Everybody says next semester.

Nobody is missing talent. They are missing a door.

Every fall, students arrive curious. They hear about hackathons, open source, the people shipping things at 2am. Then they wait, because nobody told them what the first step looks like.

So we made the first step small. One room, one evening, one thing that runs by the end of it.

Twice a month, somebody teaches the thing they actually use.

Tool session: an upperclassman who already uses the thing teaches it. Next.js, Copilot, whatever is actually in the job description this year.

Skill night: take a real app apart on a whiteboard. Trade the one CLI alias that changed how you work. Lower stakes, same room.

Every third meeting, a clock.

Mini-hackathon. Two hours from scratch, or one hour with AI wide open. You leave with something that runs. That is the entire bar.

The students who have already shipped something are the ones who show up to the real hackathon in spring.

The rest of the calendar is not a lecture.

A rotating set of nights built so that showing up alone is never awkward.

Code Golf Night. Speed-Run a Landing Page. Bug Bounty Night. Architecture Teardown. Prompt Engineering Battle. UI Speed-Dating. Roast My Setup. Blind Coding. Terminal RCM. Documentation Roast. Keyboard Modding Night. Fireside Chat.

Taught by students who did it eighteen months ago.

Not a professor two decades from their last standup. Upperclassmen with hackathon placements and finished internships, in the same room, building alongside you.

Front-end and full-stack that people actually ship. React, Next.js, Svelte.. Backends and APIs. Node, FastAPI, Supabase, Prisma.. Directing AI instead of being replaced by it.. Reading a job description and building straight at it.. Hackathon strategy. Scope it, build it, pitch it, before the clock runs out.. A GitHub and a portfolio that survive a recruiter's ten seconds..

Seventy students joined the group chat before this club was allowed to exist.

Six of them volunteered to mentor. Nobody asked them to. That is the whole argument for why HackBama should be here.

With founding members Alex Gundrum, Kori Russell, and Nikechukwu Okoronkwo.

Build something.

No application, no experience bar, no dues. Freshmen welcome. Come to one night and decide from there.