What does your company do, and what are your key engineering challenges?

Hack Club (501(c)(3) nonprofit) is a community of teenagers around the world who are learning technology by building things they care about and sharing with other people. Hack Club is where teenage coders make friends, build together, and get inspiration. If a teenager is coding outside of class, that’s Hack Club, and we’re here to try and create the most incredible learning community, tools, and services to support them to go far technically, and also grow personally with positive values.

Hack Club supports and grows our community by facilitating wholesome social spaces such as the online community and hackathons across the country, creating needed tools to support the ecosystem like Hack Club Bank (https://hackclub.com/bank/) and /z (a tool to create Zoom called used by 100,000+ students last year), providing resources and inspiration like workshops and AMAs (https://youtu.be/riru9OzScwk?t=122), and having pathways to get involved in impressive collaborative open source projects such as building handheld game consoles (https://sprig.hackclub.com), creating Hack Club Bank, making guides to assembly (https://github.com/hackclub/some-assembly-required), and so on.

Hack Club is a shared interest, centered around a shared activity, with a shared ethic. We serve about 20,000 teenagers every year.

Our current key engineering challenges center around:

1. Building exciting, collaborative timeboxed projects with Hack Clubbers that provide cultural leadership to the community and help more teenagers find Hack Club. Examples from this summer: https://github.com/hackclub/some-assembly-required, https://github.com/hackclub/assemble (see the 6 minute documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnK4gzO6S3Q), https://sinerider.hackclub.com, and most recently https://sprig.hackclub.com

2. Open sourcing https://hackclub.com/bank/ and building a thriving open source community of contributors from the Hack Club community. This is a Ruby on Rails app that thousands of teenagers and hundreds of organizations rely on every day to manage millions of charitable dollars. There is also a lot of core engineering work that needs to happen on https://hackclub.com/bank/ as it scales. Finally, the marketing and storytelling around Hack Club Bank has a lot of room for improvement and growth.

3. Providing positive role modeling in our online Slack community of thousands of teenagers, through directly talking to teenagers publicly, helping them with coding problems, and helping support new members in getting active in the community - building a wholesome and technical culture.

What's your stack?

Varies across projects. Ranges from JavaScript / TypeScript for websites, to KiCAD and C for hardware development and firmware, to Ruby on Rails for Hack Club Bank, and Go for Slack bots.