LAHS Hack Club

From 2021 to 2022, I was the LAHS Hack Club's president. There were two things that I wanted to do: recover from the hit in participation we took due to the pandemic and difficulty meeting, and grow our presence on campus. To do this, I wanted to revive existing activites we had, provide new opportunities for our members, and advertise our club to the rest of the school.

GET Program

Our club's GET program is a way for other school clubs to get free websites and domains. In previous years, we would have members learn HTML and CSS to create these sites, or choose templates and help other clubs using LAHS Hack Club infrastructure.

However, we typically did not have enough people, or web developers in particular, to reliably provide this service. Clubs also wanted more powerful management features, which we would have to develop from scratch each time. Overall, this led to the stagnation of GET, which needed a major rework.

Reworking GET with Publish

To fix this issue, I led development of an internal tool called Publish. Publish enables our members to create powerful features in sites with no need to recreate backend infrastructure, by using Notion. This means that we get (essentially) a free admin dashboard that's super simple to understand, usable by anyone on campus, and really easy to code with - it's just a REST API and JSON for our developers.

Publish makes use of Notion databases, which look just like spreadsheets. From this, we pull structured data in JSON format and automatically cache images using predictable endpoints. Site content can be automatically generated from this data, and the administration can be shared with our club and our partner. This is a stark contrast to manually editing SQL databases, which we did before.

Publish has been used by members across various projects successfully, and we have been able to provide clubs new websites using it - including our school's National Art Honors Society. We have served over 200GB of data using Publish in one year and it is open source on GitHub.

Free Stuff

To provide our members with new, hands-on learning materials, we actively promoted free resources including the GitHub education program, education discounts, software free for students, and more. We also provided students with free domains, a private Docker registry, and server hosting space if they wanted to publish a project but didn't have the funds to do so.

This year, I worked with my fellow officers to submit a PTSA grant to gain more funding to allow us to run more cloud infrastructure as well, giving us more breathing room to do bigger and better services.

Student Services

While we created internal tooling like Publish, we also made new student services available. For course selection week in 2022, we created classes.+, a free online tool that allowed students to browse and pick classes. Students can select a class to see future options in an engaging and accessible way, which was a massive improvement over stacks of paper handouts, confusingly laid out course videos, and non-centralized class advertisements.

Classes saw almost 800 users in the first year, and is expected to see more as more teachers sign on to provide more details. It is open source on GitHub.