Congratulations to the winners of the spring 2013 hackNY student hackathon!
1st Place: gitdown
Alexandra Qin (New York University), Geoffrey Litt (Yale)
2nd Place: AirDrum
Eddie Zaneski (Rutgers University), Ian Lozinski (Rutgers University), Sushanth Kodali (Rutgers University)
3rd Place: ModMail
Ayaka Nonaka (University of Pennsylvania), Sean Welleck (University of Pennsylvania), Diana Chen, Steven Krouse (University of Pennsylvania), Jonathan Leung (University of Pennsylvania)
Best Hardware Hack: Laser Tanks
Manuel Lopez (Rutgers University)
Funniest: Ooh La Wee
Alexsander Akers (Columbia University)
Technically impressive: Terminal Wars
Josh Matthews (Rutgers University), Kaitlin Poskaitis (Rutgers University)
Best UI/prettiest/most intuitive to use: Mapquestz
Michelle Lew (Carnegie Mellon University), Michael Helmbrecht (Carnegie Mellon University)
The 8breaker: Drone Control
Frank Carey (State University of New York at New Paltz)
Most number of APIs: Mustached Bear
Charles Lehner (University of Rochester), Kai Herng Loh (Brown University)
Learn more about these and other awesome hacks on Hacker League!
We’re very excited about this weekend’s spring 2013 hackNY student hackathon!
hackNY hackathons give students an opportunity to meet each other, to find out about NYC’s great startup ecosystem, and to experience coding and solving technical challenges of your own choosing.
The schedule for the hackathon points to the final demo event where students, individually or in teams, present the creations they’ve built.
We couldn’t organize these events without the great support of a number of people, including our student organizing committee, our generous community sponsors, the great talented students who participate, and of course our panel of expert judges who help us award prizes at the end of the hackathon.
We’d like to thank in advance the judges for the spring 2013 hackNY student hackathon:
Jessica Lawrence
Rob Spectre
Chris Poole aka Moot
Sara Chipps
Abe Stanway
Aditya Mukerjee
Ian Jennings
Cliff Stein
Tami Evnin
This spring at the hackNY student hackathon, we’re bringing hardware back!
Read more…
Dear Student Hackers:
We’d like to support those of you joining us from outside the NYC metro area better, so in addition to continuing a 10gen/MongoDB bus from Penn + Princeton + Rutgers to the hackNY student hackathon, we’re also creating a $50 travel grant program for a select number of students from universities not along the bus route.
10gen/MongoDB has generously agreed to sponsor travel grants in the amount of $50 to bring 30 lucky student-hackers from and to the hackathon. These will be awarded on a first-come-first-served basis.
We ask that student purchase their own tickets, so you can choose the mode of transport that is most convenient for you. If selected, your name will be on a list to be reimbursed during the hackathon.
Details & Requirements:
1) Keep an eye on the hackNY blog and @hackNY, where we will post a travel grant application form at noon on Thursday
2) Register for the hackathon here.
3) On the form, provide us with your name/.edu email addy/academic institution/graduation date
4) Book your transportation and email your receipt to receipts2013@hackNY.org no later than March 15, 2013
5) The first 30 students to fill out a complete application will be on the list to receive their grant during the hackathon. If you do not book your travel and provide hackNY with a proof of purchase before March 15, 2013, your spot will be given to the next person on the waiting list.
Hope to see you April 6-7!
Best,
Team hackNY
As part of hackNY’s mission, we provide free housing to all hackNY Fellows and Mentors during the 10-week Fellows program. We want to enable every Fellow to get to know other members of their cohort, as we’ve seen how the friendships they cultivate over the summer continue to be valuable contacts, collaborators, and cofounders for years.
In previous summers, the housing was in suites of quads (two bedrooms with two residents in each bedroom). The class of 2012 suggested that, given how awesome and essential the hackNY Fellows’ housing is to the program, even better would be using NYU’s communal spaces in the suites. Based on that feedback, this year, we’re providing 13-person suites (mix of doubles and singles in each suite). Each suite has bathrooms, kitchen facilities, and large common spaces to accommodate late night hanging and hacking.
Our experience is that by living together, students learn the most from each other, and bring out the best in each other. We are very excited that the residential experience is going to be even more awesome and can’t wait for the class of 2013 to arrive in NYC!!!
Attention awesome NYC startups: hackNY is pleased to announce applications are now open for hosting one of NYC’s next generation of talented developers and engineers: the class of 2013 hackNY Fellows. Please submit applications before 11:59 pm NYC time Wednesday March 20 via http://apply.hackny.org/startups/new .
The hackNY Fellows program, now entering its fourth year, is an intense program designed to introduce students to NYC’s startup ecosystem by pairing the best technical minds with great NYC startups. The hackNY Fellows program includes housing as well as a pedagogical lecture series covering all aspects of founding or joining a startup. Previous fellows have come from all over the US and Canada, majoring in a variety of subjects, with skills including front-end, back-end, data science, and design. Don’t take our word for it though: please see this video created by the class of 2011 hackNY Fellows:
http://bit.ly/hackNY2011vid .
Please to do go hackNY.org to learn more, or to contact us at info@hackNY.org with your questions.
Best,
Team hackNY
Since April 2010, hackNY’s student hackathons have attracted hundreds of students from scores of universities for 24-hour events in which participants collaborate on creative coding challenges. At the beginning of a hackNY student hackathon, New York City startups selected by the student organizing committee demo their APIs. Students then form teams to brainstorm ideas for projects to build based on these APIs, working through the night to turn their ideas into reality in time to present before a panel of judges the following day, competing for prizes and glory.
The spring 2013 hackNY student hackathon (our seventh!) will be April 6-7 at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science (hackNY’s first student hackathon at Columbia!). It will be an exciting, well-attended event and we’re looking for sponsors.
For more information on sponsorship and to discuss becoming a sponsor, please contact Team hackNY at info@hackny.org
In this post 2011 hackNY Fellow Aditya Mukerjee describes hackNY’s visit to Brown with Peter Bell.
Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of traveling with hackNY’s own Hacker/Evangelist Peter Bell on the second stop of the hackNY College Tour: Brown University. The trip was organized with the help of hackNY ’12 alum Varun Singh (Venmo).
When we got to Brown, we were greeted by a plethora of hacker food (pizza) and a sizeable crowd of Brown students eager to hear Peter’s talk: ‘How to Build an Awesome Career in Software Development’.
I could hardly imagine a more qualified person to give a talk on this topic – for those of you who haven’t yet had a chance to meet Peter, he’s had an incredible career himself as a developer (most recently with Ruby/Rails and Node.js), entrepreneur, technologist (CTO of General Assembly), and community figure (founder of CTO School and the Node.js NYC Meetup).
In a world where resumes and transcripts are increasingly being replaced with open-source projects and Github profiles, Peter presented a modern, updated perspective on building a non-linear career in this non-linear industry. As Peter explained, building a career in software development requires building a skillset that’s dynamic, not static. In other words, success is a process, not a goal – a succesful developer will keep refreshing their skills and updating their knowledge continuously, regardless of their current job situation.
While there is no ideal skillset, there is an ideal ‘set of skillsets’ – the super-skillset, if you’ll forgive the pun. A developer should seek to maintain at least a facile understading of a number of current technologies, while also choosing an area in which to develop a deeper understanding as well. By creating a ‘T-shaped’ skillset, the proactive developer can carve out their own niche, while still remaining a versatile developer at a rapidly-changing startup.
One of Peter’s best suggestions was ‘promiscuous pairing’ – which is not quite as risque as it sounds! The easiest way to learn quickly from other people is to pair program with them, and by pairing with other developers at every possible chance, you learn the best practices of programming that much more quickly.
Incidentally, in my case, hackNY provided me with the ideal environment to shape my experiences in this manner. Each class is filled with students with a diverse range of backgrounds and areas of expertise, which makes it easy to find other excited developers to practice and learn with. Most of the fellows take advantage of this opportunity in some way over the course of the summer, whether through fellow-run workshops on the topic of their interest, or by working with other fellows on projects that they developed over the course of the summer.
After Brown, Peter and I headed to my alma mater – Columbia – for the next step of the hackNY college tour. Coming up soon: University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon University!
attention all members of the student-hacking population:
it is on!!!
save April 6-7, 2013 for the spring 2013 hackNY student hackathon.
Who: Code-loving students from all universities. NYC startups with awesome APIs to build on.
Where: We’re shaking things up this spring! New location: Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School for Engineering and Applied Science
When: April 6-7, 2013
Click here for more details and to register.
sincerely yours,
-Team hackNY
This was originally posted on jessepollak.me by Jesse Pollak (2012 hackNY Fellow).
Over the summer, hackNY had the good fortune of welcoming Peter Bell for one of our weekly tech/entrepreneurship talks. He spoke to us about choosing the right technologies for a project and we all left with a better understanding of what it meant to be a technical decision maker.
At the November NYTM, hackNY announced that thanks to Speaker Quinn and the NYC City Council we will be welcoming Peter into the family in an even bigger way: he will be working with the wonderful Manya Ellenberg as an evangelist to expand the hackNY community, improve the 2013 hackNY fellows program and build out the technology that powers hackNY behind the scenes.
I had the good fortune of talking to Peter about why he decided to join hackNY as an evangelist. I asked some questions, he gave some answers, and we had a grand old time:
How did you first get involved with hackNY?
Originally Evan (Korth) asked me to present to his class at NYU. Shortly thereafter I got a chance to present for the fellows over the summer this year.
What made you want to work with hackNY?
I was immediately impressed by the quality of the fellows and the kinds of projects they were working on. I also just love the mission of connecting students to jobs at local startups. I’ve been involved in building businesses for 20 years and I can’t imagine a better way to spend a career in technology.
What are you going to be doing for hackNY over the next few months?
I’ll be working with Evan and Chris to continue to refine the details of the role, but the focus of this evangelist position is to connect jobseekers with opportunities at local tech companies and serve as a bridge between the City’s colleges and universities and the tech industry. I’ll also be writing some code for hackNY to stay relevant as a developer!
What are some of the coolest hacks you’ve done in the past (technical or non technical)?
My favorite hack is around learning. The best way to learn is to teach, so I often commit to giving presentations at major tech conferences on technologies that I know very little about. It forces to me to learn the ins and outs of everything from git to neo4j to datomic in a way that I’d never do if I just had to use them for a project.
If you had to pick one programming language as your favorite, which would it be?
Despite resisting for years, I now use ruby for most of my day-to-day coding (although python has great math libraries and I love the groovy and grails community on the JVM). Over the next year or so I’m really excited to finally learn clojure and really get my head around the type system in Haskell. I also use javascript (client and server side) where it makes sense and java when I really, really have to.
emacs or vim?
IntelliJ for Java, sublime or textmate for day to day hacking and vim when I need to pair remotely. Emacs is on the list – I just need to find a spare decade to get over the initial learning curve! I think a great developer has some familiarity with a range of tools. On the JVM I’m a gradle fan, but I can work equally well with ant or maven.
Anything else you’d like to share?
I’m really excited to bring my experience working with local CTO’s to build a bridge between students and startup job opportunities. Many smaller startups just don’t have the resources to do college tours and often students don’t know what to do to get a great startup job.
I can speak for everyone when I say that Peter will be a tremendous addition to the hackNY leadership taem and that we are very excited to welcome him to the hackNY community. If you want to follow Peter as he takes hackNY to a new level, follow him on twitter.
