Hey there, Byeongjun checking in. It's been a while! I've been busy with so many things happening in life, and I wanted to take this opportunity to catch up with you. If you don't know me yet: I'm a 16-year-old incoming Activator at the Knowledge Society solving the world's biggest problems using emerging tech.

Participating in an anti-hackathon in a train across America with Hack Club

This past summer, I spent the 11 most memorable days of my life on the Hacker Zephyr with 42 high schoolers on a hacker train across America, thanks to Hack Club. Hack Club is a global nonprofit network of high school computer hackers, makers, and coders – you can read more about them here.

As Zach Fogg and Max Wofford describe it, "The Zephyr would be an anti-hackathon. It would be goofy and open-ended yet rigorous, like the best hackathons of old. Except this time on a train."

People on the trip were Hack Club leaders at their schools, active members in the Slack community (btw, if you're not on the Slack yet, join our community here!), hackathon/meetup organizers, cool front-end developers... there are so many different ways you can describe this group of people. Not only did we have fun exploring cities and shipping projects on the train to the ZephyrNET (our intranet that was installed on the train, read more details here + check out our projects here!), we also had so many valuable conversations on how we can level up as community leaders, shared tips and advice on leading a cool club, hackathon, etc (even on our way to this random Chinese restaurant that we went to in SF at 11 pm!)

While I'm still working on my video of the trip, here are my two key takeaways:

1. Become friends with who you can learn from. Each of these 42 people comes from a diverse range of backgrounds, skillsets, and mindsets. This was simply the best opportunity for me to seek understanding, perspectives, and thought processes – thus the conversations with these community leaders allow me to grow, change and evolve the way I understand the world and myself.

2. Bias towards action – stop overthinking, and try it out. While you're at it, try your best and make the most out of it. This was something that I really embodied on the train segment of the trip, where I basically walked in with minimal coding knowledge. With a supportive group of mentors being friends, I saw the ultimate opportunity to grow, and through that opportunity, I became more fascinated by coding more than ever before.

What's next?

This was only the first part of my summer. In the next newsletter, I'll be sharing my experience as a UX intern at Talk Social. Stay tuned!

p.s. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share this with a few friends if you feel like it. They can subscribe to this newsletter through this link.

Byeongjun