sprig VS Zulip

Blot is completely open source (hardware and software). You can find the GitHub here: https://github.com/hackclub/blot

I spent the last year building Blot with teenagers in the Hack Club community including but not limited to B (age 19), Henry (15), Kai (17), Shawn (18), Hugo (15), Ella (19) and Bright (15).

At Hack Club we’re working on building a new model for public education through open source projects. We believe people learn best by building things they care about and sharing those things with others. We want to support motivated teenagers around the world to pursue technology this way. That’s why we created the “You Ship, We Ship” model. We build online creative coding environments that are gateways to other subjects in technology. When teenagers create projects with our tools and share them publicly we send them more creative material. At the end of 2022 we released our first “You Ship, We Ship” project: Sprig.

Sprig is a microworld for making tile games, when you share your game we send you the hardware to build a handheld gaming console that can play that game. https://github.com/hackclub/sprig

Today we are releasing our newest “You Ship, We Ship”: Blot. Create a program that generates line art and we’ll send you a robot that can draw that art in real life. We hope Blot will encourage people to explore the beauty of programming and be a gateway to digital fabrication. Nothing feels more magic to me than writing an incantation on a computer that can materialize into a real thing that you can hold in your hands. I hope to share that magic with you through Blot.

Everything is free and open source so anyone is welcome to use the editor, submit to the gallery, or build a Blot machine. You have to be a teenager for us to send you a machine for free though.

I’m excited to see what people make! Enjoy.

If you want to learn more about Hack Club you can check out this short documentary we made about our 2023 summer hackathon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1s5HqSqKi0

It appears the project hasn't optimized for production (yet?). For now, I can't help but think it may be possible to cobble together a Sprig using inexpensive Pi Pico HATs and 3D printing. Here's the schematic:

https://github.com/hackclub/sprig/blob/main/docs/GROWING_A_S...

Hack Club | Full-time, Part-time or Contract | ONSITE | Vermont, US | https://hackclub.com

Hello friends,

I come from the game dev world where I led the team on the Crash Bandicoot reboot trilogy and helped ship two of the Destiny 2 expansions. I’m now building out a team here at Hack Club that will make inspiring technical and creative projects with and for thousands of the most technical teenagers you’ll probably ever meet.

In the past 3 months, we’ve shipped an open source game console ( https://github.com/hackclub/sprig ) that you can only get by building a game for it, a guide to assembly language that’s now the 4th most popular GitHub repo written in assembly ( https://github.com/hackclub/some-assembly-required ), and a teaser for a game we're producing about love and graphing (https://hack.af/sr ).

For this role, I’m looking for a technical partner-in-crime with a few notches in your belt.

JOB DESCRIP/APPLY: https://hiring.hackclub.com/26020 or email [email protected]

In the past 3 months, we’ve shipped an open source game console that you can only get by building a game for it, a guide to assembly language that’s now the 4th most popular GitHub repo written in assembly, and a teaser for a game about love and graphing.

Zulip — Real-time chat with a unique email-like threading model. The free plan includes 10,000 messages of search history and File storage up to 5 GB. also, it provides a self-hostable open-source version.

(1) Zulip Chat - https://zulip.com/ - seems to be reasonably popular, but more people should know about it

I’ve been using it for over 5 years now [1], and it’s as good as ever. It’s way faster than any other chat app I’ve used. It has a good UI and conversation model. It has a simple and functional API that lets me curl threads and write blog posts based on them.

(only problem is that I Ctrl-+ in my browser to make the font bigger – I think it’s too dense for most people)

(2) re2c regex to state machine compiler - https://re2c.org

A gem from the 90’s, which people have done a great job maintaining and improving (getting Go and Rust target support in the last few years). I started using it in 2016, and used for a new program a few months ago. I came to the conclusion that it should have been built into C, because C has shitty string processing – and Ken Thompson both invented C AND brought regular languages to computing !!

In comparison, treesitter lexers are very low level, fiddly, and error prone. I recently saw dozens of ad hoc fixes to the tree-sitter-bash lexer, which is unsurprising if you look at the structure of the code (manually crawling through backslashes and braces in C).

https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-bash/blob/master/...

These fixes are definitely appreciated, but I think it indicates a problem with the model itself.

(based on https://lobste.rs/s/endspx/software_you_are_thankful_for#c_y...)

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/04/26.html

A few more truly in the vibe of open source projects not advertising their hosting providers: https://plane.so/ , https://element.io/ , https://www.loomio.com/ , https://zulip.com/ , and it keeps going... Very few open source projects, in the FOSS sense, are advertising their hosting provider.

I was so excited to see this happen!

I'm not a customer of yours, but your blog posts inspired me a lot. Your journey through quitting caffeine is a great and heartening read.

I've got two things to say;

1) Will you consider source-availabling the web portal (app.keygen.sh) too? Some enterprises could use it for easy management/support for custoner's licenses. Although now that I think about it, it could also discourage custom, more suitable implementations for each use-case... I'm torn on this one. I would like to see it available on GitHub too just out of curiosity too. It's very beautiful.

2) For a team + customers' chat, I cannot recommend Zulip enough. It's a joy to use and has the most innovative chat system I've ever seen. https://zulip.com

I hope your business keeps prospering!

Zulip | Senior Flutter Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We're building the next generation of Zulip's mobile apps in Flutter. We're looking for a senior engineer with Flutter experience to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. Our Flutter prototype is just a few months old, so this is a greenfield opportunity to help shape the app's architecture from early on.

For full details, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at [email protected].

Anyways, I'm an internet stranger, not a social media expert. So let me know what you all think. And if we make a discord or zulip or something to make this a reality, let me know and I'd love to help any way I can.