how has hack club changed your life?

on the hack club slack, one of my friends, Stelle, sent a question in her personal channel: how has hack club changed your life?

this is my answer to that question! (right now it’s my incoherent message sent at 12:45 am but i will revise this once i finish coding the rest of my website.)

hack club got me into tech! well i was always into tech, but not that into tech. throughout elementary school, i grew up on scratch, khan academy JavaScript, and i wrote html code with inline css and js in the notepad app on my borrowed school Chromebooks. I was also severely bullied in elementary school for liking games and coding (and also for other reasons but those aren’t important to this story lmao) so my little interest in coding did not go far. in freshman year, i tried to join my schools gamedev club and got absolutely shunned out for being a girl. i thought a thought many have had before: “tech isn’t for me! coding isn’t for me!” and continued on the career path i’d set for myself: art and marketing!

march 2025, i was doomscrolling like usual when i saw an instagram post for “scrapyard ottawa .” I can’t lie i saw “free food” and signed up immediately :sob: it was one of the most fun experiences ever man baby’s first hackathon… i made friends w Susan and Anthony and got closer with Erin who r now ABSOLUTE GOATS :bangbang: and even though we made the most stupid project ever (it was like… a computer virus…) i had so much fun and realized “maybe i can code??? maybe i CAN make projects???” and i joined the hack club slack. i think i sent 1 message in #welcome, got confused, and never opened slack again.

fast forward to July 2025 - another hackathon, this time called JPEG, and all-girls! I made a renpy visual novel 95% by myself (team was sleeping and watching kdramas) which i think lead me to be scouted by Renran to work on #storyboard . anyways. all-girls? #athena-initiative ! Athena made me realize not only can i make projects, there are other girls just like me that are also making projects.

and then i wanted an iPad. I did not have money to spare on an iPad. What I did have though was 90 hours and a will to learn how to code! I spent 2 weeks of summer waking up every day at 5 am to code so i could get my iPad before school started. i don’t know how I willed myself to do that but as a side effect of getting the iPad I qualified for Parthenon, went to NYC, and…. won??? what the heck???? (Shoutout kaylee and joy su my best friends and teammates)

i don’t think the rest of my hack club journey needs a full description (this message is way too long I don’t think anyone is reading this) but i went to more hackathons and became way more active on the slack. I’ve genuinely made so so many friends and went to places i never thought id be able to go. I entered high school thinking id just study and get out and go to university for marketing or something like that, and hack club has made me realize i can do so so much more than that!

yeah this post is too long and very incoherent

side effect of joining hack club: Diet Coke addiction