I will be joining Flatiron Health and saying goodbye to the GM title of hackNY, an organization I love and respect.

I am incredibly grateful to Chris, Evan, and the hackNY alumni (alumNY!) for welcoming me into hackNY; I’ve gotten to know and love both the hackNY fellows and the NYC startup community more generally, and I am looking forward to continuing to be a part of the hackNY alumni, along with the classes of 2010, 2011, 2012, and the new class of 2013. Evan, Chris and I have been working together these last few weeks, along with the hackNY alumni and 2013 mentors, to make sure all’s smooth sailing for the class of 2013 hackNY Fellows. Aditya Mukerjee, hackNY ‘11 and hackNY’s hacker-in-residence, has agreed to run ops for the summer until we find a new GM for hackNY.

The hackNY mission has always been about “federating the next generation of hackers for the New York innovation community”, and hackNY has done that for me. So, this isn’t good-bye, we’re still traveling in the same direction and I look forward to continuing to support this mission.

Sincerely,
Manya Ellenberg

P.S. We’ve started our search for a new General Manager. If you’d like to be considered, we’d love to hear from you! Please contact us via hackNY.jobscore.com. If you have any suggestions about people we should reach out to, please do let us know at search (at) hackNY.org .

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!

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

After some really awesome hardware hacks in the fall, we’re adding a brand-new hardware component this spring, complete with a special prize category for hardware hacks, hardware giveaways, a makeshift electronics lab, and a helping hand from hardware-hacker-in-residence Jason Wright (class of 2012 hackNY Fellow). Bring hardware to hack on (old toys are especially cool!) and sign up  to participate.

f2012 hackNY student hackathon participant working on his hardware hack.

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!!!

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

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!