Hack Club: Neighborhood

I started this diary racing the clock: finish 100 hours on my personal site with twenty minutes to spare, then pack for San Francisco. A national rail strike turned school into Zoom, but it also gave me time to sketch goals and channel the jitters into writing.

The plan was simple: land in SF with momentum, keep sharing honest updates, and show up ready to build with Hack Clubbers I’d mostly met online.

Day 1 was a blur: solo flight, unexpected border interview (“I’m here to build stuff with internet nerds”), hauling gear uphill, then getting whisked straight to a midnight pizza party. Housemates had full setups; I had a couch pillow and an airplane blanket.

I still wrote it all down—sleep deprivation, culture shock, and the promise that tomorrow would feel less overwhelming.

Day 2 hit hard: doubts, a foggy brain, and Paolo asking what I wanted to build. I found structure by wandering—cafés at sunrise, Target runs for towels, accidental detours to LinkedIn HQ (yes, I asked for stickers), and grocery missions with five cultures worth of breakfast preferences.

Documenting each beat made the house feel less overwhelming and turned strangers into collaborators.

Week one became a montage: sunrise walks, Salesforce Park co-working, UNO in Chinatown, and a surprise Apple Vision Pro demo where we all tried Excel mid-air. Nights meant burritos in Dolores Park, impromptu disco ball repairs, and logging programming hours anywhere with Wi-Fi.

The highlight of week two: a ComfyUI mini-hackathon inside GitHub HQ. Security vests labeled “SSH,” RTX 5090 giveaways we didn’t win, and a depth-map workflow that actually shipped. Those entries captured the feeling of working next to 30 builders who all showed up purely to make things.

Halfway through the residency we pushed for “Freedom Week”—a break from the 40-hour tracker to ship something new and tell the story on video. That spawned Pao, a real-world stealth selfie game inspired by Among Us paranoia, plus countless midnight coding sessions, guitar breaks, and stairwell skate tricks.

As quickly as Neighborhood started, it ended—calls to the house, a program shutdown, then a slim chance to stay. I helped clean plumbing disasters, packed chairs across town, and watched Thomas deliver the final announcement before heading home to document what the month meant.

The last entry asks for a DM if you make it through all 739 lines. People actually wrote back.