atlas, but for nonprofits, where if you want to start a nonprofit or if you need a way to receive donations, and we originally formed it because our teenagers kept trying to run these events that had no way to receive money. Because if you're under the age of 18, you can't open a bank account in most of the country. It's a financial tool. If you go to hackclub.com slash bank worth one click, you can receive, you get 5, 1, C, 3 nonprofit status. You can receive donations, get physical cards for spending funds. You can, you know, manage it with your team. And now there's a thousand and 10 organizations, many of them led by teenagers, that run through Hack Club Bank. And there are millions of dollars that we process on behalf of these groups all over the country each year.

So those are kind of our key programs today. So there's the online community, there's clubs, there's hackathons, there's Hack Club Bank. And then we also do seasonal events and activities. One thing we did a few months ago was we did a project called Winter Hardware Wonderland. If you go to hackclub.com slash winter, or you did an open call and we said, hey, if you're a teenager and you want to build a hardware project, you've never done that before, buying components is expensive. So we'll buy all the components you need up to $250 per project if you submit a pull request to this GitHub repo with your stuff, if you meet the requirements and whatnot.

In total, we had hundreds of projects built from dozens of countries all over the world. The projects ranged from there was this one student, I think in Greece, who built a plant soil monitoring system for their parents' garden that helps you understand if the soil has the right components and the right setup to to grow the plants that you try to grow to like there's this one student in new york city who built a foldable kayak from scratch they want to get into woodworking so like they they wanted that it's kind of crazy their their final video submission was them in the kayak in the

hudson and there was like everything in between yeah Yeah, it works. So that's kind of a high level overview. And there's always new stuff happening. Like one of the things we're about to launch is a math game called SignWriter. If you go to signwriter.com, S-I-N-E writer.com, that's going to go live this Friday. And that's this beautiful math game that a handful of teenagers and an engineer team have built together. It's kind of like if you ever played with the TI-84 or if you ever played a graphing calculators or now for young people today, if you like Desmos, this is like the ultimate game for you. And it's, there's always stuff like this happening in the community to

get involved. Super cool. Let me close a loop on that open tab. Free Dolly. Dolly 2.0 was just released today from Databricks. The world's first truly open instruction tuned LLM. So this is an LLM open source and available to anybody with the opportunity of giving it instructions. So just another example. Alpaca, a big one. What's his name again? This is called Doy 2.0

from the databricks team they just uh released it today oh man they missed the opportunity to call it open dolly like hello dolly they said free dolly so i mean they're just compensating or they're wanting to have the word free and they're like free willy maybe anyways that's true free willy i just wanted to close that loop since I left it hanging open and I found my open tab let's focus in that's a lot of different programs man like different wings of hat club at this point let's let's talk about the after school program because I think there's so much potential power in that you know you got kids that don't you know fit in with the sports maybe they don't fit in with the drama team maybe they don't want to do this that or the other thing a lot of times if you don't have anything after school you end up merely either like bored at

home watching tv or worse out getting in trouble and so an after-school program for around technology i think is just spectacular how does that work you mentioned it's teenager run how do people find out about it how do kids get involved And then how do you start one? Yeah, well, so hack clubs are groups of teenagers that get together weekly after school. Usually there's like five to 15 teenagers at each club. And the purpose of these is they're like mini hackathons that happen every week at your school.

If you're a teenager and you want to start a club, you just go to hackclub.com. There's a whole registration process. We really work with everyone who wants to. And we have what we kind of call internally like a club in a box setup, where there's a whole set of open source materials that range from workshops that you can do inside of your club meetings to marketing materials. We print millions of stickers that we ship to clubs all over the world. And if you do this, you'd be joining this global community of other clubs all over the country, all over the world, who are all on the same mission as you.

And I think that for a lot of teenagers, you don't really know other people that share your love and interest for technology. Or maybe if you have that first spark, you don't really know what that best way to get started is. And we really believe in the hacker way, which is that if you want to learn how to code, the best way to do it is just to start writing code. And I think that a lot of education programs around technology can try to be very elite, where HACO is not elite at all. We don't believe anyone is born with some special abilities that make you better at coding than others. We think your ability as a coder is just a function of how many hours you spend coding. And if you start a club or you join a club at your school and come together weekly, every week you're writing code for at least an hour. That's a great entry point into the broader Hack Club ecosystem.

And the reason why we have all these other things that are happening in Hack Club 2 is that if you're a club member, it's not super exciting just to come together weekly and you right-click the same group of people. You want to feel part of something a lot larger than yourself. So if you're part of a club, you're going to hackathons happening near you. There's online stuff you're participating in, kind of a whole gamut of stuff. But the best way to start is just go to hackclub.com and check it out. I love that. So how do you reach schools and teenagers who have no idea that Hack club exists it seems like there's probably a lot of those and it's probably like that perfect prototype teenager who's at their school wishing for something like this but they're just not aware are there ambassador

programs are there ways is there ways for adults to like help this mission without necessarily start because you can't start a hat club but could you make help with awareness because like a lot of our listeners and myself for instance we can't start hack clubs but we would love to help spread the word somehow are there official or better ways of doing that yeah the reason why everything at hack club is student-led is because that is if we found the model that works best through that probably the best way if you're an adult and wanting to help support hack club in your, or if you have kids that are interested in technology, is to go to hackclub.com and there's an email list at the bottom that you can sign up for. What we found is the best way to help new people get into the ecosystem is every roughly two to

three months we'll launch some sort of new product that teenagers can engage with directly. One I mentioned earlier was Sprig, which was that open source game console. Another one is SignWriter, which we're doing now. Another one that's coming up is we're building this like open source, almost like CNC machine, where it's, you know, fully 3D printed, it's really cheap to build. And with all of these projects, there's some element of like, if you're a teenager, and you're an individual, and you do some action that's educational in nature, where, for example, a Sprig, if you build a game and you ship it, we'll ship you a free console. So the parts to build your own.

With the new drawing machine, if you, you know, we're doing like a generative art thing where if you make some generative piece of art using code and ship it, we'll then ship you all the components you need to build your own machine that can actually produce that art. So signing up to that email list, sharing those things with the young people in your life, that tends to be a great entry point in the hack club. Because starting a club out the gate, that's like a big commitment. And clubs only really succeed or fail at schools based on the student leadership. And sometimes we'll get like, you know, like a parent or like a teacher will be like, I really want to make a hack club start at my school. And they'll start meetings or something like that, but they don't really have that teenager that falls in love with it and really wants to make it their own.

And what happens is it always fizzles out after a few months. You have to have that charismatic leader on the ground. So that's where we have these kind of other entry points for people into the hack club ecosystem. What you see on that homepage, or at least the landing page for it, says don't run your coding club alone. Make it a hack club. So I guess the secret model really is don't be alone when you do this.

You know, something that, and Jared, I don't know if you were in a fraternity when you were in college or not, but I know my wife, she was in a sorority, and she had a sorority mom. And she's like our surrogate grandmother to this day. Like she's super close in our life. I wonder if you can have or if you've thought about models where you can involve a sorority mom to a sorority isn't there to sort of guide the sorority. They don't run it, but they're there to sort of help with adulty things, I suppose, you know, and to be a guide and to be a mentor, to be, you know, an inspiration to some degree with those younger folks in that club, basically, sorority, fraternity, similar in nature. Have you guys considered how, is that the extent that you let adults sort of play roles? Like, I get it, you know, they're going to fizzle out if you don't

have a teenager who's really charismatic, as you said, and, you know, involved. Is there a model where like there's a sorority mom type person that can play a role? Right now that happens unofficially, but I love the idea. We don't have anything kind of formal to facilitate that, but I love the idea of figuring out how to do that. I mean, when I think about my own story,

I feel so lucky to have met adult mentors as a teenager because I think if you don't know any adults that do the thing you want to do, it's really hard to picture yourself doing it. And we see this particularly among the young women in our community. And we do have some specific programs. Like for example, we have a new partnership with the Girl Scouts where we're partnering with different Girl Scouts regional councils. We just did our first one in New York City to run events that are like 12-hour coding days for local Girl Scouts in that area ran by Hack Clubbers. And then we'll put together a dinner afterwards to pair Hack Clubbers

with female mentors. And that has been a really effective model so far. And I love the idea of growing that into something a little more formal. Right now, the way most teenagers hear about Hack Club is we partner with a few different organizations in the space. Namely, GitHub is probably our number one referral partner, where they will send out blasts to every student on GitHub about Hack Club, usually every other month or so. And we partner with them on a lot of our programs. And then secondly, we work with FIRST Robotics. They're the largest engineering education program in the country. They have 600,000

students across America and the world that do like robotics and stuff like that. If you've ever seen a teenager in robotics they're probably part of FIRST. And they're starting

to roll out hack club materials to a lot of their teams because they have teenagers that want to do more coding. But I love that idea of having some more

formal mentorship models. Well, I mean, to give a role really i i totally get that it needs to be you know teenager ran totally get that even teaches responsibility i mean like it you know this thing doesn't isn't a hack club unless you show up and the folks that you've connected with show up and make it a thing here's some folks that will be you know assistive with the process of running it or maybe there's an adult required for X. I don't know. Whatever. But something where you got that osmosis

from older to younger generation seems to be a thing. Now, Jared, I'm thinking too with our audience. Sure, we don't have a teenager audience by any means, but I bet you we got a lot of parents in this audience, right? Somebody's listening right now thinking, gosh, I got kids and I care about Hack Club. Probably club probably both yeah i'd love to find a way where we can help you zach to to be similar to github or first robotics to just i don't know how we can do that necessarily without just being like hey let's just put you on blast but somehow incorporate something to share with audience because i'm sure we've got if not parents they their godmothers or uncles or aunts or whatever to younger generation folks in their lives that matter. And they're going to share the idea and the model of Hack Club with them.

Thank you. Yeah, that would be amazing. And we, you know, kind of like I mentioned at the beginning, for everyone listening and for both of you as well, like Hack Club is a volunteer-led community and a nonprofit that is here because all of us involved have had some experience where technology has touched us in a personal way, or it's made us a different person today than we would have been without it. And that is something that is so important for us as a society to give as a gift to the next generation. And Hack is like you know such a gift when someone is looking for it so spreading the word helping young people become aware of it so often

we'll hear stories from a young person well they're like oh my god my mom told me about this and i've been looking for something like hack club for years i didn't even realize there were other people my age that shared my love for this the beauty i think of separating it from an official school thing is the freedom that you have to sort of like partner up and it only happens if there's motivation right like you you're not going to force hat club into a world where it doesn't need to exist it kind of happens because the idea of hat club makes sense and that it's ran by you know the folks who are really interested i just think like maybe the hurdle i thought you may have faced earlier like i said before was like the

educators but clearly that's not necessary because you have sort of individually ran hat clubs but that's kind of probably the the beauty of it is it doesn't have to be like this staple this is a funded program into x and then it gets falls by the wayside. The next thing you know, it's sort of like not what it began as. You had great ambition for the thing, but eventually it just turned into this not-hack club, essentially. Yeah, I mean, imagine if to start an open source project, you had to get a grant first and approval from five different people. There would be no open source community. That would be crazy. The way I think about it is, I think in education, there are basically

two models of learning. One model is high floor, low ceiling. This is a traditional school on a traditional school day where you have guarantees on what everybody's going to learn. You have a textbook, you have curriculum, you have tests, you have ways to make sure everyone leaves with certain competencies. But it's very challenging for folks to go off that like default path. And then I think, you know, there's a second type of learning model where you have a low floor

and a high ceiling, where it's hard to give certain guarantees of what some people will get out of the program, but those who want to go really, really, really far can. And I think open source as a model is a low floor, high ceiling model. And I think that the future of education is blending both of those. And I think that, you know, the beauty of Hack Club is that since it is opted, since it's something that teenagers really want to be a part of, since we don't really have a captive audience in the same way that a lot of classrooms do, like, you know, if you're a Hack Club, like you actually want to be there. And if for some reason you don't want to be there, you just don't show up anymore.

And that's totally fine. It means that when you as a teenager get involved, you're connecting with other teenagers that are also opting in and making that choice to be there. And I think the internet kind of, it's interesting when you think about what the future of learning will look like. I think one of the biggest transformations that's happened in education and learning in the past 15 years that still isn't really being talked about is so much of our institutions of learning are built around solving the access problem. How do we simply get all of this information that we want people to learn in front of them and available to them? And worldwide,

we've built, in my view, an incredibly effective, really amazing, top-down, one-to-many distribution mechanism where we've made basically an entire society's literate. It's amazing. But with the internet, we have this new thing where the access problem is really solved. Every person who has access to a phone and the internet has access

to literally all of human history and knowledge in our pockets. And the new challenge of education and learning is not just how do we simply get people access, it's like how do we get people to spend their time unlocking the secrets of the universe rather than doom scrolling through Twitter?

And I think the answer is, you know, you make it fun. You make it community oriented. You make it something where, you know, I think the thing that we've really realized with Hack Club and a lot of other people who are pursuing these models have realized is that learning and making things and manipulating the world around you, that is like a fundamentally human and satisfying thing that we've been doing since the dawn of our species. And once you help someone realize like,

oh my God, like I can do this through coding, I can do this through this other subject and like get really deep into something on the internet, it is so much more exciting, so much more compelling, so much more fun than watching Netflix. And it's addictive. You literally can't pull yourself away from it. And I think the question of learning in the future is how do we make learning fun? And I think we'll see a lot more models like Hack Club. I think Hack Club needs to be a lot better

to better provide that experience for the people where we're touching them but not totally having that yet. What's up, friends? This episode is brought to you by CIQ, the founding sponsor and partner of Rocky Linux, Enterprise Linux, the open source community way. And I'm here with Gregor Kertzer, the founder and CEO of CIQ and the creator of Rocky Linux. So Greg, I know that a lot of people are still sort of catching up to some degree with what went down with CentOS, the Red Hat acquisition, and just the massive shift that required everyone using

CentOS to do. Give me a glimpse into what happened there. We've seen a number of cases in the open source community where projects were pivoted due to business agenda or commercial needs. We saw that happen with CentOS. CentOS was one of the primary, one of the biggest enterprise operating systems ever. People were using it all over the place. was one of the primary, one of the biggest enterprise operating systems ever. People were using it all over the place.

Enterprise organizations and professional IT teams were all leveraging CentOS. For CentOS to be stripped away from the community and removed as a suitable option to meet their needs created a massive pain point and a gap within the industry. As one of the founders of CentOS, I really took this to heart and I wanted to ensure that this does not happen again. And that is what we created with Rocky Linux and the RESF. Okay. You mentioned the RESF. What is that? And what is its relationship to Rocky Linux? The RESF is the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, and it is a organization that we created to hold ourselves responsible to what it is that we've promised that we're going

to do with the community. It is community run. It is community led. We have a board of directors, which is comprised of a number of people that have a huge amount of experience, both with Linux as well as open source and community. And from this organization, we solidify the governance of how we are to manage Rocky Linux and any other projects that come and join in this vision. Sounds good, Greg. I love it. So Enterprise Linux, the open source way, the community way, has a home at Rocky Linux and the RESF.

Check it out and learn more at RockyLinux.org slash changelog. Again, RockyLinux.org slash changelog. can we uh break down the flow of getting started i guess then because you got step one is application you start by telling you know you all hat club themselves you know who you are who's leading it etc then you have an onboarding call I got to imagine is like the funnest time ever for somebody at what you call Hack Club HQ. You hop on a Zoom call with someone. And I assume that's just to connect the dots to make sure they're a real human being and they're not trying to gain.

I can only imagine the fraud, waste and abuse you must have in this process. But we'll set that aside to focus on what's actually mattering here. But then the next one is the first meeting. So like you said before, a hack club in a box. Walk us through that flow, how that works and that first meeting to the 10th meeting. How do you ensure without overly handholding the process that this is successful and it has the right tooling and that there's a similarity or is there a similarity to Hack Club to Hack Club? Does it even matter to have similarity? Yeah, totally. I mean, I think the first thing to understand

is like clubs are a part of Hack Club, but they're not like the primary thing. Like I would say maybe only 25% of students in Hack Club are actually in a club or engaged in a club. And that was a transformation that the pandemic really had. We were almost entirely clubs before that. And that was a transformation that the pandemic really had. We were almost entirely clubs before that. And once the pandemic hit, I think we're very early to realize that things were going to be totally different. And we also saw that the space was arranged in such a way

where we thought every other organization, every school was going to try and do exactly what they were doing in person, but in Zoom calls instead. And like, that's a terrible idea. Like what's going to be best for the internet is totally different than what's best in person. And we really doubled down on like, how do we build an amazing online community? How do we build an amazing opportunity for people to contribute to Hack Club beyond clubs? How do we build like different flows for people? And in the first few months of the pandemic, our community grew 700% because so many people from other spaces were finding Hack Club as a space where there was stuff happening that made sense on the internet.

For clubs specifically, a lot of it's actually student-led. If you're a teenager and you're like, I want to start a Hack Club or I want to start a club, you apply, you fill that out. A lot of that is just basically just stick stuff on our end and make sure that when we send you all the material physically, because we actually send physical materials in a lot of cases,

you're going to be able to benefit from that. We accept everyone we can. The real flow and the real magic happens when you join the Slack and when you join the community. And what happens is after you apply, you get an invite, you join the community, and you're talking with other teenagers your age from other schools that are doing the exact same thing as you and what's so cool about that is you know there's this to kind of get just like on a more of a society level there there is a piece in the air times recently that talked about how like cross zip code friendships like are one of the number one predictors of whether or not someone will rise in like social class like do they have friends in other social classes? And I think it's such a shame that

our education system today is so highly dependent on what zip code you happen to be born in. And you really don't interact much at all with teenagers from other locations, even though they might share your same interests. So the coolest thing with Hack Club is like when you join, when you get involved, and when you're getting started with starting your club, you're talking to other teenagers that are already doing that activity successfully. You're seeing what it can look like. You're having one-on-one conversations. You're asking questions in the public channels, you're getting on Zoom calls with people where they're really walking you through things. You're getting invites to hackathons where suddenly you're not like this one weird teenager at your

school that has this interest where you're struggling to find support. You're like part of a whole community of people that share your love, share your passion, share your interests. More tangibly, like, you know, most hack clubs are pretty focused on how do we simply get people in the room and how do we make coding a really fun one-hour activity? Because our thesis is like, look, if you come in and have a great time,

you're going to come in again next week. It's like a party. How do you make it fun? And what we focus on in hack club meetings is shipping because there's nothing more satisfying than having an idea and making something that you didn't think you were capable of doing possible. So that first meeting that every Hack Club leader has, their goal is how do I get 25 plus people in the room? And how do I make sure every single

person in the room leaves the room having actually made a real project with a real URL by making real code, even if they don't understand all the code that they wrote. And, you know, we have a lot of like training materials and stuff like that. But like, I would say the beauty of it is really where you're connecting with teenagers from other schools, where you're seeing them do it successfully. And you're realizing that like, you're not this weird person on your own. You're part of this broader community, this broader movement of people your age that share that love, share that passion, share that interest. Can we get into the community weeds for a moment?

Because I'd love to have your take on Slack as a platform for this community. I noticed on the webpage, you say Slack, it's kind of like Discord. So you're explaining to your potential members that it's like Discord, which is something that they must be more familiar with. We have a Slack that we've been on for years now, right?

And it's, you know, thousands and less than 10,000, but enough people where it's like, okay, moving this would be difficult, but there's things about Slack that we don't love. And I'm just curious if you're loving Slack, if that was a choice that you made that you now regret, or if there's a partnership there, or what's your take on Slack for communities of this size?

Yeah, well, first I say thank you, Slack, for donating Slack to Hack Club, because there's no way we could afford it. There you go. So that's only a part of it. But it's been really interesting, because so for me, when I was a teenager, I was on IRC.

And I was kind of on the later days of IRC. Most of you I talked to were like, oh, you should have seen it in the early 2000s, or you should have seen it in the 90s. It was so awesome. And with Slack, we started our Slack in 2015. So we really were there right at the beginning. I remember when Slack left beta,

we were one of the very first users on it. And Discord didn't exist yet. Later, we saw Discord emerge. And we, early early on had a lot of conversations as to whether or not it made sense to move the Hack Club community to Discord. And what's interesting today is teenagers do not know what Slack is. They've literally never heard of it. For almost every teenager who comes into Hack Club, it's the first time they've heard of Slack. They're familiar with Discord. All their friends use Discord. They all have group chats

on Discord and stuff like that. Because if you have friends who have Android phones and iPhones, the best way to have a group chat is through Discord. So with that, I think Slack is better for communities than Discord is, depending on your community. The reason why we haven't switched to Discord is for a few reasons. The first is that if we were to have the Hack Club community be on Discord, the network that you're part of is Discord and the server you're on is Hack Club. So like when you have interactions, Discord is set up in such a way to pull you outside of your individual server

as much as possible. Like when you DM someone, you don't DM someone within the context of that server. You DM them, you know, in the context of Discord. And what that means is that as soon as people make friends or have some sort of connection, rather than contribute back to your community, because you actually can't make your own channels in Discord and stuff like that, you have to have the admins make the channels. Or you can have some really clever bot thing,

which is extremely confusing for people who aren't, like, really deep in the weeds with Discord. You go off and make your own server. And Hack Club only works because teenagers are building the spaces they want within the Hack Club sphere to make it better for everyone. It's like a positive sum game. With Discord, we thought that the dynamic would be such that

there'd be a lot of value pulled out of Hack Club put into the Discord network rather than kept within the Hack Club community. The other thing that we like more about Slack than Discord is that, and this is maybe a little specific to our community, but since teenagers don't know what Slack is, for most of that, we are the only Slack workspace that they are in. And that means that as a result, there's basically the Hack Club app on every Hack Clubber's phone and the Hack Club app on every Hack Clubber's computer. There's no way we can afford to build a Hack Club app

or get people to use it, being a small nonprofit without lots of engineers. The last thing I'll say on this is that Slack, given that it's meant for companies, has extensive APIs that let you heavily customize a Slack experience in a way that you just can't with Discord. And as a result, there's all this magic that happens in Hack Club that I think wouldn't be happening if it was through Discord. One good

example of this is a couple of years ago, some Hack Club has decided to make a channel called Count to a Million, where they said, you know what, let's count to a million together, one message at a time. You're not allowed to put two numbers in a row. And this whole ecosystem of bots emerged around enforcing the rules, having leaderboards, seeing who's doing well. That's the sort of thing that can't happen on Discord because people can't make their own channels. I would say the reason why

we stick with Slack instead of Discord is because we think of Hack Club as its own ecosystem, not as one part of the broader Discord ecosystem. I didn't quite consider that the pandemic would have hit you guys like that that totally makes sense now in retrospect because i just wasn't thinking about that's the before times you know and i'm it's post pandemic to some degree in a lot of ways and so i'm like okay that

never happened just forget that two years or whatever it was right it's just gone so i'd forgotten that you know getting together people face to face was a challenge and now it's less so now it's less so now it's still a challenge because you still have concerns and issues but but it says down here events on zoom that don't suck you got amas you got hack night you got minecraft you got community funds so like you're doing what you would have normally done in the hour after school in remote ways or distributed ways i gotta imagine that's helped with growth, but also just with inventiveness. Now, like with the whole zip code idea, I agree with that. Like the social

possibility for a human being that knows somebody beyond their own zip code has got to be greater. And I'd love to like dig into the stats behind that, but this lets you join a cohort. My wife right now is in a book club for like the last year or so. She started to lead it. And it's been one of the most positive things I've ever seen happen in her life. This book club has become like sisters to her. And, uh, and like, I'm seeing this idea of like clubs and you need to belong somewhere. And as a kid, like, where do you belong initially? Right. Or as a teenager, well, you've got your home base, you've got your family, right. And that's obviously where you fit unless you don't fit and you have home issues and that's just an absolute

shame the next place you fit obviously is school because that's by nature sort of forced on you as a child you have no other choice but to go to school you want to learn but is that the place you want to go maybe not but you are forced to go to school so you have that following in that group where else do you get it at you get get sports or other things like Jerry was saying, like chess club, drama club, sports, et cetera.

But if you don't fit in those things, you need somewhere to belong. And this, I think is such an interesting way. Like if you're in this world where coding or technology matters to you, you don't have to have a afterschool program. You could just go online and join the Slack, no matter where you're at and join one of these AMAs or the Minecraft thing or the whatever it might thing

to be across zip codes and meet some people. That's so cool. But events on Zoom that don't suck as the premise there, but that's so cool that you can like do hack club, but not have to be in person. Well, we're building on that. Like when you think, you know, and that was a huge realization we had during the pandemic. We were like, oh, snap, like this is way better and actually helps people have better in-person experiences too.

It also means that the perpetual challenge pre-pandemic was how do we have a relationship as Hack Club, as a brand, and as a like HQ with members? Because we have this intermediary who are leaders. And there's this chat,

both the best part and the worst part of Hack Club is that every year, all of our most experienced people become alumni because you don't go to high school to stay there forever, you go to high school to graduate. And on one hand, that means there's always room for fresh blood. There's always new leadership opportunities. There's always like new voices in the room. But on the other hand, it means that it's very hard to build up institutional knowledge. And we had basically thrown the towel and we're like, you know what? After the leader graduates, that club's dead.

Someone else is going, if someone else wants to, they can restart a club without school. And we consider a new club, not a continuous, just the same one. Because nobody wants to inherit something. You want to be the founder of your own thing. For sure. Yeah. And what we realized post-pandemic was like, wow, actually, Hack Club, where like with a lot of education groups or a lot of similarly structured things like the Scouts,

if you ask the question, what is the fundamental unit of this thing? It's the group. It's either the fundamental unit of schools is the classroom. The fundamental unit of Scouts is the troop. The fundamental unit of Hack Club was the club. But simply, if you think about it, that's a constraint of the physical world

because you can only have relationships with so many people. When you're going through the internet, the fundamental unit could be the individual. And we've really shifted the hack club approach to be something where, you know, you don't need to be part of a club. You don't need to like run a club. You can engage a hack club directly as an individual. And if you later start a club or try on a club, that's great. But we don't really recommend that as a starting point anymore.

And that's where things like, you know, one of the best call to actions right now is if you're a teenager and you want to make a video game, go to hackclub.com slash sprig. It's a really awesome, really fun way to get started with game development. And if you ship a game, you get a free console that's open

source, mailed to you for free. And we have lots and lots and lots of call to actions like that that we do now. And we have lots and lots and lots of call actions like that that we do now. And those have been great ways for people to get involved in the community. And I think the future of education is like more things where the fundamental unit of the interaction is the individual rather than the group. So a large online community of 25,000 plus teens or post-teens, I assume you can probably continue to hang out. You don't get booted at age 20, do you? You get to hang out still?

You don't get booted, but the social expectations, you should make room for. People kind of age out eventually. That makes sense. But what I'm aware of thinking is like, how much time and effort and distraction, I guess, perhaps,

is involved with moderation? Because teenagers can get rambunctious. I remember myself when I was a teen, you know, you wouldn't want me in your slack necessarily. Has that been a problem? Or there been a lot of incidents? Is it not an issue? Or do you have a lot, do you have a team that just sits around and, you know, make sure everybody's abiding by the code of conduct and doing what they're supposed to do? Yeah. So at this point, with all the different programs that we have, I would say there's probably somewhere

between 50 and 100 teenagers that kind of have like official positions in some way, shape, or form helping make a hack club happen. And a handful of those positions are on the moderation team in the community. Most of the stuff is pretty minor. I mean, we have a pretty robust code of conduct

and we're pretty, I think, proactive in our moderation approach like sorry but hacklip's not a democracy we have certain things that we're okay with so things we're not okay with and it's not going to be decided by consensus it's like you put the foot down so most things get nipped in the bud early i'd i'd say we have some sort of moderation incident like every other month or something like that and And really, you know, I think one thing that's a little unique about us is that since we work with teenagers, like change is fundamentally part

of what it means to be a teenager. Yeah. So in a lot of communities, you know, you get permanently banned, you get permanently kicked out. And we're like, no, like we're never going to give you a chance again. We're in Hack Club,

our whole moderation approach is built on this idea that, you know, people grow, people change. And the thing that we primarily look for is good faith behavior. So to answer your question, I don't think we have anything that's very extensive as issues. Occasionally, you've had stuff blow up. But the beauty of Hack Club is that people also tend to self-moderate. One thing we see that a lot of teenagers get a lot of value out of Hack Club, and one thing they like a lot about Hack Club, is in a lot of value out of Hack Club. And one thing they like a lot about Hack Club is in a lot of online spaces, and this really, I think, accelerated towards the end of the pandemic, people begin to realize that it's easier to get attention through being outrageous and through being helpful. And particularly in spaces where you're gathering over some technical interests,

you would see very loud people dominating a lot of the conversations. And I think one thing teenagers really like about Hack Club is that our two values and our online spaces are one, wholesome, and two, being technical. So if you're a teenager where you just want a low drama space to build as a coder, get recognition, work with other people, catch other like-minded people, Hack Club's a very wholesome place and people are invested in keeping it a wholesome place. And we're very deliberate about making sure that the only way to rise in the social hierarchy of the community is through contributing, being helpful, giving more than you take, rather than being loud, outrageous, etc. And I think that those are values that compound over time as you hold them. I love that emphasis on wholesome because technology is very powerful, especially when you start to learn how to wield it.

I used the word leverage earlier, and you are operating at high leverage. You can do a lot with a little, and I know that it's tantalizing and sometimes cool to do things that are perhaps malicious because you can, like pranky, sinister, like, ooh, we can get away with this because I know how. And it's easy to get riled up around those things, these bad ideas that float. Somebody floats a bad idea.

It's not. But if you have wholesome as a core value, and I'm not sure if this actually weaves its way through your code of conduct or not because I haven't read it, but certainly your moderation teams and your leadership, which will emphasize these things like those bad ideas that sound good and maybe they'd be funny, maybe be interesting and be hard to do there. If they're doing damage, they're not wholesome. So like having a wholesome as this core part of what hat club is, I think will go a long way to combat what is kind of natural for young people when they have some power that

they find is like doing things along the fringes of damaging. So I think that's going to serve you well. Thank you. Yeah, and I think that like, you know, when I think about the long-term mission of Hack Club, I think values and being a space where young people can find really positive values and actually like so often

when you're in programmer spaces, particularly as a young person, the people who are more technical will be kind of cynical or be a little mean or be a little short-tempered or stuff like that. Particularly, I think, though, the people who tend to be more technical than you would hang out and spend time if people were younger than them

and kind of want to be put in that mature position. I'm sure both of you have experienced that with others in some way, shape, or form. I think it's really important that there's a path that's like very, we were like, I can be really successful and really ambitious and like really want to be someone who writes myself into the pages of history. And I can be a nice, wholesome, positive person. And when you look at groups like the Girl or Boy Scouts, I think they do a really great job with that. Like, you know, you talk to anyone who made it to an Eagle Scout and they're like, yeah, like they all, they're pretty consistently good people and have shared values and talk about how that experience

really helped them become the person they are today. And I think a lot of young ambitious people right now, particularly because of things like the college application process, I don't know how old your kids are, but are you in that stage with them yet or no? My oldest is turning 15 soon. I go 15 down to four, so. I go from 18 down to three. Yeah, so. Okay, so you've experienced some of this, son.

Or maybe are currently experiencing. Sure. I think for like a lot of young people who are very ambitious, the path that they see to being successful, which I think is reinforced through things like the college application process, the way to succeed is to basically lie, cheat, exaggerate, and steal. And I think that our ambitious colleges are turning a generation of young ambitious people into sociopaths. And I think one thing, yeah, and it's crazy. I mean,

I don't know how much you've dug into it but it's like that when we saw the George Santos stuff happen we were like yeah like this is literally what like Stanford is asking for it's like crazy and I think that we hope to you know can help be part of a path

where people kind of feel like they don't need to do that but can still be successful that like values component is very important to our community where people kind of feel like they don't need to do that but can still be successful at those ages. That value component is very important to our community. Well, where does it go from here? You seem to be off to a good start. You've got a base, you've got supporters, you have a lot of programs, there's excitement,

there's infrastructure, the core is there. And so what happens next or what are you trying to accomplish? Is it just get this into the wheelhouses of more people? Is it build and become bigger than the current offerings? What's next? person and you have that smart technology, there's very few things to support you in doing that. And we want to live in a world where right now there's about 15 million high school students in the US. I want to live in a world where about a million of them can kind of choose that hacker maker path to be the primary thing they're doing outside of class. And I want Hack Club to meaningfully contribute to building an ecosystem where there's a whole bunch of different touch points that they're a part of that are supporting them on that path. Today, like, I would say when you look at all of our different programs, there are probably about 25,000 teenagers around the world who would say, yeah, like, Hack Club's, like, a meaningful part of what's going on for

them. Like, they would identify as that. But, like, that's a tiny percentage and a tiny fraction of the number of people who would love to be a part of Hack Club if they simply heard of it. So the way I see it is we need to grow Hack Club to be something that every young person who wants to be a part of it knows about it, knows the right things about it, and has the right folks to become a part of the community. And I want to live in a world where every high school has a group high school has a group of teenagers where like, this is our thing. They're nice, kind people with really positive values. And where, you know, if you are someone who kind of, you know, wants to pursue this thing, like there's a path for you. I felt like I had to drop out of high school and move hundreds of miles away from home

to find my people and find that path for myself. And I feel like I mostly got lucky in being able to find that. And like, this is something that changed, like coding is something that changes lives. It shouldn't be something that's left to chance. And like, it's important that those of us who've been lucky enough to kind of be the

beneficiaries of the current technology revolution, that we give that gift to the next generation and make sure these, they see that path for themselves too. One more Silicon Valley reference. I have to bring it up i'm sorry but does this act like an incubator in any way shape or form have you gotten to the point where you've got folks or young folks or teenagers or whatever label you apply to those i think you call them hack lovers that they get to a point where they're like you know what i'm i'm aging out and I'm going to create this thing. And they need not so much venture capital necessarily, but maybe angels or pre-seed or early seed. Are you at a point where you actually are helping to assist in that next trajectory, which is like, hey, I needed a place to belong when I was young.

I needed a place to learn. I needed to make friends. And I did all that. And Hack Club served me well. And now I'm at a point where I'm at a launch point. And I was in the Hack Club, for lack of better terms, incubator, like Erlich Bachmann's incubator. And I'm ready to spread my wings and create my Yo app or my Bro app or whatever it might be. What's the scenario for you? Yeah. So today our oldest alumni are in their probably early 20s. And it's been really interesting seeing what hack clubbers do.

There's a number of hack club alums who've raised millions of dollars for their startups and are doing really serious stuff. And again, there's a handful of hack club alums who have built open source projects that are now used by millions and millions and millions of people. I think that the primary purpose of hack club is and should always be to help young people become the best versions of themselves. Once you turn 18, I think there's like a really great network of support and stuff like that afterwards. And I think that if we're going to do, you know, I think that like the one thing that will kill the org is focus. So it's like, let's pick one thing and try to make it as amazing,

beautiful, incredible gift that you've ever experienced for people aged 13 to 18. And then afterwards, maybe we'll have some alumni support, but I don't really want Half Club to be an incubator. Because the problem with being an incubator is that the people who are in power get to choose who gets opportunities and who don't. And Half Club only works because everyone is building the spaces that they themselves want. If suddenly there's a dynamic where you got more by being friends with staff or doing certain things, I think it would make Hacklin feel a lot more competitive, a lot less community-driven, and there's already so many spaces like that.

Go to Y Combinator. Y Combinator's great. And there's a bunch of Hackliners who've gone to Y Combinator. Just do that. There's a ton of stuff like that already. And I think that we would just end up doing a lower-quality British edit. I was thinking more on the naturalness of it, less like the explicit, like, hey, we are an incubator and more like just by nature of your mission, you've got to incubate to some degree. And, you know, like a coding school or a boot camp, there may be on the other side of that, they may partner up with opportunities for example i just wondered if that was because you've got connections like tom preston warner he is very into funding startups and other folks are into seed investing i know quinn slack is a angel to several startups i'm sure and you've got friends

in that area would just make sense i would think to not so much implicitly you know say that okay since you're a hat clubber you get x X opportunity, but more like just by natural operation. You're going to incubate some opportunity for somebody. I just wonder if there was anything that you were doing around that front, or just were connecting those dots for folks? Yeah, like nothing official at this stage. Because again,

I want the role of hat club to be to help you become the best version of yourself if we're, like, the thing is, hat club's a human network, right? There's thousands of people involved. Inevitably, board members like Tom get connected with some Hack Clubbers and stuff like that. But I'm not the one making the connections at HQ.

Actually, one of the key things you learn at Hack Club is how to send really good cold emails if you're running a hackathon. And that is a skill that really serves you later on. Oh yeah, for sure. And there's a really robust alumni network. There there's a handful of hack clubbers who run like a series of group houses in San Francisco and stuff like that. So it's like, there's all like, you know, it's a broad world. And I think that I want hack club to like, I don't know,

there's something that feels a little wrong to me about like staff going out of their way to connect certain people and not others. I think it would change dynamic a little bit. It would make it a little more transactional, I think. Yeah, I appreciate the focus. We have a saying right here, keep the main thing the main thing. And there's nothing worse in life than a focused person who's distracted. Because they're not focused anymore, right? I love the fact that you have that focus, and that's good.

Because that gives you your North Star, right? That's even for us. One of our North Stars around here is slow and steady. Now, slow and steady doesn't necessarily mean that you're literally going slow because to go steady, you have to go at a pace that makes sense to keep the thing steady. So slow is just a term to say as fast as it needs to be to remain steady. And we find ourselves, you know, not being steady anymore and going too fast. We say slow down and check yourself. So that's how we keep our focus around here to remain steady. And we find ourselves not being steady anymore and going too fast. We say, slow down and check yourself. So that's how we keep our focus around here to some degree. And that's great that you had that response because you're focused. Thank you.

I'm glad we had you on to share more of the story. I was curious myself. I want to dig into what you're doing. We didn't talk too much about Sprig and the PCB that was there, but we did enough, I suppose. Is there anything else in closing you want to share? Anything else that's left unsaid? Go to github.com slash hackclub slash Sprig. Go to github.com slash

hackclub slash signwriter. Go to hackclub.com and sign up for the email list where every three months they'll get an email about a cool new open source project. What we see is there are so many young people who are hungry, and sharing one of these things with the young person in their life could be the thing that helps them find their people,

helps them find their path, and helps them be part of a community that they might have been looking for for a long time. And it takes a big tent. And again, I think maybe the last thing is, if you're listening to this and you wish you had something at Hack Club as a teenager, give that gift to a teenager today. And a lot of our support, well, literally all of Hack Club is made possible and free

for teenagers through donors. So give $5 a month at hackclub.com slash donate. You'll really be helping make this possible for a new generation of young people too. Very cool. Yeah, we'll link that up in the show notes. Definitely want to encourage donations as necessary. Yeah, I can't imagine we have a large teenager audience, but certainly want to encourage the ones who are here. And those who are parents or loved ones of teenagers, then please follow Zach's advice.

We'll link everything up in the show notes, as you would expect. So check that out. Zach, thanks so much for taking the time to come on. We appreciate it. Thank you both again. And really, thank you both for taking the time to come on. We appreciate it. Thank you both again, and really, thank you both for everything you do for open source. I followed the changelog and would check it often as a teenager after you launched. You actually featured one of my projects I built when I was like 15, and that was

the most exciting thing ever. Is that right? Which one was it? It was a Gitignore tool. It was a CLI tool that generated Gitignores for you. I think it was just one of the Go projects that i got a few stars that day another one was ssh tron i think you did it's like a it's a little game that you can if you type ssh space ssh tron.zachlatta z-a-c-h-l-a-t-t-a.com in your terminal it drops you to like a multiplayer tron game written go i think those are the two that you, that you had on your site.

And that was really, I think that was like one of the first times I'd ever seen my stuff on someone else's site. So thank you both for the work you do and for supporting the ecosystem. I would not be coding today if it wasn't for the open source movement. And I know you two do a lot to help make that possible. Thank you for saying that. I know what's getting featured in news next week,

Jared SSH Tron. We'll re up that possible. Thank you for saying that. I know what's getting featured in news next week, Jared. SSH Tron. We'll re-up that sucker. We'll bring it back. We'll bring it back. It's a multiplayer Tron in your terminal. That's so cool. It looks cool too.

Sounds like something I would have covered at some point. Definitely give it another shout out next week on news. Why not, right? That's right. Well, Zach, thanks for being a follower all these years. And man, I appreciate you seeing that. And it's so cool to like, we never really quantify our impact. You know, we never slow down enough. We're so many years later, but also throughout your journey, having, you know, some shape or form of impact to you. And that's just honestly such a cool thing.

Thank you for that. Oh, of course. So you're the people who did the hard works. Thank you. We'll have a wonderful rest of your days. Thank you so much. Thank you, Zach. Okay. Seriously, how cool is that? How cool is it to be out here doing your thing for the better part of 15 years? 14 years is how old we'll be the end of this year in November. And during that time, during all of this, we impacted Zach Lata and look what Zach did. Like, isn't that just so humbling that you can

put something out there show up consistently for 14 years and have impact I love it got the warm and fuzzies over here you know I'm saying I got the warm and fuzzies speaking of warm and fuzzies thank you so much to Fastly, Fly and also TypeSense for having our back. And of course to Breakmaster. Still into those beats. They're banging. And of course to you. Hey, Jared mentioned in news this week. By the way, did you check out ChangeLog News yet?

We've turned it into a podcast slash newsletter companion. Instead of ChangeLog Weekly going out on Sundays, we now ship ChangeLog News the podcast and ChangeLog News the the podcast, and ChangeLog News, the newsletter, at the same time on Mondays. If you're subscribed to this feed already, well, hey, you get it already, but you may not get the newsletter. So go to changelog.com slash news and get the newsletter. You don't want to miss it. Okay, that's it. The show's done. Thank you again for tuning in. We'll see you next week.