One random email from GitHub ended up changing my whole summer, and somehow, it ended with me getting my dream laptop completely free.
Back in June, I was just trying to survive semester exams when this email popped up about something called Summer of Making. I didn’t know it was going to change my whole summer vacations.
It was sponsored by GitHub and run by Hack Club, a nonprofit that helps teenagers (13–18) build cool stuff and learn by doing. The idea was simple but so good: You code, you earn shells — their in-program currency.
For every hour you coded, you got 1 shell (using a VSCode extension to track time). And when your project was done, it went for community voting, where it could get a multiplier between 1x and 30x. Those shells could be used in their store to buy MacBooks, Raspberry Pis, 3D printers, games, AI tools, headphones, and hardware kits. Basically heaven for any builder.
The Grind
So I joined in and decided to code my summer away. For the next three months, I built five projects: a web scraper, a game, a DOM visualizer (my attempt at a browser), a website, and a custom leaderboard.
It was quite difficult in the beginning to lock so many hours, but that drive for something amazing at the end kept me going. I started off with my visualizer and kept doing the scraper (a 150-hour project) and my game (another 70-hour project), and the work continued.
Due to some circumstances, the event extended one more month, crawling till the end of September. This allowed me to hop onto some more projects.
The Payoff
What an irony! I was turning 19 on September 29th and this turned out to be my last but the best event ever.
I met some amazing people, learned more than I expected, and ended up coding for over 414+ hours. By the end, I had 6,612 shells, got a grant of $1,322, enough to finally buy my dream setup: GIGABYTE AERO X16 with a Ryzen AI 7, RTX 5070, 32GB DDR5 RAM, and 1TB SSD.
Still can’t believe I actually earned it through just mere code. Also got a $25 Steam grant, which was just a fun little bonus. To my surprise, I was among the top few coders with the highest earned shells. 6,612 boi!!
"It started with a random email. It ended with me realising how far a few lines of code and some late nights can really go."
I wrapped it all up just before turning 19, and honestly, this was the best summer I’ve had — not because of what I got, but because of what I learned and built. The fun that was missing before drove back in. Though I was let down after GSoC and some no-win hackathons, I kept going, and the output was as sweet as I could imagine.
A summer well spent. All thanks to Hack Club.