What up, fellow Hack Club nerds? I'm Jared, and you are listening to The Change Log, where each week we talk to the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world to pick their brain, to learn from their mistakes, to be inspired by their accomplishments, and to have a whole lot of fun along the way. Today, I'm joined by Hack Clubber Akon, who is fresh off the GitHub universe stage and ready to tell us all about High Seas, a new initiative by Zach Lotta and Hack Club crew that's incentivizing teens to build cool personal projects by giving away free stuff. But first, a quick thank you to our partners at Fly.io. Yes, you know we love Fly. It's the home of changelog.com after all. And it's the public cloud for developers who ship. Learn all about it at fly.io. Okay, Akon from Hack Club on the changelog. Let's do it.
What's up, friends? I'm here with Jasmine Casas from Sentry. They just wrapped up their launch week and they're always shipping. So, Jasmine, what do you think about Sentry's mantra of always be shipping? So to me, Sentry always shipping is just in the spirit of iteration and constantly improving what we're doing to make developers ship with more confidence. We're always listening to our customers' needs and pain points. We're always iterating on products that we have launched. And on top of that, we are also, even if we look at things that customers haven't explicitly asked for, we are trying to innovate and provide solutions that I think would be really beneficial to help developers debug with more confidence.
I love that. So I know there's been an addition to one of the features out there that kind of exemplifies that. Can you share more? Yes. So something that the team has been developing for a long time and is currently an open beta is our mobile replay product. So historically, replay has always been for web, but now we have brought it on to mobile, specifically Android, iOS, and React Native. So this allows our developers, no matter what stack they're using, to get video-like reproductions that actually help users see the repro steps that led to an error and also understand the user impact of an error.
OK, Sentry is always shipping, always helping developers ship with confidence. That's what they do. Check out their launch week details in the link in the show notes. And of course, check out Session Replay's new edition mobile replay in the link in the show notes as well. And here's the best part. If you want to try Sentry, you can do so today with $100 off the team plan. Totally free to try out for you and your team. Use the code changelog. Go to Sentry.io. Again, Sentry.io. I am here with Akon, an 18-year-old high school grad and a member of Hack Club. You may recall Hack Club.
from a show we did last year with the founder, Zach Lada. If you don't recall, that is a community where teen hackers from around the world can code together. Akon, thanks so much for joining me. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. So you've been up to some pretty cool stuff. Most recently on the GitHub Universe stage, you got to launch Hack Club High Cs on stage at GitHub Universe.
And so we've decided to do more with Hat Club and invite all of you here, even if you're not a teen, to help us out. But there was one person who impressed me so much that I wanted them to join me on stage for the next announcement. So people of Universe, please join me in welcoming one of Hat Club's students, Akon. Thanks, Kyle. And hello, Universe.
That'd be pretty cool, right? Yeah, no, it was amazing. So HiSees is something that me and around 20 other teens have been working on for a few months now. Basically, it's this program that Hack Club is running where teenagers can log into our site, code cool things, submit their projects. And then after that, they can get a bunch of cool hardware and other prizes, such as Raspberry Pi Zeros, 3D printers, MacBooks, a hell of a ton of really cool things. That'd be cool. So tell me about your journey to Hack Club. We're going to dive into all the nitty gritty. But how'd you get involved in Hack Club in the first place?
Yeah, so currently I'm taking a gap year to work at Hack Club, but before then, so basically I joined Hack Club around two-ish years ago. I joined Slack. I wasn't very active. Around a year ago, I had the idea of running a hackathon, and the hackathon did actually happen. It's called Apocalypse. It happened around six months ago, but basically I had this idea. I put it into the Slack, and enough people were interested in it that I got an entire team to organize this thing with me. And basically at Hack Club, I've done various tons of things. I've made a few stickers for them, done things here and there. Apocalypse is the main thing. Apocalypse is the reason that I'm also here currently at Hack Club HQ, working for Hack Club. Okay, so where did this idea for Apocalypse come from?
Yeah, so to give some context, Apocalypse is basically this hackathon where instead of solving for normal hackathon themes, such as like, I don't know, infrastructure, AI, things like that. Instead, you try to just solve for the zombie apocalypse, which is like this entirely fictional thing, does not exist. You can like build anything you want to dream of. Your creations basically don't have to be grounded inside of the real world. And the reason why I came up with that theme is because I noticed that like in a lot of hackathons, people keep on building the same things over and over again. The creativity in a lot of projects are like practically non-existent. They feel very corporate. And so what I wanted to do with Apocalypse is use a theme to push people out of those zones to make them create what they actually want.
want to do. So what was some stuff that people created? I mean, there was a ton of cool stuff. There was like a three foot tall pea shooter that shot out like these balls. And it's like from that Plants vs. Zombies game. There's a hell of a ton of like RC cards where you can control something remotely and the car moves and like they built the car themselves. There's a ton of just cool things like that.
Do you call the winners and was there voting or how did the whole thing work? Yeah. So the way Apocalypse voting worked is that it was a pure vote hackathon. So in a lot of traditional hackathons, you have like a bunch of like judges who are like middle age who you have to pitch in front of at Hack Club and at Apocalypse. The people who you want to appeal to are teenagers such as yourself. So we had people basically present their projects in like a science fair demo style. And then at the end, you're able to vote for your peers and you're able to actually see all the projects that they made. Because oftentimes in other hackathons, you're just not really able to do that. And I think that my favorite part of Apocalypse was actually just being able to see all of the projects laid out in like a bunch of tables. Like that was such a cool part of it.
Well, I feel very seen because as a middle-aged man who has been asked to judge various hackathons and game jams, I oftentimes think I'm not probably the primary audience of this game, but here I am trying to judge this game. And so what I do as a hack is I bring my kids into it and I ask them what games they like. But pretty cool if you're having a hackathon for hack clubbers, right? For us, by us, you know, have the youth judge the youth and decide on which ones are awesome. So how did you even find Hack Club in the first place? Yeah, so actually I found out about Hack Club through the GitHub education newsletter, which is really funny actually, because I have since then like...
At Hacklub, I've written GitHub Education Newsletter, like, takeover type things. But basically, Hacklub had this program called Sprig that was going on, still going on, actually, where basically you're able to code a game and get a game console. And that was basically featured in the GitHub Education Newsletter. And I was interested enough to click on that, find out about Hacklub, and after that, I joined the Slack. And what were you doing on the GitHub Education Newsletter? Like, how did you get involved in that? I'm just trying to follow the breadcrumbs here. Yeah, okay, so, long story short, this summer we ran a program called Arcade, which is, like, our biggest thing. Other than Hi-Sees, Hi-Sees is going to be bigger, but Arcade is...
this program where you code cool things and you get cool things basically a model that high seeds also follows but arcade had these takeover newsletters that they needed something to write so one of the other hack club employees called me up and was like hey you want to like work with me to write this takeover of this newsletter and basically it would just be me writing as myself i go like hey i'm akon i'm a hack clubber and here's a couple of cool things you should know about arcade and that's kind of how it started and i read also the newsletters were quite popular within github i can't share exact numbers but sure the numbers are pretty good okay so popular writing this arcade thing, and then the GitHub newsletter thing, the hackathon thing. What predates all of this? Like, why did you get into software or game? I mean, it sounds like you're more interested in perhaps game design or experience design. Where do your interests come from? Yeah, so I have done a variety of things. I like to think of myself more of a, like, jack of all trades, master of none. But before everything, in middle school, I got really into writing fiction. And then COVID hit, and I kind of stopped doing that. I started basically coding in Python. I did a ton of, like, competitive programming in high school.
Basically, that got me into coding. When I was around 16, I joined hot clubs, started building some projects. Yeah, I'm like pretty interested into like game design and how to gamify things. Even like outside of games, for example, at Apocalypse, which was a pretty gamified hackathon. I toyed around with this idea of basically like having an economy in the hackathon. So at Apocalypse, we had something called like bottle caps, which were just physical bottle caps that we bought from this one shop. But with these bottle caps, you're able to buy swag. And then in order to get bottle caps, you have to go to activities and workshops. So instead of laying all of our swag out in like this one giant table and letting people just like bloodbath for it, instead we had the system where you're able to walk up to the shop we had inside of the hackathon and you're able to purchase swag using these physical bottle caps that we had. Nice. That's really cool. So did that pay off? Was that highly engaging?
I mean, definitely. Like, people were obsessed with the bottle caps. Like, before the hackathon, I thought, like, nobody would be interested in this or, like, very few people would participate in it. But at the hackathon, like, the inflation, firstly, was crazy. So we had, like, these giant plushies that we bought previously that we were, like, selling with bottle caps. Before these plushies, at the very start of the hackathon, they went for, like, eight bottle caps. But the thing about having a shop in a hackathon is that as an organizer, you can say that things within that shop cost however much as you want it to cost. Because guess what? We live in an apocalypse.
That's a really good point. Yeah. So during like the middle-ish of the hackathon on like the second night, we held like this giant auction. There were like 30 people just lined up in a table. We had like a stage and everything. It was epic. One of the plushies there sold for like 102 bottle caps, which is crazy. But yeah. And then after that, the value bottle caps just massively dropped and nobody cared about it. But it's kind of like crypto. Yeah, I was going to say, that sounds like tulips. Yeah. Have you ever heard of Pogs?
I don't think so. Okay. So now I'm going back to my childhood. You were evoking things from my childhood. Of course, full disclosure, I have a 16 year old daughter. So, you know, you're, you're older than that, but there's the gap there in our ages. So I go back to my childhood. Pogs were these basically bottle caps and they were almost like pins without the sticky part that you put in your shirt and you would play games with them. I can't remember the actual games, but people would just collect pogs and it became a thing where like you'd stack up your pile of pogs and you'd like trading cards and the game became irrelevant because all about which pogs you had.
And then eventually, you know, they fell out of favor and then nobody wanted pogs anymore. And I'm sure there's just like boxes of pogs and various 40 somethings, you know, storage totes these days. But I'm just thinking about that because of the interest in the bottle caps, you know, almost outweighing anything else. It's like, can I get the bottle caps? So that's pretty cool. What have you learned through that about gamification? Like what works, what doesn't work? Sometimes when you gamify things, it can backfire or not exactly produce the intended effect. Have you learned anything through these experiments?
Oh yeah, so much I've learned. Before I get to that, you talked about like trading cards, something, something. I just wanted to say I made a custom trading card game, a swag for Apocalypse actually. It's 18 custom cards. It's entirely playable. Just for Apocalypse? Just for Apocalypse. I made it in like a week. All 18 cards have like entirely custom art done by community members.
Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. But on just, like, what I learned from gamification, I mean, there's a ton of stuff. The first thing's probably just, like, people get very into gamified things. Like, I did not think bottle caps would be so valuable. But you have people who literally, like, make a bag from, like, an empty bag of chips that they, like, literally tape to their hip. And they use it as, like, a bag for their bottle caps. Or, like, you have people just, like, going to a bunch of workshops. Like, our workshop turnout was insane because of the way we gave up bottle caps. Like, at a normal hackathon, what I typically see is you get, like, maybe 10% of people going to every workshop. And that's, like, probably a pretty good number for larger hackathons. But at Apocalypse, we literally had, like, 50 to...
like I think it was like 70 people go to one of our workshops and that was like pretty standard so we just had a ton of people participating in our things as for what could have done better I think one of the problems is that like going to workshops and activities oftentimes distracted from the actual hacking itself what I want to try for another hackathon that I'm like wanting to run is what if we have experience points as the currency instead and how that would work but I think another thing I learned was just like I really need to actually price things better because we had a bunch of hardware also for shot for bottle caps. And when you have like a raspberry pie for 20 bottle caps and you have a plushie for 10 bottle caps and it's worth way less, like people are going to go for the raspberry pie. Things could have been priced way better on that scale. Yeah. One thing I've learned, I've seen this kind of gamification when it's like, you know, based on completion, like do a thing to get a thing. And then of course you can trade that thing in for something else is like you said, sometimes it becomes more about the collecting of the item than it is about the actual engagement in the activity that you're trying to promote.
And so what you want to promote as the main objective becomes just this thing you have to do in order to actually win the game. I've seen this at conferences. So a lot of conferences, you know, they have all these vendor booths. And of course, the vendors are there to meet people and show off what they're up to and stuff. So they want the attendees to come and talk to them. The attendees don't necessarily have a reason to talk to them except for swag, right? And so we've seen conference organizers try to gamify that scenario where they create a sub game where you're collecting points or you're trying to complete them all in order to get some sort of a prize. And that gets the individuals to go and have a reason to go talk to each vendor because, you know, you have to complete them all in order to win the game.
And as somebody who's been at these booths sometimes, the interactions are very, what's the word? Shallow? Almost like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I have to talk to you. Hey, can you scan my thing? Can I get that bottle cap? Can I get this completion marker? Where you feel like you're incentivizing the interaction, but you end up actually just creating a weird, awkward scenario, wherein they don't really want the interaction, they want the end result. I don't know if there's a workaround for that, but it's just kind of an unfortunate thing sometimes where it's like, you don't want it to become the main thing. You want it to be the thing that incentivizes the main thing.
And if you make it too cool, that's all people care about. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that just gamification should be something that makes people more encouraged to actually hack and do cool stuff and talk to people rather than it is something that, oh, you're just doing it for the end result. And that's something I do want to play around with in later hackathons that I do run. Yeah. How do you think you can do that?
I mean, once again, it's just like trying to use experience points as the new currency instead of having like this middleman, like bottle caps, physical item as a thing, right? So for example, instead of having like, oh, you go to like workshops and activities to get these points, which could definitely still happen, but just on a lesser scale, maybe encourage like, hey, if you work on your project and you show us a progress that you've had, then we will give you experience points, which you can then spend, or even have like a ton of the swag you think that directly help you on your project. So for example, maybe you can get like hardware through doing certain things instead of getting other types of swag which are like less involved in the actual hacking itself. No, I think that's a really good point. Instead of...
focusing on participation or completion, actually have the incentive attached to some sort of meaningful progress or practice in order to obtain progress. And then whether or not they want to be doing the practice or not, well, they're getting it done anyways. You know, they're eating their vegetables as part of the process versus just, yeah, I showed up and I went to your workshop. Can I please have my bottle cap? Interesting. Okay. So what are some games that you enjoy? I think you seem like a gamer. What's interesting to you? What's out there? What do you play? I think I read, is it Magic the Gathering? Oh yeah, Magic the Gathering is probably like the more so recent one. When I was younger, I was really into Pokemon. I played Pokemon Shield when I was younger, when I was like 13 or so. I've always been pretty big in the Pokemon franchise. Let me think, what else is there? Pokemon Go. Did you do any Pokemon Go? Pokemon Go, yes, but...
I like the actual games you can play on, like, a game console there. You don't want to go out in the real world, huh? You don't want to walk around physical places? No, I really don't feel like touching grass right now. All right, fair. Know what you want. That's fair. A ton of, like, smaller indie games, such as Celeste, is a really cool 2D platformer. Their art is amazing. It's been a lot of, like, inspo for other things I've designed. Games like that, yeah. Celeste, I haven't heard of that one. Oh, you haven't heard of Celeste? No, you know, I'm old, so I don't know the cool new stuff. You know, I'm also Nintendo generation, so, like, I'm not, like, Nintendo Switch, if it's on the Switch.
I might play it. If my kids are playing, I might play it. But otherwise, I'm just, you know, I'm not gaming age anymore, unfortunately. So I haven't heard of Celeste, but I'm looking at the artwork of it now. And I agree with you. It's very beautiful. Celeste has an amazing like plot or everything. When I was younger, I also played a ton of Splatoon 2. Okay. It's also very heavy on like the art and the world building is actually pretty nice. There's like a plot and everything, but it's like a shooter game where you go against people online. It's on the Switch, so I don't know if you've heard of it, but. Yeah, Splatoon I'm aware of. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Awesome. So I'm going to check out the Celeste game. Definitely.
Looks cool. And now I'm just seeing, I'm searching for Celeste image search and I see Earthblade, which sounds like a new game from the makers of Celeste. Have you played that one? No, I haven't actually heard of that one, but I will check it out now. Yeah, it looks like it's pretty cool. Anyways, I get distracted easily and here I am looking at different artwork. So do you, have you drawn for a long time? Is like design and art something that you've been into or is this a new skill that you're developing with Hat Club?
So kind of both. Before COVID hit, I did a bunch of like physical like paper art things with like, you know, pencil and everything. After COVID hit, I kind of stopped doing art for a bit. But after I joined Hat Club, I actually started doing a ton of like digital art, especially for Hat Club. I made a bunch of like their stickers. I actually really got into doing design and stuff in Figma, which is, you've probably heard of it. It's very popular. But yeah, I love using Figma. I use it to like design sites. I also use it for like non, I've used Figma for a lot of unorthodox things, such as like designing the 2D layout of this dinosaur bone thing that you can then.
basically put into another platform, extrude it a bit, and then 3D print it. So I guess I can technically say I did like 3D design modeling in Figma, which is, I mean, that's pretty cool. Oh, dinosaur bones? Well, you know those like 2D cutout like things you can, oftentimes they sell it in stores and you can like snap together the pieces. Yeah. They got like those, one of those things I made of our mascot hat club, Orpheus. Sweet. I also do a bunch of like logo design in Figma. The Hi-Seas logo was actually made in Figma. I made it. Nice. It's pretty cool. So how do you find yourself adapting to web then for your deployment of your, of your creations? Like rather than
on a physical bottle cap or out there in the real world or with pen and paper. You're in Figma, you're doing designs, and now at the end of the day, you're basically putting out websites, right? Like Hack C-Side Club is a website that you helped work on and helped deploy live on stage at GitHub, which is cool. How do you find web development? I mean, it's pretty fun. I like being able to put the things that I create on a platform that's accessible to people outside of what's physically close to me. But also, unlike design and art itself, I do actually really enjoy vector art and moving around points and such. I find that when you do design things for web, things load much, much faster when it's vector.
just because of the nature of it versus like raster art. So honestly, it's been pretty enjoyable. What's up, friends? I'm here with Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly. As you know, we love Fly. That is the home of changelog.com.
I want to know how you explain fly to developers. Do you tell them the story first? How do you do it? I kind of change how I explain it based on almost like the generation of developer I'm talking to. So like for me, I built and shipped apps on Heroku, which if you've never used Heroku is roughly like building and shipping an app on Purcell today. It's just it's 2024 instead of 2008 or whatever. And what frustrated me about doing that was I didn't I got stuck. You can build and ship a Rails app with a Postgres on Heroku the same way you can build and ship a Next.js app on Purcell. But as soon as you want to do something interesting, like as soon as you want to at the time, I think one of the things I ran into is like I wanted to add what used to be like kind of the basis for Elasticsearch. I want to do full text search in my applications. You're kind of.
hit this wall with something like Heroku where you can't really do that. I think lately we've seen it with like people wanting to add LLM's kind of inference stuff to their applications. On Vercell or Heroku or Cloudflare or whoever these days, they've started like releasing abstractions that sort of let you do this, but I can't just run the model I'd run locally on these black box platforms that are very specialized. For the people my age, it's always like, oh, Heroku was great, but I outgrew it. And one of the things that I felt like I should be able to do when I was using Heroku was like run my app close to people in Tokyo for users that were in Tokyo, and that was never possible. For modern generation devs, it's a lot more Vercell based. It's like, Vercell is great right up until you hit one of their hard-lying boundaries, and then you're kind of stuck. There's another one.
We've had someone within the company, I can't remember the name of this game, but the tagline was like five minutes to start forever to master. That's sort of how we're pitching Fly. It's like you can get an app going in five minutes, but there's so much depth to the platform that you're never going to run out of things you can do with it. So unlike AWS or Heroku or Vercel, which are all great platforms, the cool thing we love here at ChangeLab most about Fly is that no matter what we want to do on the platform, we have primitives, we have abilities, and we as developers can charge our omission on Fly. It is a no-limits platform built for developers, and we think you should try it out. Go to fly.io to learn more.
launch your app in five minutes. Too easy. Once again, fly.io. And I'm also here with Kyle Carberry, co-founder and CTO at coder.com. And they pair well with fly.io. Coder is an open source cloud development environment, a CDE. You can host this in your cloud or on premise. So Kyle, walk me through the process. A CDE lets developers put their development environments in the cloud. Walk me through the process. They get an invite from their platform team to join their Coder instance.
They got to sign in, set up their keys, set up their code editor. How's it work? Step one for them, we try to make it remarkably easy for the dev. We never date any features ever for the developer. They'll click that link that their platform team sends out. They'll sign in with OADC or Google, and they'll really just press one button to create a development environment. Now that might provision like a Kubernetes pod or an AWS VM.
You know, we'll show the user what's provisioned, but they don't really have to care. From that point, you'll see a couple buttons appear to open the editors that you're used to, like VS Code Desktop or, you know, VS Code through the web. Or you can install our CLI. Through our CLI, you really just log into Coder, and we take care of everything for you. When you SSH into your workspace, you don't have to worry about keys. It really just kind of, like, beautifully, magically works in the background for you and connects you to your workspace. We actually connect peer-to-peer as well. You know, if the Coder server goes down for a second because of an upgrade, you don't have to worry about disconnects, and we always get you the lowest latency possible. One of our core values is we'll never be slower than SSH, period, full stop. And so we connect you peer-to-peer directly to the workspace, so it feels just as native as it possibly
might be time to consider a cloud development environment, ACDE. And open source is awesome. And Coder is fully open source. You can go to Coder.com right now, install Coder open source, start a premium trial or get a demo. For me, my first step, I installed it on my Proxmox box and played with it. It was so cool. I loved it. Again, Coder.com. That's C-O-D-E-R.com.
Tell me about Hack Club High Seas. Build personal projects, get free stuff. So, of course, there's our incentives, like lots of cool giveaways. What's the big idea here and maybe even some of the details? Yeah, so Hack Club High Seas is this new program that we're launching. It's going to go until January 31st. We partnered with GitHub in order to launch it. But the idea behind High Seas is that as a teenager, all you have to do is you...
code cool stuff, you code cool projects, and in return, you get cool stuff to help you keep on coding, keep on making cool projects. If you're a teenager listening to this podcast right now, you should go check out highseas.hackhub.com. But basically, you're able to get a bunch of these prizes that we have on the shop. It is very, very easy to get a ton of these things. Highseas basically came almost from Arcade, which is a previous program that we launched this summer with GitHub. But the idea behind Arcade was also code cool stuff, get cool stuff in return. Highseas is basically a second version of that that is on a web platform instead of in our Slack. And basically, yeah, you're just able to get cool stuff. The logistics are like way better here this time around. Total.
We have around like 10,000 teenagers already participating and like signed up into Hi-C's platform. We have like almost 30,000 hours currently logged. We have a ton of projects currently already submitted in the platform and you're able to see these projects when you log on and stuff. So, yeah. Very cool. Very cool. I was scrolling the Hi-C's website and it said, what will you make this winter? And I found this. Is it dino? I assume it's dino. Click the dino or dino. Is this the mascot? That's our mascot, Orpheus.
Well, I made the mistake of clicking the dino for ideas and only a mistake because I'm trying to hear what you have to say. But then the dino started talking to me after I had thought of an idea. You ever hear the tall tale of the invisible treasure map that reveals hidden snacks? So, you know, potentially a cool idea you could build, I suppose, for Hacksies High Club or Hack. club high seas is that the idea here is you don't have an idea you're gonna spit out a few for them yeah like even if you don't have an idea there's always a dino you can click on to spit out some ideas and also hack club has a variety of other programs you can participate in that will also be submitted to high seas for example sprig as i mentioned earlier you can code a game with our like custom like game engine platform thing and you can get a game console but you can also submit it to high seas we also have things like a ton of like pcb design just workshops and like things you can get in return such as that just there's just like a variety of programs on the hack club page i mean if you're a teenager listening to this you should definitely check them out there's a ton of like tutorials and workshops teaching you how to make a ton of stuff So cool. So who all is eligible then for this? You said teenager, but is it more specific than that? Basically, if you're in high school or younger, you're able to participate. So basically 18 and under. Okay. So you are not participating in this. You are just merely a facilitator, I assume. Yeah. Yeah. She says remorseful. Okay. How much does it cost? Oh, it is completely free. Hat Club and GitHub is paying for everything. You do not have to pay a cent. Yeah, no, it's completely free. We ship everything out to you. Some of these prizes cost a lot of money, like if you're actually going to go out and buy an iPad or a framework laptop, which I recently spec'd out. So this is just out of the goodness of GitHub's heart, or how does the money come in?
Yeah, so GitHub gave us like a ton of money. Not sure if I'm allowed to disclose how much. Also, a ton of the prizes on the shop are actually sponsored by the companies themselves. For example, Framework just gave us a bunch of like laptops. I think they also did that with Arcade, which is pretty cool. If you're a part of a company and you want to put a product into our shop, feel free to contact us. We're always looking for more cool stuff to give out to teenagers. But yeah. I need to show this to some of my teenagers because we have been playing this game called NitroType. By we, I mean my sons have been, which is basically a gamified typing website, like teach them to type.
And the amount of engagement that sucker has drawn, especially out of my 10 year old, is somewhat miraculous. If I show them and they can't win anything with that, I think it's just like you get points and then you can build a team. It's like a racing themed learn how to type program. If you show them actual real hardware that they can potentially win, such as a Bamboo A1 Mini or a Flipper Zero, I mean, I can imagine that this is the easiest sell in history to get people involved, isn't it? Yeah, definitely.
If you're a teenager and you want awesome prizes. Yeah, you qualify, right? Yeah. Just go to highseas.hatclub.com. Yeah, yeah. Also, we ship everyone who signs up free stickers. So you don't even have to do anything technically to get the first thing shipped to you. Literally just sign up and we will give you stickers of the High Seas logo, among other things. Nice. And so I see now perhaps your bottle caps idea.
moving over to this because now we have doubloons this is basically the equivalent right of your this is your purchasing power here yeah it's funny because i'm pretty sure that the inspiration of the arcade shop which is the thing that came before high seas is directly from apocalypse economy the idea of being able to purchase things using a currency instead of just like do something get something directly in return there's like this like middleman that the currency kind of access right which kind of gives you some more agency right because definitely instead of saying well if i do eight hours i get a domain for a year It's if I get eight hours, I get 40 doubloons. Roughly, I'm just making the numbers up. And I can spend those on a domain for a year or I can save up for the bigger thing and I can continue to go. And so I get agency on what I actually am going for versus like at this threshold, you get this prize.
which I may not necessarily want. Definitely. That's cool. That's something that we're trying to do with Hi-C's because we noticed that like people want a lot of different prizes and stuff and they all have different tastes and opinions and what they do want to spend their things on. So the model of Hi-C's basically gives them so much more freedom. And in return, they're able to like actually create better because if you always wanted like a Raspberry Pi zero, but somebody else wants like, I don't know, a 3D printer to be able to prototype things. Well, now these two people can get these two different things. Now imagine 17 year old Jared and a little coder, a little coder Jared at 17, which when I was 17, I could code exactly zero things. In fact, I was so impressed by one of my...
high school friends who was in coding class. I didn't know there was one. And he could change a sprite on a webpage. It was a Secret of Mana sprite. I'm not sure if you know that video game. It's an old one, but a really good one. The main character would be color. And in the game, Secret of Mana, if you die, you turn into stone at some point. With a spell cast on, you turn into stone. And he actually could change it to where he, I remember him being like, dude, you gotta see this. Come look what I did. And he like brought me over to Computer Terminal. And it was Geocities. I'm just giving out nouns now for the old people to also remember the nostalgia. And if you hovered over that thing, it would turn from full colored sprite to stone.
And it was like amazing. And I was so impressed. Like this guy's a computer hacker. So that was me probably at 17. But imagine me at 17 with a little bit of coding skills. Maybe I've been hanging out in Hack Lab for a little bit. Maybe I've been doing some stuff. I can handle an on hover event inside JavaScript. And I want a framework laptop. Gosh, darn it. And I'm broke because I'm 17. I got a bunch of time, but not a lot of money. It says here that's going to cost me 4,980 doubloons. What's my straightest line between here and there? Like, how do I get that many doubloons? I mean, the easiest way is just to.
build cool projects that other people also like in high seas. And this is what's different about it in arcade is when you submit a project, other people are going to also be able to vote for your project between like another project. And so you're constantly pitted against other projects. This is how we're testing for like whether or something is quality or whether or not it's just a slot. And this also kind of ties into the gamification thing. People are much more likely to actually submit and build cool things rather than like, I don't know, a simple site and say it took them like 50 hours. Like they're actually going to put into like time and effort into something. They think that it's actually going to be compared against other people and that better projects actually get this multiplier that we have that gives them more doubloons.
The best way to like just get the blue is just build cool things, submit them. Okay. So I have to impress people basically. I can't merely put the time in. I also have to like produce something of quality. Yes. That's what we're trying to encourage people to do within high seas. And quality is quite subjective, but generally it's things that are like technical, creative. Don't try to be corporate. Just build things that other teenagers such as yourself also probably want and like to see. Right. We're here to hack. We're not here to make the next Facebook, right? We're not trying to be corporate. We're trying to be cool. And so if I build my thing, let's imagine that 17 year old Jared goes out and builds an invisible treasure map.
that reveals hidden snacks, as Dino has suggested. Then what do I do? I got my app. I'm done. What happens next? Yeah, so after you log into Hi-Seas and you log in using your Hat Club Slack, so yeah, join our Slack. After that, you're able to submit it to our harbor and you're able to basically ship out your project. After that, you have to vote for a few projects yourself before your project is officially shipped out. But your project then goes into this Wonder Dome, which is where it's pitted against other projects. After a certain amount of people have voted onto your project, you then get a doubloon payout. And when you get those doubloons, you're able to spend them in the shop that we have.
Okay, so did you build all this? No, I only made the Hi-Seas landing page, which is a pretty small part of it. We have a ton of people working on the Hi-Seas webpage in total. Around probably like 20-ish people working on Hi-Seas. Probably like five people who work, like many people on it. But we have a ton of people. One of the main ones, Ben, cool guy, built like a hell of a ton. Yeah, shout out to Ben. They built a ton of the site himself. Really cool, yeah. Okay. I'm just imagining Zach who created this whole thing. Kind of like, you know.
It's a gross analogy, but kind of like Peter Pan, you know, just like hanging out with these awesome hacker kids who are building amazing stuff and like having awesome ideas. And it probably keeps them young and keeps them creative and youthful. You think that's accurate? You think Zach's having fun with this project? Yeah.
I mean, Zach is mostly like in the team. He's the guy who like makes sure that everything's actually done on time and make sure. Right. Cause he's the, yeah, yeah. He's the guy that like makes sure we're not just like goofing off and make sure that things are shippable to people. So he's kind of like Peter Pan when he has to leave Neverland and go back to the real world and be like, okay, this thing has to actually ship because, you know, give us a bunch of money and we have to do the thing. So yeah, you got to get stuff done, but it's still really cool stuff that y'all are working on. Yeah. Zach is a very motivating person to be around. I bet he's, uh, he's definitely inspired quite a movement here. Here's something that's really cool for our developer.
audience who's listening to this is that there's special prizes. So of course I pointed out the most expensive one and what it looks like the most expensive, which would be the framework laptop. Maybe the iPads actually, no, I mean, by the balloon count is about twice as much as an iPad. So there you go. There's the most expensive hardware. However, there's also special prizes, which you can't buy this with money, access to really smart people. So there's two special prizes. And if you're lucky enough to win, you can get a one-on-one call with Guido Van Rossum, who of course our listener knows, Creative Python, or a one-on-one call with Anders Heilsberg, the creator of C Sharp and TypeScript.
That is cool. Have you met these guys? I mean, personally, no, but as somebody who uses Python a lot, and that was my first coding language, I mean, they sound amazing. They sound really dope. And that's not even all the special prizes we got lined up. We got more just amazing people who are coming on to just AMA with a hack lover who builds something cool with their things. We have a ton of just really cool things in the shop.
That's really awesome because, you know, we've been talking with really cool, smart people for many years here on this podcast. And we've had Anders on the show, but we'll say that, you know, one-on-one with Guido, definitely try to line that up a few times. And for some reason, he's been elusive for us. So this is like, this is priceless right here. I can't even get this with money, but you can get this if you build something cool on Hacks to Use. Yeah. And like, if you're listening to this podcast and you're somebody who has built something really cool that a lot of people use, feel free to also come in contact with us and see if, you know, you want to also host like an AMA with us. Sounds good. A couple other things that people might be wondering.
Can you build more than one project? Is it just like one and done? Or can you can you blast? Can you go for the quantity? You can build as many projects as you want. And the nice thing about High Seas is the projects that you go against in the Wonder Dome are projects that also spend a similar amount of time. So just build as many as you want, ship as many as you want. Love it. What's up, friends? I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Assembly AI, founder and CEO Dylan Fox. Dylan, tell me about Universal One. This is the newest, most powerful speech AI model to date. You released this recently. Tell me more.
So Universal One is our flagship industry leading model for speech to text and various other speech understanding tasks. So it's about a year long effort that really is the culmination of like the years that we've spent building infrastructure and tooling at assembly to even train large scale speech AI models. It was trained on about 12 and a half million hours of voice data, multilingual, super wide range of domains and sources of audio data. So it's a super robust model. We're seeing developers use it for extremely high accuracy, low cost, super fast speech to text and speech understanding tasks within their products, within automations, within workflows that they're building at their companies or within their products. Okay.
Constantly updated speech AI models at your fingertips, well, at your API fingertips, that is. A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free right there in the browser, or you can get started with a $50 credit at assemblyai.com slash practicalai. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practicalai. So what's next for you, Akon, inside of Hack Club or outside? What are you up to? What are you interested in? What are you working on?
I mean, recently I went to Counterspell, which is this most recent hackathon that Hack Club had and basically makes me want to get onto that hackathon organizing wave again. I previously organized two. One was Apocalypse, the other one was Jam Hacks 8. But basically both of those both like pretty big in-person hackathons. Other than that, I'm also trying to run a few smaller programs of my own. One of those pretty similar to Sprig called Hackapet. Basically, I'm trying to get into PCB design a little bit. It's like you code a virtual pet and you get this basically like Tamagotchi. I don't know if you heard of it. It's like a game that's pretty popular. Tamagotchi. Now you're going back to the time of Pogs, actually. Tamagotchi goes way back.
to make a Tamagotchi clone for hack lovers. Now you got me curious. Tamagotchi Wikipedia first released in 1996. So that's pretty old, right? Yeah. And now let's go Pogs Wikipedia. And let's see what time frame it's got to be right in there. Oh, this is interesting. So Pogs is based on the game of milk caps, which originally originated in Hawaii during the 1920s or 1930s. And of course, the Pog brand was the one that came around and got it going. And that was 1991. So a little bit older than Tamagotchi, but...
Definitely in that same 90s timeframe. Cool. So you are on a gap year. Yep. What are you going to do after that? I mean, I'm just like current plan is to go off to university. Okay. And like I'm from Canada. So yeah. Somewhere in Canada or somewhere here in the States. Yeah. So I'm somewhere in Canada. And studying computers, are you going to move on to something else? You're a jack of all trades as you call yourself. So are you interested enough to like stay in the software industry at this point? Or are you like more interested in game design and moving on? Or I know you haven't said on the show yet, but you've also had some experience in debate and other things, maybe writing. What are you thinking?
Yeah, so currently looking to major in math, but probably going to like minor in something else. I'm pretty interested in like the computer science field and wanting to maybe like get jobs later on in it. But yeah, there's that. All right. Well, the website is highseas.hackclub.com for teenagers, 18 and under. So if you are listening to this as a teen, check it out. If you're listening to this more of my age group, pass it off to your niece or nephew or son or daughter or somebody who might find value here and maybe earn some stuff as they build cool things. Anything else, Aikon, that we didn't cover yet? I mean, I think that's...
That was pretty good coverage. Just once again, High Seeds has a lot of teenagers in it. You get to meet a community full of people. You get to join our Hack Club Slack, which has like 40,000 teenagers on it, which is pretty big. Just if you're somebody who is really into tech or want to get into tech, High Seeds is a great starting point for doing all that. Just meet cool people, build cool things, and get cool things in return. Sounds like a great deal. All right, that is our show for this week. Akon, thank you so much for joining me and explaining this cool project coming out of Hack Club. And to our listener, thanks for sticking around, and we'll talk to you on the next one. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
All right, that is our interview for this week. Thanks for riding along on the high seas. Did you know our seventh annual State of the Log episode is right around the corner? You should totally leave us a voicemail that we can play and respond to on that episode. And yes, we are doing Breakmaster Cylinder remixes again this time around, so you definitely want to get your voicemail submitted in time to get your remix on.
Head to changelog.fm slash S-O-T-L. That's short for State of the Log. And submit yours today. It's linked up in your chapter data and show notes too. Thanks again to our awesome partners at Fly.io, to Sentry, and to Assembly AI for sponsoring this episode. Coming up next, Chris Coyer and Dave Rupert join us to talk shop. That's on ChangeLog and Friends. And that's on Friday. But that is all for now. We'll talk to you again on Friday.