[alumNY News]: Happy Fool's Spring!
Happy NYC Fool’s Spring everyone! We hope you got to experience the amazing weather in NYC while it lasted.
Here’s what our amazing alum have been up to:
❗❗ hackNY Public Interest Lab
Chris (h’-1) recently posted about hackNY’s new model for this summer. Please take a look at the #1-announcements channel for more information.
👀 Events, Opportunities, and More!
Please RSVP, sign up, and/or apply to the following:
📖 Book Club Continues!
The next hackNY Book Club meeting will take place on April 12th. The book for the next meeting is Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Join for a fun discussion, some snacks, and a good time! You do not need to read 100% of the book, but please RSVP.
RSVP to hackNY book club: Klar… | Partiful
book: Klara and the Sun by (Nobel Prize winner!) Kazuo Ishiguro hackNY book club returns!! i personally love hanging out in Ishiguro’s worlds, and they always makes me reflect on what it means to be human & connect w others. AI adjacent book, but written / released pre-ChatGPT! come thru for a (hopefully enlightening) discussion, snacks, and old & new friends!! you do not need to read 100% of the book, and all are welcome including friends of hackNY, just please RSVP 💛
❗ Community Privacy Residency
Applications for the Community Privacy Residency 2026 are open!
Applications due Sunday, March 29: https://tinyurl.com/cpr-app-2026
This year, we’ll be based near Berlin, Germany, from July 15 – August 6, 2026. Our location is Projektraum Drahnsdorf [projektraum-drahnsdorf.de], a community focusing on sustainability, participatory democracy, and rural revitalisation in Brandenburg.
>> Residency Info
The Community Privacy Residency is a 3-week program convening experienced practitioners across privacy, cryptography, participatory design, community organizing, policy, research, engineering, security, journalism, activism, and more, with a focus this year on Countersurveillance, Privacy & Cryptography in AI, and Community Infrastructure.
>> Getting Involved
We welcome community partners, sponsors, and collaborators. If you or your organization are interested in supporting or collaborating on community-driven privacy infrastructure and applied cryptography work, let’s talk! communityprivacyteam@protonmail.com
>> Application and Links
Application: https://tinyurl.com/cpr-app-2026
Site: https://community-privacy.github.io/
2025 Highlights: https://community-privacy.github.io/recap-highlights-2025/
📗 Open Library Open Source Opportunities
Ray (h’18) has been migrating the Internet Archive's openlibrary.org to FastAPI and recently became a maintainer 🎊! If anyone wants to commit some hours or tokens to open source, please reach out to Ray!
🎉 Hackathons and #raves
hackNY Takes On HenHacks 🐔
hackNY takes on HenHacks, a beginner-friendly, social-good focused hackathon hosted on the University of Delaware’s campus. Dustin (h’25) was this year’s Head Coordinator. Jamie (h’mentor), Suchi (h’25), and Heldanna (h’25) helped volunteer for the hackathon! What a blast 🤠!
🥳 #raves
Jamie (h’mentor) will be starting a master’s in social work this fall, where she wants to create mental health educational programs for technologists. Good luck Jamie!
Jacob (h’17) is looking to teach and/or play magic the gathering with any fellow nerds. If you want to learn and don't have a deck or are already a big nerd please let him know.
Shy (h’14) is helping to run a conference in May, and he is getting 2000 custom PCB badges made in China as part of the swag drop. This is the v1 prototype. If you want to come and get one of these you can use coupon code “shy” for 85% off! https://replay.temporal.io/
Job Openings
Take a look at the following job openings below:
Treeswift
Emily (h’15) is hiring for 2 software roles on her team! Treeswift makes a device that ingests enormous amounts of data on the physical world (LiDAR, image data, audio, location) and we help our customers record data. She has been here 2 weeks and it is so cool to be in a group of 30 people who are INCREDIBLY aligned on helping the environment and working on real problems. Founders have kids and work-life balance is good right now. Please see the links below for the following openings:
Openings on Emily’s team:
Other teams:
Hardware
Product
Deployment Lead <-- this role would be interesting for career switchers! If you have some client-facing experience and are a current or past software engineer, could be a good fit. Requires some travel, but right now entirely to warm places with nice trees and forests, very hikeable destinations
rerun.io
Emily (h’15)’s mentor/career coach Ryan just joined a super cool new company called rerun.io. They have a strong open source product that has been in development for 2.5 years with a large user base and they are now working on commercializing. You can enjoy full remote work, an awesome boss, and European work-life balance (hq is in Stockholm) wrapping super cool technical problems. They are hiring for a few Rust folks and/or database experts, some robotics AI/ML folks, and folks familiar Python dataframe. Please see the links below for openings.
robotics ML
rust DB/backend
dataframe SDK (python)
Tero
Jacob (h’17) and Doug (h’17) are looking to hire for Tero. Please reach out to Jacob if you are interested in design engineer roles or SWE roles.
Spotify
John (h’19)’s team at Spotify is hiring! Ideal candidate is either a new grad with some very strong internship/co-op experience, or someone who has at least 1 year of full-time experience: https://lifeatspotify.com/jobs/fullstack-engineer-platform-developer-experience. The ideal candidate considers themself as "AI-native, but still exercises sober judgement" and a fullstack generalist who can jump into any problem. Please reach out to John if you're curious.
That’s it for now! As always, if you want your cool things to be on the next newsletter, share them with us via Slack. Have a wonderful day, hackNY!
Love,
Gloria 🍀 🌿 🌳