

Day in the Life of a hackNY Fellow - socialengineer
http://hackny.org/a/2012/07/day-in-the-life-of-a-hackny-fellow/

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kunj2aan
This reads like a satire.

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jrubinovitz
It is very much satire of the batches of "a Day in the Life" posts from people
involved in startups that have been posted lately, along with startup
stereotypes as a whole. Please don't take it literally.

~~~
kunj2aan
I think the post made the organization look very bad. I am not sure why anyone
would want to post a self-parody on the root blog.

~~~
jrubinovitz
Like all posts by me, not an official HackNY opinion, just my own:

The piece should speak for itself, so I definitely agree that if that's what
you got out of the piece, it looks bad.

The purpose of the piece was to satirize startup culture. HackNY is young, and
just developing a culture. Cultural aspects I believe are distinctly HackNY
are the living arrangements (having around 30 hackers on one floor of a
building is pretty awesome and leads to a lot of brother and sisterhood),
along with the talks and activities with amazing people involved in the New
York technology sector. That's it. The rest of it you can find at any startup
technology internship, and it was the actual incredible, different,
interesting, and often difficult, experiences of working at startups, and
their stereotypes, that I sought to satirize.

I love HackNY, and I love startup culture although I find it really amusing at
times. I'm the kind of person that is literally wearing a shirt with 1's and
0's forming a "binary tree" on it right now. I love this community, and if you
have an interest in what HackNY really is, I strongly suggest you take a look
at the other pages of the site. I should actually go to bed because I may go
to a BBQ with some hackers tomorrow.

~~~
kunj2aan
Relevant points to the question "Why would anyone post a parody in a root
blog"

"The purpose of the piece was to satirize startup culture... I love HackNY,
and I love startup culture although I find it really amusing at times. "

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Volscio
Somewhere in there is some hacking right?

~~~
jrubinovitz
It's a parody.

But real HackNY, for me personally, is hack at work for 9-10 hours, then hack
with fellows on personal projects for 2 hours or go to a talk with an
established person in the tech industry, rinse and repeat.

If you want an factual diary of the day, I can write one for you, but as it's
a lot of coding and networking, you would probably find it dry.

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DrJ
I would like to hear what a real day-in-as-a-HackNY-fellow is like.

~~~
jrubinovitz
Alright, so this was yesterday:

I got up around 8:30 AM to get to work in SoHo by 10 AM. I live in a dorm at
NYU with a floor full of other HackNY fellows really central to NYC, which is
amazing. I made breakfast and ground some coffee and worked on a personal
Node.js project then walked to SoHo around 9:30AM. Work started at 10AM. I
work as a front-end engineering intern primarily with Backbone.js and
Require.js lately, so I spent between 10AM-6:30PM doing a quick standup, then
coding or getting food from the kitchen (I eat a lot).

Then at 6:30, which is relatively early for me to leave, myself and another
intern (non HackNY), went over to Pivotal Labs. We don't usually get to bring
other interns with us, but we were having an intern buddy night. When we first
got to Pivotal Labs we ate dinner and networked. I got to catch up with a lot
of the other fellows and their "intern buddies." We're having a demo day
coming up soon so we were all sharing what we would present.

Then Josh Knowles, of Pivotal Labs, gave a talk on the process of developing
software and took questions along the way. I got to ask 2-3 on agile software
development, recruiting and automation. It was like tech lead 101. After the
talk we were allowed to ask him questions separately, but I was all questioned
out, so I went out to a bar with my intern buddy and another friend of the
program and we talked about the startup spaces we were interested in and how
to encourage technology innovation on our respective campuses. I then talked
to my suitemates (also HackNY, sans one) about everything from girl stuff to
Ruby on Rails database preferences. The peers are one of my favorite parts of
the program. Living on a floor full of hackers is incredibly inspiring and we
get so much done by inspiring (and sometimes competing) with each other.

So yeah, that's a real day in the life.

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jrubinovitz
Are avocados a trend on the west coast as well? I see them in so many startup
kitchens in NYC.

~~~
Stefan_H
The west coast loves avocados as well. They are the fruit of life. California
produces about 90% of the nation's avocado crop. <http://www.avocado.org/fun-
avocado-facts/>

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pliny
>start working at 10:30

>day ends at 18:20

>working more than 8 hours in a day is "start-up life"

I feel cheated.

