450 hours, four ships, one laptop

In June 2025 I was busy surviving semester exams when an email about Hack Club’s Summer of Making arrived. It quietly took over my vacation.

The premise

Summer of Making was run by Hack Club and funded by GitHub. You coded, an editor extension tracked your time, the community reviewed what you shipped, and the shells you earned could be traded for hardware, games and tools.

It sounded like a game. The better framing turned out to be: show up, finish things, then do it again.

The grind

Over three months I logged more than 450 hours. I built Webber, a scraper that saves whole websites; Timberly, a game with an online leaderboard; a DOM visualiser; a website; and a custom leaderboard. The scraper alone took about 150 hours, and the game another 70.

Staying consistent was hard at first. A visible goal helped, but the bigger change was learning to create momentum by finishing a small next piece instead of waiting to feel inspired.

The payoff

The programme was extended to the end of September. I turned 19 on 29 September, right as it ended. I finished with 6,612 shells and a $1,322 grant, enough for a Gigabyte Aero X16 with a Ryzen AI 7, an RTX 5070, 32 GB of DDR5 and a 1 TB SSD.

The laptop is worth roughly ₹1.2 lakh, but the number that matters more is 450. I now know I can keep going through the unglamorous middle of a project.

What I kept

This was the best summer I’ve had, because it made building fun again. After missed opportunities and hackathons that didn’t go my way, I left with shipped work, better habits, and proof that long effort compounds.