Hey! I'm Cosmin, a 16 year old club leader from Romania, who leads the VectorBytez hack club, and I'm gonna share with you the most AMAZING club meet I ever hosted!
For context, we typically hold our club meetings at a pizza place. However, with some new members joining in recent times, we wanted to do something more fun and affordable. So, we decided to cook our own food– and what better way to do that than a BBQ!
So we made our plans: we were gonna do a BBQ and a sprig workshop at a member's (Simone's) chalet, which is right next to a waterpark!
First, we gathered resources: Simone and Maria bought the meat with our HCBcard, I brought some sodas, Marc brought spices, and everyone came in with their laptops.
We had to take a train to a town near the venue, and we put a Hack Club sticker in it
At nearly every stop, I thought it was our turn to get off and stood up to check, which made the others laugh because they could see out the window and knew it wasn't.
After arriving, we went shopping for the rest of the necessary items (chips, marshmallows, chocolate, biscuits). Unfortunately, we couldn't pay with the virtual HCB card because the cashier insisted, "I need to see the actual card in your hand, or you'll have to pay with cash." It was odd, but we split the bill and only ended up paying around 4 bucks each, so it worked out fine.
There were nine of us, but we crammed into two taxis. One driver mentioned he could get in trouble because we had six people in a five-person vehicle. We even passed a police car, but fortunately, they didn't notice. When we arrived, the taxi driver charged us a bit more than usual, probably due to the illegality.
Finally, we arrived and started the fire while the other members unpacked all the food.
Half of us started cooking the meat while the other half were preparing the veggies.
The food was finally ready and we got to eating
After eating, we took a stroll through the closed waterpark and the regular park inside it. We found a spinning wheel and half of us got dizzy and sick, but after 10 minutes, we felt better and decided to spin again. Click here to watch us spinning!
At the end of our tour, we also took a group photo with the more senior members:
As the sun was setting, we gathered once more in the chalet, pulled our laptops out of our bags, and started the Sprig workshop. It was an absolute blast. I gave a small presentation and let everyone express their creativity by making their own games. All the participants created decent games, and one even completed theirs, made a pull request, and got it merged!
Our meeting was rudely interrupted by a call from our friend's dad, announcing that he had made a bus wait for us for 30 minutes (and Simone forgot to tell us). We panicked, grabbed all our stuff, and ran to the bus. Thankfully, nobody was waiting except the driver. He drove us to the station where we got our tickets and waited for the train, which had a 40-minute delay. Not wanting to waste the opportunity, we went for a walk in a park and then to a café, where we enjoyed some delicious cake slices.
On our train back home, I asked every participant to complete a 3-question form for the workshop. The feedback given was super helpful because it helped me understand what each member’s pace and preferences are, which in turn made me adopt changes to future workshops that would make it easier for everyone to learn.
It was the most fun meet we’ve had and the best workshop I’ve ever hosted. And I don’t think it was a coincident either because I think if people do something with pleasure, they're more likely to continue doing it.