Stardance memo

This an internal memo I circulated with the Stardance review team

The big questions of tomorrow

When I was 16, I quit competitive Overwatch (where I was top 50 in all of North America) and started to once again work on personal projects.

During my many years 3D printing (8 at that point), I saw a lot of things consistently wrong with the DIY 3D printing sphere; overly expensive parts lists, custom CNC’d parts, just general inaccessibility.

I reached critical point was seeing something like the Positron, a 3D printer that fit inside a filament box, and seeing that BOM being more than $1000 USD and requiring multiple custom CNC’d metal parts.

Why wasn’t any design I ever wanted to build remotely accessible? Why does this almost always happen to the majority of 3D printer designs?

Answering this question led to me to build Neutrino, a 3D printer that fits in a filament box for under $200 USD. That was the craziest journey of my life up until that point, and I learned SO much about CAD design, firmware, PCB design, and everything else. And yet.

I remember when I initially took on this task, it seemed absolutely impossible to do something like that from scratch. Where does one even get started? What do I design first? How do I even put this together?

These were really hard questions to answer! It took a couple of months, but eventually I got there and made it.

Once I finished that, it took me to the next question to answer: why on earth was that answer so hard to get in the first place? Why was that

Moreover: why can’t we live in a world where the DIY norm is to design your own projects, not just build other people’s designs?

For the record: this is why the JOURNAL.md filesystem even started. I wanted people to tell the stories of their projects. I am so incredibly happy we have had thousands of people make one.

This is why I joined Hack Club just over 2 years ago.

Recently, I think we’ve reached that point! Hundreds of teenagers around the world are designing their own projects from scratch, and sharing their story along the way. Blueprint, Stasis, Fallout, Forge, etc have all been insanely large programs.

That brings us to today. What are the next questions to answer? I have an idea.

One of the most staggering stats at Hack Club is that for the vast majority of hardware programs we’ve run in the past year, less than 30% of the projects we fund ever get a build update submitted.

I really want to underline that number. That is not 30% of projects successfully working (which would still be poor mind you), but 30% of projects ever sharing an attempt to build at all. No update, no sign of life, just disappeared.

What is happening there? Why are we pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into projects that don’t exist? For every $100k we spend on hardware programs, only $30k of that (best case) comes back as built projects.

The big question I want to answer is to figure out how to get us to a world where that figure is 80%, or even 90%. Where are people getting stuck? How do we get them over the finish line? What if we actually got over a thousand built hardware projects?

Once we figure that out, then we can start asking even bigger questions:

What is the world where you every week you browse r/3dprinting or r/electronics and see at least 1 teen-made project?

What’s the world where teenagers are designing the things we use daily? The SlimeVR project has raised over $11M to date, and yet I think a team of Hack Clubbers could’ve 100% made something similar.

What’s the world where you can go to weekly local meetups with other teen hackers?

And ultimately, can the world have a legitimate third space for young makers in the 21st century?

It starts with relentless reviewing and providing community to people. We are one of, if not the biggest educational institute for hands-on engineering education. There is no other big party to be overshadowed by. If you are actively helping with Hack Club programs, you are pushing the frontier.

We have 51 days until Stardance ends. Let’s make it the best 51 yet.

I was having a conversation with someone last night which really struck out to me and reminded me why we do this:

“Highway to this date was my favourite program”

“Why?”

“Because it was the only time a reviewer told me my project wouldn’t work.”

“Elaborate?”

“In every other program, a reviewer just told me my project wasn’t shipped. They didn’t say anything about my design; in highway, one of my projects was shipped and yet they still told me it wouldn’t work”

“and?”

“I actually learned something. I disagreed and ordered anyways, and turns out it actually didn’t work. I felt like submitting my project for review was actually useful”

Reviewing is an act of mentorship. Our primary job is to teach people the way. The way of building your own projects and experiencing the joy that comes with that. Never forget that.