The Boreal Express

I’ve made each day collapsible to allow for you to just read the pictures and summaries if you’d like. Just click the summary to expand the day’s events.

Some background

Hack Club

I joined Hack Club in late-May of 2024. Hack Club is a non-profit organization comprised of over 35,000 teen programmers, hackers, and makers. I joined as it seemed like a cool community, in addition to their you ship; we ship initiatives. An example is Arcade wherein you can earn stuff from laptops to microcontrollers, simply by working on personal projects.
What I found incredible, however, were the hackathons . Recent hackathons have included Apocalypse , which took place in Shopify Headquarters, and The Trail , a hackathon combined with a hike. One of the most recent hackathons was The Boreal Express .

The Boreal Express

I learned about The Boreal Express shortly after joining Hack Club. Boreal was a hackathon that was supposed to be a transcontinental journey across Canada. It was taking place onboard The Canadian, a train known for its beautiful views. Only 50 applicants would be accepted for this all-expenses-paid journey. Initially, I thought about applying but didn’t prioritize it. I applied a week or two later. Upon submission of the application, I was told that I should receive a response by June 10. It was June 15. Assuming I missed the deadline, I moved on. I also couldn’t imagine myself being accepted, considering I had just joined Hack Club. Five days later, on June 20, I received a message regarding my application and if I would be open to a call regarding my application. I was somehow accepted out of 600 applicants.

Day 0-1

Traveling to Vancouver and meeting others

Along with one of my friends (who was also accepted), I flew to Vancouver one day prior to the planned date for the opening ceremony. The next day, along with the other attendees (who reached one day prior), we went to Jericho Beach and got to meet the others who were arriving. I also got to meet some cool people, such as Panos , one of two attendees from Greece, seen here trying to pet a rabbit.
The beach provided a great view of the Vancouver skyline which looked particularly looked beautiful as darkness fell. Overnight, we stayed in HI Vancouver Jericho Beach hostel. Not before trying to take a selfie with a 2000+ lumen flashlight.

Day 2

A PR-friendly opening ceremony and fire

The opening ceremony, which was supposed to occur the first day, ended up being postponed to the second day as many people were arriving late. In part, this can be attributed to the CrowdStrike outage that occurred shortly before the trip started. The opening ceremony was held at the Pacific Central Station. I’m not sure if this was due to VIA Rail attempting to get the most PR out of the event or miscommunication, but the minister of heritage, along with some higher-ups from VIA Rail, were present and were giving speeches that alluded to us solving climate change on a week-long trip.
Around 10:20 PM, we began to see wildfires in the distance. At that point, I don’t think most of us thought much of it. I tried to get some pictures of the fires, but wasn’t able to get any good ones.

Day 3

The Jasper Wildfires, turning back, and a lot of caffeine

Early morning, the Jasper Wildfires started. Over 10,000 people were evacuated from Jasper. The train, at this point, turned back towards Vancouver. Whilst this was unfortunate, I doubt it was anywhere near as bad as what the people in Jasper were going through.
VIA Rail allowed Hack Club, along with other passengers, to stay on the train for two nights while it was stationary at the station. Inside the train, stuff was mostly the same. Workshops, talks, hacking, and consumption of caffeine continued. For context, Hack Club managed to get 360 cans of Celsius for the trip. I do wish that I was able to get more pictures of the scenery that we saw while the train was moving through the beautiful landscapes of Canada, however.

Day 4

Linus Media Group and the illisuion of overkill hardware

We were able to visit Linus Media Group and got a tour of their space. While seeing the spaces where they filmed their videos was cool, the most interesting part was getting to talk with some of the team members. From the videos on the LMG channels, it’s easy to get the impression that everyone’s using overkill hardware. I was able to talk to one of the writers, whose name I’m unfortunately forgetting, about how they daily-drive a Dell machine with an 8th Gen i5 (or i7, I don’t remember) for writing scripts. It shows how you as long as the hardware is usable, it doesn’t matter if it’s using the latest graphics card or CPU. What matters is that work gets done.

Day 5

Closing ceremony and the simulation of cool conversations

Today was the last day of the trip. Projects were showcased in the morning. As stated before, there were many cool people on this trip. Projects ranged from an LLM built from scratch to a Chrome extension for sustainable shopping. I worked on a project that tried to show how cool conversations between people with different backgrounds and personalities can be. The project used an LLM (local or remote) to generate a conversation using a different system prompt for each person. Whilst it did hallucinate, I would say it still accomplished the goal of representing the cool conversations that can occur between people.

A quick note

I regret not writing this post earlier. I had a lot of fun on this trip and met some really cool people. The trip was, of course, a great experience, but the people I met were what made it truly memorable. Meeting 55 like-minded people from 7 different countries was simply incredible. Even though I had only joined Hack Club less than two months prior to the trip, Hack Club felt much more significant to me after the trip.
Seeing the projects people were working on was inspiring. I also found it cool that over half the Hack Club staff on the trip was under 20 years old. I hope to see some of these people again in the future and thanks to Hack Club, that’s quite likely.