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On the 16th of June 2025, I got a newsletter from GitHub:

GitHub is joining Hack Club for Summer of Making 2025! Code this summer to earn incredible prizes: Framework Laptops, Raspberry Pis, Cricut Cutters, Flipper Zeros, Bambu 3D Printers, and so much more. Here’s how it works:

1. Code on personal projects to earn shells
2. Spend your shells on prizes from Pis to Pinecils
3. Repeat until August 31st

I was already working on libsim, my biggest project at that time, so why not log my time and get some cool prizes along the way?

Learning PHP

I had learnt PHP with Jeffrey Way’s amazing beginner course on Laracasts in preparation to build my best project with Laravel. The stack I chose was Laravel + React + SQLite, since I felt most comfortable building my UI with React.

Now reflecting on the project, I really should have chosen another database system instead of SQLite for much better scalibility, but it made the deployment very simple.

I wasn’t the best at designing beautiful interfaces, so I found a really cool TailwindCSS theme on tweakcn.

The First 25% of libsim

After a long and full period of school happenings, I finally found time to commit to this project. It had been a few months since I learnt PHP and Laravel basics, but I quickly got used to the framework’s architecture.

The entirety of May was spent building a solid foundation for the API, with little focus on the frontend. I was not rushing to finish libsim quickly, since I had more than 2 months to finish it before going abroad for 6 weeks. Time went by, and then Summer of Making started!

Accelerating

I somehow managed to managed to log 60 hours of VSCode in three weeks while finishing up my application. It was during my internship too, which was not an ideal combination for my mental health. Nevertheless, I accelerated my building speed and was able to ship a buggy but very proud project before my flight!

In total, I shipped 23 devlogs with each one averaging 2.6 hours.

The project got rejected 2 times and it took additional 3.5 hours for me to fix it up before finally getting that ship certification ☺️. I received 992 coins as my reward, which is around the average amount this project should give:

$$\begin{equation} coins = 15 * hours \end{equation}$$

The multiplier ranges from 1 to 30, depending on how many votes the project gets.

The Community

I had a lot of fun talking to other participants in Summer of Making, as well as seeing the various projects that people have built in those months. They were all supportive and I would like to thank the Hack Club team for supporting teenagers like me, who love building stuff.

Sources

• Summer of Making Art from GitHub

And of course, this blog was also built for Summer of Making 😉