Hack Club Is Building a Worldwide Network of Teenage Hackers, and You Can Join
You've probably wondered where young people who actually build things hang out online. Not the places where they just talk about code, but the places where they ship projects, help each other debug, and occasionally mail each other dinosaur drawings. Hack Club is that place, and it's been quietly growing into a worldwide community of high school hackers who make things together.
What It Does
Hack Club is a community by and for teen hackers. The organization describes itself as artists, writers, engineers, tinkerers, campers, filmmakers, and volunteers who make things, help one another, and have fun. At its core is a Slack community with over 20,000 student members, described as a Discord-style online chatroom where you can ask coding questions, meet friends, and share projects you're building.
The GitHub repository at hackclub/hackclub serves two main purposes: it stores the organization's Workshops (self-led learn-to-code tutorials) and its Code of Conduct. The broader Hack Club ecosystem includes starting a club at your high school, attending or organizing high school hackathons, and even making your project a 501(c)(3) nonprofit through something called HCB.
The organization is entirely open source, from its website to its finances, and it was crafted by teenagers from around the world.
Why It's Cool
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It's a community where the members actually build the thing. Hack Club isn't a platform built for teens by adults—the README is explicit that the software, past events, and branding have all been crafted by teenagers. That's a meaningful distinction. When the people running the show are the same people using it, the incentives line up differently.
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The philosophy is about converting consumers into creators. The README frames learning to code as gaining a superpower that turns your computer from something you consume from into a tool for creation. That's a nice way to think about it, and it's the kind of framing that probably resonates more with a teenager than "learn Python in 30 days."
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There are concrete ways to contribute beyond just chatting. You can write a workshop for clubs and hackers to build from, draw a dinosaur and submit a pull request to
hackclub/dinosaurs, create a game in Sprig (and they'll ship you a physical console), or help translate the site if you're multilingual. Those are specific, achievable tasks that give newcomers a real entry point. -
Workshops are the learning layer. The self-led learn-to-code tutorials stored in this repo are what members use to actually build things. If you've ever wanted a structured way to go from "I know some syntax" to "I shipped a project," workshops are that bridge.
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The openness goes all the way down. Public finances, public website source, public everything. For an organization aimed at teenagers, that transparency matters—it means you can see how the thing actually works, not just how it's presented.
How to Try It
Getting involved depends on what you want to do. Here's the short version:
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Join the Slack. Head to hackclub.com/slack and start chatting with thousands of other young makers. This is the front door.
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Start a club at your school. If there isn't one already, hackclub.com has what you need to get one going.
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Attend or start a hackathon. Check hackclub.com/hackathons for events in your area.
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Build something with a workshop. Browse workshops.hackclub.com and ship a project.
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Contribute on GitHub. If you want to write a workshop, submit one here. If you'd rather draw, hack.af/draw-dino takes you to the dinosaur PR flow. If you're multilingual, there's a translation effort that needs help.
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Check the repo itself. The main repository lives at github.com/hackclub/hackclub, and contribute.hackclub.com has a guide to more active repositories.
There's no install command here because Hack Club isn't a library or a framework—it's a community. The "how to try it" is really "how to show up."
Final Thoughts
Hack Club is best for high schoolers who want to build things with code and want other people around while they do it. The Slack community size and the range of contribution paths (workshops, art, translation, games) mean there's a low barrier to getting started, which matters a lot when you're young and figuring things out. If you're past high school, this probably isn't your community, but it's worth knowing it exists—it's a good model for what an open, member-driven organization can look like. For the teenagers it's built for, the invitation is straightforward: join, make something, help someone else make something.
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