i'm not just doing hack club, i'm running programs in it now - orbit & pristine

Date : 04-2026

hack club has been my home base for a while now, i'm an official contributor, i review other people's project submissions, i've organized hackathons, and i did summer of making (got the stickers AND the rpg cards, still hyped about those). but this year i crossed over from "person who participates" to "person who runs the thing", and that's a whole different feeling. i designed and ran my own YSWS programs. for anyone who doesn't know, YSWS is "you ship, we ship", the deal is you build and ship a specific kind of project and hack club sends you real hardware for it

the first one is Orbit, where the brief is to build a gravity or space physics simulation, and the reward is a magnetic levitation globe, which is SO on-theme it makes me happy. the second is Pristine, which is all about making games in pure HTML and CSS (no js, that's the fun constraint), and the reward there is a Logitech MX Master. running these means i'm on the organizer side now, the sign-up flow, the outreach, defining what counts as "shipped", making the whole thing enticing enough that people actually build. it's basically product + community + ops all at once

what i love is it closes a loop for me. i got into all of this because communities like hack club and tinkerspace existed and lowered the barrier for a kid with a bad laptop and a weird idea. now i'm one of the people building those on-ramps for the next batch. designing a good YSWS is weirdly similar to designing a good game, you're crafting an incentive and a constraint that makes someone WANT to make something they wouldn't have otherwise. turns out i like doing that for real people just as much as i like doing it for players