How do you do, fellow Hack Clubbers? (Interview)

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.

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Sponsors:

• DevCycle – Build better software with DevCycle. Feature flags, without the tech debt. DevCycle is a Feature Flag Management platform designed to help you build maintainable code at scale.
• Postman – Build APIs together — More than 20 million developers use Postman for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.
• Rocky Linux – Enterprise Linux, the open source community way.

Featuring:

• zach latta – GitHub
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• Invest in the future hacker generation
• hackclub.com
• Hack Club Bank
• hackclub/sprig
• Sprig - The game console where every player is a creator
• Meet the 18-year-old who left his job at ‘Yo’ to spread the joy of coding
• Founders Talk #81: The future of code search with Quinn Slack
• Changelog Interviews #369: Five years of freeCodeCamp
  with Quincy Larson
• SSH Tron
• The World’s Longest Hackathon: The Hacker Zephyr, July 2021
• ToorCamp

Thanks to the “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” meme for this title’s inspiration.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(01:28) - Sponsor: DevCycle
(04:04) - Start the show!
(07:49) - Thanks Quinn and Tom
(10:06) - Hack Club in our transcripts
(11:40) - Let's get into Zach's story
(14:07) - I started Bro'ing people
(15:45) - $25K started it all
(19:37) - Sponsor: Postman
(23:15) - Yo! Bro!
(24:39) - I donated $5k to my cousin's Bro app
(27:48) - Silicon Valley is too real
(28:44) - The future of tech for young people
(32:53) - The future of AI and openess
(38:44) - The Hack Club structure
(44:26) - Hack Club afterschool
(46:59) - How do you reach schools and teens?
(49:20) - Can older folks get involved?
(54:02) - It's best to not be a school program
(58:16) - Sponsor: Rocky Linux
(1:00:43) - Getting started
(1:05:29) - Slack vs Discord for Hack Club
(1:09:42) - Remote Hack Clubs
(1:14:16) - Running a 25,000+ online community
(1:20:49) - What's next?
(1:23:04) - Is there incubation in Hack Club?
(1:27:54) - Wrapping up
(1:31:23) - Outro