Announcing the hackNY Spring Conference
Back in 2020, the pandemic ended our hackathons, which we had been organizing twice a year every year since 2010. It’s been a few years since that post and we’ve been reflecting every year on when is the time for hackNY to return to providing public programming and what would that programming look like. I am extremely excited to share that day is finally here.
On April 27th, 2025 hackNY will be organizing a conference at NewLab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We’re calling it hackNY Spring. It’s a one-day professional development opportunity for developers in the first 10 years of their careers who are looking to level up in the tech industry. Leveraging our 16-year track record of empowering the NYC tech community, organizing hackathons and speaker series as part of our Fellowship program, we’re launching a public conference for 250 attendees. The hackNY Spring Conference will cover topics across two themes – equipping emerging tech leaders and engineering with intention.
In addition to announcing the event today, we’re also sharing our first five speakers that you’ll be able to hear from at hackNY Spring:
Heidi Waterhouse is one of the most impactful speakers I’ve encountered in my own professional career for helping me understand my role and how it’s valued by my employers. In a talk that she gave at the adulting.dev conference I organized in 2019, Heidi shares how you can understand and articulate the value you bring to your employer and leverage that value to improve your career. I am extremely excited for attendees to be able to learn from her this April.
Shreya Murthy is the Cofounder & CEO of Partiful. I’ve been obsessed with partiful since we discovered it, and have been using it to organize events for the hackNY community these last few years. Shreya will be sharing her experiences as an engineer and then a founder and CEO with all of our attendees.
Chris Wiggins has been a personal mentor to me for the last 10 years. In addition to being a co-founder of hackNY, professor at Columbia, he’s also the Chief Data Scientist at the New York Times. He’ll be sharing essential non-technical skills – including communication, collaboration, and navigating organizational dynamics – that can be immediately applied to improve performance.
Mackenzie Burnett is the CEO and cofounder of Ambrook, a company building financial management software for family-run businesses. Mackenzie is part of the Interact fellowship as a member of the board, and alum. Interact is a community of mission-driven technologists that resonates with our own mission here at hackNY. Mackenzie's natural leadership, combined with her initiative, resourcefulness, and clear thinking, makes her an exceptional advisor and I am looking forward to hearing what she has to share with y’all.
Randall Hunt is the CTO at Caylent, hackNY alum and an investor based in LA. He’s worked at Facebook, SpaceX, AWS, MongoDB and NASA. He loves mentoring junior engineers and is looking forward to sharing how he evaluates the impact of his work, identifies potential risks, and makes informed decisions to build technology that truly makes a difference.
We’ll be sharing more speakers as we approach April 27th. Tickets are now on sale, and the first 50 are sold at a reduced price until March 15th so act fast.
