[alumNY Newsletter] h`24 Wins at HackTheNorth & more!
Happy Thursday. I’m here with our new monthly community update!
You got a brief taste of this in Eric’s previous email, but going forward once a month I’ll be sending you all the cool stuff our fellow alumNY are getting up to. Going forward Eric will send an update on hackNY at the start of the month with all the org related updates, while in the middle of the month I’ll be sending our community update.
Thank you to our newest monthly donors
Shout out to Claire Durand h`16 and Gloria Zhu h`24 for signing up for monthly donations to hackNY! hackNY couldn't exist without your support. By contributing to hackNY, they're supporting our both our Fellowship program and the new things we're creating for all our alumNY. Learn more about supporting hackNY at https://hackny.org/support-us.
Photo of the Month
Jacob Aronoff h`17 and Pauline Wee h`24 are using our Donut Channel to visit LaCabra. I’m going to be rejoining #donut-worry-be-happy so I can hopefully get to visit a bakery with them soon.
Haven’t heard of the donut channel? It’s our slack channel, that every other week pairs you with an alumNY to get to know each other and optionally share baked goods. If you missed it, Harrison recently upgraded us to a self-hosted bot to initiate new matches so it’s a great time to return to that channel.
Cool stuff made by alumNY
hackNY Applications are live
Sakib Jalal h`16 has kicked off hackNY 2025 by launching applications for the h`25. We’ll be reaching out to y’all to help us get the word out about admissions. For now I want to shout out how Harrison Liddiard h`15 has taken on the challenge of updating our website. For our admission launch he redid our fellowship page and it looks so good. I’ve been admiring all of the videos from that page including the amazing cover of uptown funk by Shloka Kini h`15.
Tarot Bot Goes Physical!
Y’all remember how Nolan Filter h`10 made Tarot Bot with friends to give tarot readings on social media? Well, Nolan and friends "Innovented" a New Thing - giving yourself readings at home! They’re printing a physical deck! Signup for notification of the launch on Kickstarter on Oct 1st.
Pocket Oasis: Cozy Gaming on iOS
Another Nolan project, Pocket Oasis launched on iOS. Nolan describes it as a cozy balcony gardening game, and looking at the screenshots on the app store it makes me want to get an iPhone so I can relax and play this game. .
hackNY @ HackTheNorth
Moody Rahman h`22 mentored at HackTheNorth, teaching students (including their hackNY mentees) about subnets, app deploys, and the differences between different kinds of Javascript. Izzy Qian h`24, Angela Yuan h`24 and Luna Chen h`24 won sponsored prize with their project.
Angela let me know that her team cooked up a prototype using Symphonic Labs' API (which lets people mouth words and get them transcribed, plus text-to-speech and captions!). The ultimate goal? To integrate it with Zoom and conference apps so you can ditch the noisy coffee shop and take meetings anywhere. (Symphonic Labs is planning to release their API publicly soon, which is why the app isn't fully functional yet – hackathon perks, right? Gotta work with what you got). Check out their Devpost to see the project in action.
3D WebAssembly Simulator
Grant Kot h`11 is back with another very cool webpage, leveraging some fun web technologies. He’s been playing with multithreading in WebAssembly to make a 3D simulator. Check it out I started testing out multithreading in WebAssembly to make a 3D simulator. He’s working on adding more interactions. It should work decently on recent phones but if it’s choppy let him know.
Events
LiveCoding Show @ Public Records.
Dan Gorelick h`16 has put together a really lovely new website. I took a look and found his latest event, a show at Public Records on September 29th.
Latino pride month
It’s Latino pride month! Walter Menendez h`14 is celebrating and you can join him.
Hire/Work with an alumNY
Let us know you're hiring/looking to be hired in the #jobs channel on slack so we can share it in the newsletter.
Tess Mondria h`24 | Resume
@Tessa Mondria | Teresa.mondria@gmail.com
Location: NYC (I can do in-office) or Remote. Relocate: Not as a preference
Technologies: Anything quant methods / data science (Python, R, SQL)
Ali Mohamad h`21 | Resume
@Ali | Teresa.mondria@gmail.com
Location: Seattle, WA. Open to remote for sure, open to relocate after 2025
Technologies: TypeScript (React, Gatsby, Express, etc.) C# / .NET Python (Flask) Golang
The Browser Company Fellowship
Shared by Jacob h`17, The Browser Company is hiring for folks with swift experience 🙂.
Presidential innovation fellow applications
Haley Johnson h`23 posted that the presidential innovation fellow applications are open! She’s happy to talk about working on tech in gov or even put in a referral if you apply.
Skylink
Kush Maheshwari h`17 is hiring at Skylink for Engineering (ML/LLM, Backend, FullStack) & Product in Williamsburg. He shared that you’d be working with a talented team of 12 that work in-person in Williamsburg, NYC (~6min from Bedford ave) and that are working on the edge of AI applications. Check out Kush’s slack post for more info.
That’s it for this month from me. I’ll be back to share more of the cool stuff that y’all have been doing next month. Let me know if you’ve got something to include in our newsletter.
Best,
Shy
Shy@hackNY.org