an story of someone joining hack club
when i first joined hack club, it was because of shipwrecked, an all-expenses-paid hackathon on an island near boston. i was completely blown away by it and honestly thought it was a scam the moment it landed in my inbox.
i spent around 60 hours across 4 projects which are unfortunately collecting dust on my github account nowadays. i really haven’t had the time to come back to them and properly polish them, mostly because i’ve been busy with school and other responsibilities i deal with on a day-to-day basis.
and i’m actually pretty proud of them! some even reached around 14 stars on github, which is honestly surprising considering they were built over the span of about a month. i know that if i ever come back to polish them properly, they could blow up in popularity.
sadly, my visa was rejected at the US embassy in my country after the interview, so i couldn’t go to shipwrecked. to this day, i’m still not fully sure why it was rejected, but i’m pretty sure it was related to the fact that, back then, we didn’t have a system like https://visas.hackclub.com where the consulate could verify the invitation letter i brought that day.
i spent all the hours i earned on visa reimbursements exclusively, since there really weren’t any items in the shop at the time, and i didn’t know programs gave out macbooks, 3d printers, and other stuff. so i just left it at that and was honestly happy to have had the experience of flying to another city and visiting the US embassy, which was genuinely beautiful, even if i got rejected in the end on that same place 😭
i maybe didn’t leave with a macbook or a 3d printer, which i would’ve absolutely loved to have, but i did leave with the experience of going to one of the coolest places i had wanted to visit for a long time, seeing how everything worked there, and experiencing the views of the city. at the same time, i left with 4 really cool projects that i’m genuinely proud of.
so, what is “hacker value”?
hacker value comes from something that will genuinely help you build projects as an incentive to keep going. it’s something you’ll see, get your hands on, and most likely use to build your next project, or at least build it with the help of it.
sometimes YSWS organizers know certain things are part of a hacker’s identity. that’s why we add items like blahajs to the shop, because we know people are going to connect with them and genuinely appreciate having them as a reminder of the journey they have went through. the same goes for stickers and similar things.. like fursuits.
that’s why you’re most likely never going to see something like an iphone 17 pro max 4tb orange edition in a program shop, because let’s be real here, you DEFINITELY do not need that to make projects, nor is it going to help you much at all considering xcode exists. we don’t want to normalize expensive status-item rewards because it changes the expectations around programs.
why ship the items? just give us grants!
grants are the last resort when fulfilling an item in a shop. there are risks that come with offering grants, especially how it can make people feel like they’re working for a wage instead of being motivated to build projects for fun.
that’s why when a grant-based reward is added, like a steam grant, it’s penalized by lowering the $/hr ratio of the item as a way to make the people that really want to get that prize work for it.
there are people who tell me they have a mouse that’s 5x cheaper than the mx master 3s we have in our program shops, and i should just give them a grant. but is that cheaper mouse actually going to last? are you even going to remember it in 3 months and think, “damn, i made a bunch of cool projects and grinded so hard to get this mouse and it’s still rocking”?, probably not.
adding vague grant items like a “$5/hr mouse grant” is honestly something really sad to me. i understand it for things like laptop grants, because that laptop is going to become your best friend while building and shipping projects. but vague grant items tend to push people into doing the bare minimum work possible just to get something finished and claim the reward, instead of actually caring about the projects they’re making.
ending thoughts
i know i probably repeated myself a lot throughout this post. i’m really not the best at writing my thoughts, and this is one of the first times i’ve actually decided to make a blog post.
you might still think that, at the end of the day, you’re still working for a reward and aiming for an item in the shop… and that’s valid! i actually agree with you.
my point here is that i want you to aim higher and set a higher bar for what you build to earn the prize you want. i want you to be creative, make cool projects, go crazy with them, blow them up, and maybe even become popular because of them.
i could easily not care about you the teenager making projects, i could throw a bunch of grants into the shop and lock them to merchants and call it a day. but i do care about you, and i want you to improve and learn something new every day. that’s why i put so much effort into what i do.