Elle
Mundy
hackNY class of 2013
Elle Mundy is an alum from the class of 2013. Since hackNY, she’s had a storied career involving work at Meetup, Spotify, and Twitter (pre-Elon). Outside of coding, Elle spends her time outside work playing guitar, either solo as Inkjetski or as lead guitarist in the backing band for Adam LaGreca’s solo project. She also has a passion for photography with a focus on capturing cityscapes, as well as writing poetry, all of which are available on her website.
Elle’s Favorite Projects
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SlamWhale
SlamWhale takes a line of text from the user and finds tweets that rhyme with it to construct a poem. The results can be profound, hilarious, or downright confusing. This epic fusion of poetry, Twitter, and hacking was one of the hackathon community's most beloved projects.
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Process Things
Process Things is Elle’s website that serves as a hub for her music, photography, poetry, and code. She built Process Things using Strapi, a headless CMS, and 11ty, a static site generator. The result is a fast and efficient website.
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Inkjetski
In 2022, Elle started releasing music under her solo project, Inkjetski. She plays a combination of indie rock, folk, funk, blues, jazz, dream pop, and ambient. She says, “Listen to restore some semblance of flow and balance amidst life’s precarity.”
Origins
Elle was born in New Jersey. From an early age, she had an interest in computers, which she credits to her parents giving her a DOS PC. When she discovered her father’s old apple ][ plus in high school, it lead to her coding for the first time in Applesoft BASIC.
In university, she started as a CS major, but became dissatisfied and switched into English Literature. Elle started participating in poetry slams on the New Jersey shore while continuing to teach herself coding on the side.
In 2011, she discovered hackathons, leading her to build several projects. AlumNY Devon Peticolas h’12 from the class of 2012 introduced Elle to hackNY and brought her to a hackNY hackathon. This ultimately encouraged her to apply for the summer fellowship.
hackNY
experience
Elle interned at Devpost, formerly ChallengePost. During her fellowship, she found friendships that endure to the present with classmates like fellow photographer Eric Leong h’13, German urbanist Steve Gattuso, h’13 and Go open-source software writer Aditya Mukerjee h’13.
Reflecting on highlights, Elle remembers Cathy O'Neil’s talk about algorithms’ role in reinforcing preexisting inequality. Joel Spolsky’s talk on network effects also stood out over a decade later.
By the end of the fellowship, Elle’s time touring and living in New York City with hackNY led her to realize that she wanted to move to New York.
Moving
to NYC
For her first full time job in NYC, Elle was rehired by Devpost, her hackNY host. She spent two years working on the software platform that supported most student hackathons. After Devpost, Elle worked at Hackerati, a software consultancy focused on teaching agile software development practices to engineering teams.
After Hackerati, Elle followed her manager to Meetup. A week after her start date, Meetup was acquired by WeWork. Elle worked as an SRE, increasing the reliability of the notification system, reducing build times on CI/CD pipelines, improving the on-call rotation, and refactoring a large legacy code base.
Joining a band
Elle started playing guitar as a child. In college, she was in a few bands, but fell off playing regularly for a few years, only practicing enough to maintain her skills. During Elle’s early days in NYC, her friend Claudia helped reignite her passion for poetry with an invitation to House of Abundance, a poetry open-mic community.
There, Elle started performing original guitar compositions which led to an invitation to join the backing band for Adam LaGreca’s solo project. She also collaborates with Carli Van Voorhis, a vocalist, with whom she has played at open mics like House of Abundance and Apartment Party. Elle also plays solo as Inkjetski.
Photography
During lockdown, Elle missed playing open mics, so she decided to start streaming live music on YouTube. She bought a camera which she realized she could also use for street photography. Through street photography, Elle rediscovered the thrill of capturing the perfect shot. While her time spent streaming was contained to lockdown, photography remains a passion for her.