Fun facts
I can ride a unicycle (and do tricks), I've run ultramarathons, and I've addressed the floor at the European Parliament!
My favorite songs:
Coding stats from hackatime
Inventory / Tools
Story: The lore so far
Started programming at 16 to automate my very boring warehouse job, and got hooked on the intersection of maths and art — using code as a tool to explore it. I quickly realised that no community of makers existed in my area of rural England, so I started one. I taught a class, won a competition and was offered a $50,000 fellowship with Hack Club. At 18, I moved to America to build the future of technical education for teens.
Over that year in America I ran hackathons with the creators that first showed me coding, travelled all across America and Europe to mentor at events, and got teens to program for 10,000 hours — tracked using Hackatime.
Now I have flown the other way. Home to England to study Robotics and Mechatronic Engineering at Lboro Uni. We are yet to see where that will go...
Missions
COMPLETE Hack Club Fellowship Move across the world at 18 to spend a year scaling the mission of Hack Club — building programs and running events that inspire thousands of teens to learn coding.
IN PROGRESS StrandBeest Design, manufacture and build a mechanical walking sculpture, and meet the inspiration Theo Jansen.
IN PROGRESS Beest Hackathon Convince 30 teens to fly to the Netherlands to watch the StrandBeest exhibition.
IN PROGRESS You Ship, We Ship Create and execute programs that reward teens for building personal projects. Goal: 10,000 hours of tracked learning.
COMPLETE Flagship Hackathon Get 10 of the biggest technical YouTubers together for a game jam in LA.
IN PROGRESS Stickers Build a platform to track historical sticker designs by Hack Club — starting as an internal tool and becoming a full-fledged distribution platform.
COMPLETE Create a coding club, win a competition! Start teaching kids coding from 0 — raise your own budget, beat the well-funded schools.
New MissionWant to work on another mission with me? Reach out with your pitch — euanripper2@gmail.com
Sidequests: Fun projects on the side
COMPLETE Learn to unicycle Over lockdown you find yourself with a lot of time, a lot of boredom, and a rusty old unicycle in the back of a shed...
COMPLETE Hike 55 miles with the British Army Over 3 years, take on progressively harder hikes, culminating in leading a team of 6 across 55 miles through 10 checkpoints for the army's Ten Tors challenge.
COMPLETE Attend Hackathons I love being in a technical community, and the best way to meet people is at hackathons — fortunately my work runs a lot of them!
COMPLETE Run an ultramarathon Go from couch potato to ultramarathon runner — run across a national park to complete the quest. Time doesn't matter, finishing matters!
COMPLETE Learn how differential equations govern the spots and stripes on fish. Build a visualisation of Turing's "The chemical basis of morphogenesis" paper using Python to simulate why some animals get spots and others stripes.
COMPLETE Speak at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Convince the European Parliament to let your school visit, even after Brexit...