Hack Club takes to the High Seas (Interview)

0:11What up, fellow Hack Club nerds? I'm Jared and you are listening to The Change Log, where each week we talk to the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world to pick their brain, to learn from their mistakes, to be inspired by their accomplishments, and to have a whole lot of fun along the way. Today I'm joined by Hack Clubber Akon, who is fresh off the GitHub universe stage and ready to tell us all about High Seas, a new initiative by Zach Lotta and the Hack Club crew that's incentivizing teens to build cool personal projects by giving away free stuff. But first, a quick thank you to our partners at Fly.io.

0:55Yes, you know we love Fly. It's the home of changelog.com after all, and it's the public cloud for developers who ship. Learn all about it at fly.io. Okay, Akon from Hack Club on the changelog. Let's do it.

1:16What's up, friends? I'm here with Jasmine Casas from Sentry. They just wrapped up their launch week and they're always shipping. So, Jasmine, what do you think about Sentry's mantra of always be shipping? So, to me, Sentry always shipping is just in the spirit of iteration. and constantly improving what we're doing to make developers ship with more confidence. We're always listening to our customers' needs and pain points. We're always iterating on products that we have launched. And on top of that, we are also, even if we look at things that customers haven't explicitly asked for, we are trying to innovate and provide solutions that I think would be really beneficial to help developers debug with more confidence.

1:57I love that. So I know there's been an addition to one of the features out there that kind of exemplifies that. Can you share more? Yes. So something that the team has been developing for a long time and is currently in open beta is our mobile replay product. So historically, replay has always been for web, but now we have brought it on to mobile, specifically Android, iOS and React Native. So this allows our developers, no matter what stack they're using, to get video-like reproductions that actually help users see the repro steps that led to an error and also understand the user impact of an error.

2:36Okay, Sentry is always shipping, always helping developers ship with confidence. That's what they do. Check out their launch week details in the link in the show notes. And of course, check out Session Replay's new edition mobile replay in the link in the show notes as well. And here's the best part. If you want to try Sentry, you can do so today with$100 off the team plan. Totally free for you to try out for you and your team. Use the code changelog. Go to sentry.io. Again, sentry.io.

3:20All right, I am here with Akon, an 18-year-old high school grad and a member of Hack Club. You may recall Hack Club from a show we did last year with the founder, Zach Lada. If you don't recall, that is a community where teen hackers from around the world can code together. Akon, thanks so much for joining me. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. So you've been up to some pretty cool stuff. Most recently on the GitHub Universe stage, you got to launch Hat Club High Cs on stage at GitHub Universe. And so we've decided to do more with Hat Club and invite all of you here, even if you're not a teen, to help us out.

4:06But there was one person who impressed me so much that I wanted them to join me on stage for the next announcement. So people of Universe, please join me in welcoming one of Hack Club's students, Akon.

4:29Thanks, Kyle. And hello, Universe. That'd be pretty cool, right? Yeah, no, it was amazing. So Hi-C's is something that me and around 20 other teens have been working on for a few months now. Basically, it's this program that Hack Club is running where teenagers can log into our site, code cool things, submit their projects. And then after that, they can get a bunch of cool hardware and other prizes such as Raspberry Pi Zeros, 3D printers, MacBooks, a hell of a ton of really cool things. That had to be cool. So tell me about your journey to Hack Club. We're going to dive into all the nitty gritty, but how'd you get involved in Hack club in the first place?

5:11Yeah. So currently I'm taking a gap year to work at hat club, but before then, so basically I joined hat club around two-ish years ago. I joined their Slack. I wasn't very active around a year ago. I had the idea of running a hackathon and the hackathon did actually happen. It's called apocalypse. It happened around six months ago, but basically I had this idea. I put it into the Slack and enough people were interested in it that I got an entire basically team to organize this thing with me. And basically at Hack Club, I've done various tons of things. I've made a few stickers for them, done things here and there.

5:45Apocalypse is the main thing. Apocalypse is the reason that I'm also here currently at Hack Club HQ, working for Hack Club. Okay. So where did this idea for Apocalypse come from? Yeah. So to give some context, Apocalypse is basically this hackathon where instead of solving for normal hackathon themes such as like I don't know infrastructure AI things like that instead you try to just solve for the zombie apocalypse which is like this entirely fictional thing does not exist you can like build anything you want to dream of your creations basically don't have to be grounded inside of the real world and the reason why I came up with that theme is because I noticed that like in a lot of hackathons people keep on building the same things over and over again the creativity in a lot of projects are like practically non-existent They feel very corporate, and so what I wanted to do with Apocalypse is use a theme to push people out of those zones to make them create what they actually want to do.

6:40So what was some stuff that people created? I mean, there was a ton of cool stuff. There was like a three-foot-tall pea shooter that shot out like these balls, and it's like from that Plants vs. Zombies game. There's a hell of a ton of like RC cars where you can control something remotely, and the car moves, and like they built the car themselves. themselves there's a ton of just cool things like that do you call the winners and and was there voting or how did the whole thing work yeah so the way apocalypse voting worked is that it was a pure vote hackathon so in a lot of traditional hackathons you have like a bunch of like judges who are like middle age who you have to pitch in front of at hat club and at apocalypse the people who you want to appeal to are teenagers such as yourself so we had people basically present their projects in like the science fair demo style.

7:26And then at the end, you're able to boast for your peers and you're able to actually see all the projects that they made. Because oftentimes in other hackathons, you're just not really able to do that. And I think that my favorite part of Apocalypse was actually just being able to see all of the projects laid out in like a bunch of tables. Like that was such a cool part of it. Well, I feel very seen because as a middle-aged man who has been asked to judge various hackathons and game jams. I oftentimes think I'm not probably the primary audience of this game, but here I am trying to judge this game.

7:59And so what I do as a hack is I bring my kids into it and I ask them what games they like, but pretty cool. If you're having a hackathon for hack clubbers, right for us, buy us, you know, have the, have the youth judge the youth and decide on which ones are awesome. So how did you even find hack club in the first place? Yeah. So actually I found out about Hacklub through the GitHub education newsletter, which is really funny actually, because I have since then, like at Hacklub, I've written GitHub education newsletter, like takeover type things. But basically Hacklub had this program called Sprig that was going on, still going on actually, where basically you're able to code a game and get a game console.

8:39And that was basically featured in the GitHub education newsletter. And I was interested enough to click on that, find out about Hacklub. And And after that, I joined the Slack. And what were you doing on the GitHub Education newsletter? How did you get involved in that? I'm just trying to follow the breadcrumbs here. Yeah, okay. So long story short, this summer we ran a program called Arcade, which is our biggest thing. Other than Hi-C's, Hi-C's is going to be bigger. But Arcade is this program where you code cool things and you get cool things. Basically a model that Hi-C's also follows. but Arcade had these takeover newsletters that they needed somebody to write so one of the other hat club employees called me up and was like hey do you want to like work with me to write this takeover of this newsletter and basically it would just be me writing as myself I go like hey I'm Akon I'm the hat clubber and here's a couple of cool things you should know about Arcade and that's kind of how it started and I've read also the newsletters were quite popular within GitHub.

9:39I can't share exact numbers, but the numbers are pretty good. Okay. So popular writing this arcade thing and then the GitHub newsletter thing, the hackathon thing. What predates all of this? Like why did you get into software or game? I mean, it sounds like you're more interested in game design or experience design. Where do your interests come from? Yeah. So I have done a variety of things. I like to think of myself more of a like jack of all trades, master of none. But before everything in middle school, I got really into writing fiction and then COVID hit and I kind of stopped doing that. I started basically coding in Python.

10:22I did a ton of like competitive programming in high school. Basically that got me into coding. When I was around 16, I joined hat clubs, started building some projects. Yeah, I'm like pretty interested into like game design and how to gamify things even like outside of games for example at apocalypse which was a pretty gamified hackathon i toyed around with this idea of basically like having an economy in the hackathon so at apocalypse we had something called like bottle caps which were just physical bottle caps that we bought from this one shop but with these bottle caps you're able to buy swag and then in order to get bottle caps you have to go to activities and workshops so instead of laying all of our swag out in like this one giant table and letting people just like blood bath for it instead we had the system where you're able to walk up to the shop we had inside of the hackathon and you're able to purchase swag using these physical bottle caps that we had nice that's really cool so did that pay off was that highly engaging i mean definitely like people were obsessed with the bottle caps like before the hackathon i thought like nobody would be interested in this or like very few people would participate in it but at the hackathon like the inflation firstly was crazy so we had like these giant plushies that we bought previously that we were like selling with with bottle caps before these plushies at the very start of the hackathon they went for like eight bottle caps but the thing about having a shop in a hackathon is that as an organizer you can say that things within that shop costs however much as you want it to cost because guess what?

11:50We live in an apocalypse. That's a really good point. Yeah. So during like the middle-ish of the hackathon on like the second night, we held like this giant auction. There were like 30 people just lined up in a table. We had like a stage and everything. It was epic. One of the plushies there sold for like 102 bottle caps, which is crazy, but yeah. And then after that, the value bottle caps just massively dropped and nobody cared about it. But it's kind of like crypto. Yeah, I was going to say, that sounds like tulips. Yeah. Have you ever heard of pogs? I don't think so. Okay. So now I'm going back to my childhood.

12:30You were evoking things from my childhood. Of course, full disclosure, I have a 16-year-old daughter. So you're older than that. But there's the gap in our ages. So I go back to my childhood. Pogs were these basically bottle caps. And they were almost like pins without the sticky part that you put in your shirt. And you would play games with them. I can't remember the actual games, but people would just collect pogs. And it became a thing where you'd stack up your pile of pogs and you'd like trading cards. And the game became irrelevant because it's all about which pogs you had. And then eventually, they fell out of favor and then nobody wanted pogs anymore.

13:09And I'm sure there's just like boxes of pogs and various 40-somethings, you know, storage totes. these days but i'm just thinking about that because of the interest in the bottle caps you know almost outweighing anything else it's like gotta get the bottle cap so that's pretty cool what have you learned through that about gamification like what works what doesn't work sometimes with when you gamify things it can backfire or not exactly produce the intended effect have you learned anything through these experiments oh yes so much i've learned before i get to that you talked about like trading cards something something just wanted to say i made a custom trading card game a swag for apocalypse actually it's 18 custom cards it's entirely playable because i'm just like apocalypse just for apocalypse i made it in like a week um all 18 cards have like entirely custom art done by community members yeah that's amazing yeah but on just like what i've learned from gamification i mean there's a ton of stuff the first thing is probably just like people get very into gamified things like I did not think bottle caps would be so valuable but you have people who literally like make a bag from like an empty bag of chips that they like literally tape to their hip and they use it as like a bag for their bottle caps or like you have people just like going to a bunch of workshops like our workshop turnout was insane because of the way we gave up bottle caps like at a normal hackathon what I typically see is you get like maybe 10 % of people going to every workshop.

14:39That's like probably a pretty good number for larger hackathons. But at Apocalypse, we literally had like 50 to like, I think it was like 70 people go to one of our workshops. And that was like pretty standard. So we just had a ton of people participating in our things. As for what could have done better, I think one of the problems is that like going to workshops and activities oftentimes distracted from the actual hacking itself what i want to try for another hackathon that i'm like wanting to run is what if we have experience points as the currency instead and how that would work but i think another thing i learned was just like i really need to accurately price things better because we had a bunch of hardware also for shot for bottle caps and when you have like a raspberry pi for 20 bottle caps and you have a plushie for 10 bottle caps and it's worth way less like people are gonna go for the raspberry high things could have been priced way better on that scale yeah one thing i've learned i've seen this kind of gamification when it's like you know based on completion like do a thing to get a thing and then of course you can trade that thing in for something else is like you said sometimes it becomes more about the collecting of the item than it is about the actual engagement in the activity that you're trying to promote and so what you want to promote as the main objective becomes just this thing you have to do in order to actually win the game.

16:03I've seen this at conferences. So a lot of conferences, they have all these vendor booths. And of course the vendors are there to meet people and show off what they're up to and stuff. So they want the attendees to come and talk to them. The attendees don't necessarily have a reason to go talk to them except for swag, right? And so we've seen conference organizers try to gamify that scenario where they create a sub game where you're collecting points or you're trying to complete them all in order to get some sort of a prize. And that gets the individuals to go ahead and have a reason to go talk to each vendor because you have to complete them all in order to win the game.

16:38And as somebody who's been at these booths sometimes, the interactions are very, what's the word? Shallow? Almost like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I have to talk to you. Hey, can you scan my thing? You know, can I get that bottle cap? You know, can I get this completion marker where you feel like you're incentivizing the interaction, but you end up actually just like creating a weird, awkward scenario wherein they don't really want the interaction. They want the end result. I don't know if there's like a workaround for that, but it's just kind of an unfortunate thing sometimes where it's like you don't want it to become the main thing.

17:11You want it to be the thing that incentivizes the main thing. And if you make it too cool, it's all people care about. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that like just gamification, So it should be something that makes people more encouraged to actually like hack and do cool stuff and like talk to people rather than it is something that like, oh, you're just doing it for the end result. And that's something I do want to play around with in later hacks on Saturday do run. Yeah. How do you think you can do that? I mean, once again, it's just like trying to use experience points as the new currency instead of having like this middleman like bottle caps physical item as a thing.

17:51So, for example, instead of having like, oh, you go to like workshops and activities to get these points, which could definitely still happen, but just on a lesser scale, maybe encourage like, hey, if you work on your project and you show us a progress that you've had, then we will give you experience points, which you can then spend or even have like a ton of the swag, we think that directly help you on your project. So, for example, maybe you can get like hardware through doing certain things instead of getting other types of swag, which are like less involved in the actual hacking itself. No, I think that's a really good point.

18:21Instead of focusing on participation or completion, actually have the incentive attached to some sort of meaningful progress or practice in order to obtain progress. And then whether or not they want to be doing the practice or not, well, they're getting it done anyways. You know, they're eating their vegetables as part of the process versus just, yeah, I showed up and I went to your workshop. Can I please have my bottle cap? interesting okay so what are some games that you enjoy i think you seem like a gamer what's uh what's interesting to you what's out there what do you play i think i read is it magic the gathering something that you oh yeah magic the gathering is okay probably like the more so recent one um when i was younger i was really into pokemon i played pokemon shield when i was younger when i was like 13 or so um i've always been pretty big into the pokemon franchise let me think what else is there.

19:15Pokemon Go? Did you do any Pokemon Go? Pokemon Go, yes, but I like the actual games you can play on like a game console. You don't want to go out in the real world, huh? You don't want to walk around physical places. No, I really don't feel like touching grass right now. All right, fair. Know what you want. That's fair. A ton of like smaller indie games such as Celeste is a really cool 2D platformer. Their art is amazing. It's been a lot of like inspo for other things I've designed. Games like that, yeah. Celeste, I haven't heard of that one. You haven't heard of Celeste? No, you know, I'm old, so I don't know the cool new stuff.

19:55You know, I'm also a Nintendo generation, so like I'm not, like Nintendo Switch, if it's on the Switch, I might play it. If my kids are playing it, I might play it. But otherwise, I'm just, you know, I'm not gaming age anymore, unfortunately. So I haven't heard of Celeste, but I'm looking at the artwork of it now. And I agree with you. It's very beautiful. Celeste has an amazing plot or everything. When I was younger, I also played a ton of Splatoon 2. Okay. It's also very heavy on the art. And the world building is actually pretty nice. There's a plot and everything, but it's like a shooter game where you go against people online.

20:31It's on the Switch, so I don't know if you've heard of it. Yeah, Splatoon I'm aware of. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Awesome. So I'm going to have to check out the Celeste game. definitely looks cool. And now I'm just seeing, I'm searching for Celeste image search and I see Earthblade, which sounds like a new game from the makers of Celeste. Have you played that one? No, I haven't actually heard of that one, but I will check it out now. Yeah, it looks like it's pretty cool. Anyways, I get distracted easily and here I am looking at different artwork. So do you, have you drawn for a long time? Is like design and art something that you've been into or is this a new skill that you're developing with Hat Club?

21:06So kind of both. Before COVID hit, I did a bunch of like physical like paper art things with like, you know, pencil and everything. After COVID hit, I kind of stopped doing art for a bit. But after I joined Hat Club, I actually started doing a ton of like digital art, especially for Hat Club. I made a bunch of like their stickers. I actually really got into doing design and stuff in Figma, which is, you've probably heard of it. It's very popular. But yeah, I love using Figma. I use it to like design sites. I also use it for like non, I've used Figma for a lot of unorthodox things, such as like designing the 2D layout of this dinosaur bone thing that you can then basically put into another platform, extrude it a bit, and then 3D print it.

21:50So I guess I can technically say I did a like 3D design modeling in Figma, which is, I mean, that's pretty cool. Oh, dinosaur bones? Well, you know those 2D cutout things, oftentimes they sell it in stores and you can snap together the pieces. Yeah. They got one of those things I made of our mascot hat club, Orpheus. Sweet. I also do a bunch of logo design in Figma. The Hi-Sees logo is actually made in Figma. I made it. Nice. It's pretty cool. So how do you find yourself adapting to web then for your deployment of your creations? Like rather than on a physical bottle cap or out there in the real world or with pen and paper, you know, you're in Figma, you're doing designs.

22:36And now at the end of the day, you're basically putting out websites, right? Like Hack Seas High Club is a website that you helped work on and helped deploy live on stage at GitHub, which is cool. How do you find web development? I mean, it's pretty fun. I like being able to put the things that I create on a platform that's accessible to people outside of like the, you know, what's physically close to me. But also, unlike design and art itself, I do actually really enjoy vector art and moving around points and such. I find that when you do design things for web, things load much, much faster when it's vector, just because of the nature of it versus, like, raster art.

23:12So, honestly, it's been pretty enjoyable.

23:38what's up friends i'm here with kurt mackie co-founder and ceo of fly as you know we love fly that is the home of changelog.com but kurt i want to know how you explain fly to developers do you tell them a story first how do you do it i kind of change how i explain it based on almost like the generation of developer i'm talking to so like for me i built and shipped apps on heroku which if you've never used heroku is roughly like building and shipping an app on vercell today it's just it's 2024 instead of 2008 or whatever and what frustrated me about doing that was i didn't i got stuck you can build and ship a rails app with a postgres on heroku the same way you can build and ship a next js app on vercell but as soon as you want to do something interesting like as soon as you want to at the time i think one of the things i ran into is like i wanted to add what used to be like kind of the basis for Elasticsearch.

24:27I want to do full text search in my applications. You kind of hit this wall with something like Heroku where you can't really do that. I think lately we've seen it with like people wanting to add LLM's kind of inference stuff to their applications. On Vercell or Heroku or Cloudflare or whoever these days, they've started like releasing abstractions that sort of let you do this. But I can't just run the model I'd run locally on these black box platforms that are very specialized. For the people my age, it's always like, Oh, Heroku was great, but I outgrew it. And one of the things that I felt like I should be able to do when I was using Heroku was like run my app close to people in Tokyo for users that were in Tokyo.

25:02And that was never possible. For modern generation devs, it's a lot more Vercel based. It's a lot like Vercel is great right up until you hit one of their hard line boundaries. And then you're kind of stuck. There's the other one we've had someone within the company. I can't remember the name of this game, but the tagline was like five minutes to start forever to master. That's sort of how we're pitching fly. is like you can get an app going in five minutes, but there's so much depth to the platform that you're never going to run out of things you can do with it. So unlike AWS or Heroku or Vercel, which are all great platforms, the cool thing we love here at ChangeLog most about Fly is that no matter what we want to do on the platform, we have primitives, we have abilities, and we as developers can charge our own mission on Fly.

25:48It is a no-limits platform built for developers, and we think you should try it out. Go to fly.io to learn more. Launch your app in five minutes. Too easy. Once again, fly.io. And I'm also here with Kyle Carberry, co-founder and CTO at Coder.com. And they pair well with Fly.io. Coder is an open source cloud development environment, a CDE. You can host this in your cloud or on premise. So Kyle, walk me through the process. A CDE lets developers put their development environment in the cloud. Walk me through the process. They get an invite from their platform team to join their coder instance. They got to sign in, set up their keys, set up their code editor.

26:32How's it work? Step one for them, we try to make it remarkably easy for the dev. We never gate any features ever for the developer. They'll click that link that their platform team sends out. They'll sign in with OIDC or Google, and they'll really just press one button to create a development environment. Now that might provision like a Kubernetes pod or an AWS VM. You know, we'll show the user what's provisioned, but they don't really have to care. From that point, you'll see a couple buttons appear to open the editors that you're used to, like VS Code Desktop or, you know, VS Code through the web.

27:04Or you can install our CLI. Through our CLI, you really just log into Coder and we take care of everything for you. When you SSH into a workspace, you don't have to worry about keys. It really just kind of like beautifully, magically works in the background for you and connects you to your workspace. We actually connect peer to peer as well. You know, if the Coder server goes down for a second because of an upgrade, you don't have to worry about disconnects. And we always get you the lowest latency possible. One of our core values is we'll never be slower than SSH, period, full stop. And so we connect you peer to peer directly to the workspace.

27:32So it feels just as native as it possibly could. Very cool. Thank you, Kyle. Well, friends, it might be time to consider a cloud development environment, a CDE. And open source is awesome. And Coder is fully open source. You can go to Coder.com right now. install Coder open source, start a premium trial, or get a demo. For me, my first step, I installed it on my Proxmox box and played with it. It was so cool. I loved it. Again, Coder.com. That's C-O-D-E-R.com.

28:07Tell me about Hat Club High Cs. Build personal projects, get free stuff. So of course, There's our incentives, like lots of cool giveaways. What's the big idea here? And maybe even some of the details. Yeah. So Hack Up High Seas is this new program that we're launching. It's going to go until January 31st. We partnered with GitHub in order to launch it. But the idea behind High Seas is that as a teenager, all you have to do is you code cool stuff, you code cool projects, and in return, you get cool stuff to help you keep on coding, keep on making cool projects. If you're a teenager listening to this podcast right now, you should go check out highseas.hatclub.com.