My Name is Nicholas Van de walle

I'm a maker and linux geek

• I'm 19 years old and I want to take on the world. I need to sharpen my oyster knife.
• I love building things, with bits and with bolts. I've built sculptures and LED-embedded clothing. I want to help other people become Makers. I want to share the joy of using the command line. I want more people to mind meld with their terminal.

I've been accepted into Hack Reactor

Where I'll be forged into a software developer

• Hack Reactor is the leading immersive software developer bootcamp. Graduates regularly land six figure jobs and places where they love to work. In three months, they bake into you the skills required to land a job and dance nimbly in front of the technology steam roller. For me, Hack Reactor will be the crucible wherein I shape and forge my adulthood. After Hack Reactor, I will be able to support myself and my dreams financially.

I can't afford it

So I'm raising bitcoins

• I applied to Hack Reactor without money or support structure (family) to help me go. So far, I've been able to raise 75% of the $22,000 that I need in order to attend, mainly in the form of personal loans. I've covered tuition, now I just need Food and Shelter for 3 months.
• I've been raised by technology, and I want to use technology to unify my species. It only seems right to try and fund my education with the currency of the future. I believe we should reimagine every aspect of our world, knowing what we now know, and Bitcoin is a brilliant experiment that is reshaping our beliefs about money, and by extension, value and wealth.

Can you help me?

I'm $4,000 away from being able to attend

• I'm looking for personal loans (or, preferably, grants/donations) to cover the last $4,000 that I need. Loan agreements are negotiated over a Google Document and signed and stored on HelloSign.
• All Loaners and Donors will be on the Beta list for any projects that I control in the future. For example, I've noticed how hard it is to get parents and children to be excited about actual science and learning over an extended period of time. As an experiment, I want to release a physical monthly circuits newsletter, each one coming with a packet of new components to learn about and play with.
• Each newsletter would be like a Mini Make: Magazine. They would have theory, application, exercises, and finally projects to work on. The goal would be to have the newsletter be similar to a course, with each newsletter building upon the last. I would like to try and fit enough basic electrical engineering education to move from Batteries and Lightbulbs to simple Arduino programming over the course of a year. The first newsletter would come with a large project organization box, complete with tools but lacking components, so that later letters would fill the box.
• I want to personally subsidize the letter so that it can specifically target low income families. It can be very hard to make time to spend learning with your child, which is why the letter would be monthly and the projects would be short and included. It can be hard to get children excited about learning, which is why I would package this as a real, physical newsletter with real parts, instead of just creating a webapp and scaling it to 1000 servers. It's also why it comes in the mail (who doesn't like mail?).
• These are the kind of network solution projects that I enjoy designing, and want to be able to bring into the world. After Hack Reactor, I'll be able to do just that.

I'll pay it forward

Until my dying breath

• I hate living in a world where one's future can be determined by the place and circumstances of one's birth. Once I've built a strong personal foundation (I want to never worry about food or shelter again), I will devote all of my being to changing this.
• I've already started, albeit in small ways. There's a program at UC Berkeley called Pioneers in engineering. It's a robotics competition run by undergraduates at the College of Engineering. When I was in High School, this program opened my eyes to the larger world of making and hacking. After I graduated from H.S, I volunteered to help out with PiE, and ended up trying to teach STEM concepts to Oakland High School Students.
• While I was doing that, I became painfully aware of my immense privilege as a well-fed, well-nurtured, white male living in California. Now, I am fueled by a burning desire to eradicate the very notion of that Privilege, not by tearing everything down, but by building everything up.
• It's going to take a huge, monumental, concerted effort spanning several lifetimes in order to do that. I'm going to spend the next 15 years preparing to architect or orchestrate such an effort.