HackNY Week 7

This week I began the lengthy and arduous task of actually deploying my service to production. The process required tons of ops, eyes on, and code changes. I obviously can't go into the details, but it actually was deployed today! It's really cool to use our product to monitor the service i made for our product.

Tech Talk 11: Sisi Wei

Today Sisi Wei talked to us about ProPublica and coding in investigative journalism. It was cool to see some of the projects she, as a programmer, works on for their website. Some of their projects include scraping and analyzing medical documents to get information on good and bad doctors for different procedures at American hospital. She emphasized the importance of programming in modern journalism, underlining the key roles programmers are going to make in the future of media.

Tech Talk 12: Jonah Peretti

Jonah Peretti, CEO of buzzfeed, gave us a very interesting look into his life and the company he built. He started off with some great storeis about his beginnings an internet troll. Some of his projects involved just messing around with other company's websites. More than anything, he was interested in how things on the internet went viral; what makes people want to share content with their friends? It was that kind of connection that drove him to teach media studies, and eventually found Buzzfeed (which spawned out of a huffington post lab). It was great hearing the story of such a succesful founder's story, beacuse it was very different than i had anticipated. Buzzfeed, being the well known company that it is, comes with a certain reputation. My perception of buzzfeed changed such that I now understand that they focus on finding what connects people in this new world, and how do we as a society like to relate to one another; it's definetly an interesting thought experiment.

Weekend Photoshooting

Sean and I went all around lower manhattan taking pictures of some very interesting and weird buildings/ locations around the city. I'll hopefully be posting those somewhere very soon, but I got a couple shots that I really loved which i want to get prints of to put up in my apartment in the fall.

Soundtrack for the Week

Vaudeville Villain - Viktor Vaughn

Love in Outer Space - Sun Ra

The Low End Theory - A Tribe Called Quest