 Hi everybody, we're back. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles Continuous Production. We're here at MongoDB Days in New York City. We're here at the Marriott Marquis. My name is Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. And we're here to try to extract the signal from the noise. What we do at these events is we bring the best guests at the event and we share with you their knowledge within our community. So you can tweet us, I'm at D.Vellante and if you have specific questions, please do. We really appreciate the feedback. The folks from Hack New York are here. The two co-founders, Evan Corth is to my right and to his right is Chris Wiggins. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So Hack New York, you see, you know, we certainly saw incubators pop up all over the place. You guys aren't an incubator. You're really providing support and helping the hacker community, you know, creating a place to federate the numerous hackers. So take us through, how did it all start and how long have you guys been around? Give us the history. Sure, we're about to have our fourth class of Hack and My Fellows. In terms of where it came from, Evan and I are both professors. We've both been teaching engineers for a long time and we're both very big fans of the hacker community and also of New York City. And so what we saw was a desire and a need for changing the narrative for young software engineers who didn't really know that New York City had this vibrant technology ecosystem, the startup community that wanted to hire them. We created Hack and My to try to create, to change that narrative and try to help young software engineers find out more about the Hack and My, about the software, about the startup community in New York City. So Evan, we heard today, and we've, of course, been following this for quite some time in SiliconANGLE Wikibon, that New York is now the number two area of the country for a venture backed community. Of course, I'm from Boston, so yet again, New York beats Boston. But the reality is that New York has so much technology embedded within industries, like retail, obviously financial services, publishing, et cetera. So why is it that New York and how is it that New York is becoming so prominent as a tech oriented area? Well, I think there have always been strong technologists in New York. Certainly Chris and I have seen many, many strong technologists come through NYU in Columbia. What you see now is that more of those technologists are going out and starting companies. Traditionally, they'd gone to some of the bigger companies in New York, and I think Hack and My is playing a role in expanding these options to the community. And yet, the New York City tech community, since we've been doing this for the last four years, it has really come into its own. Just this week, we saw Fab raised a very big round and Makeabout was sold for $403 million. I think one of the things that you see in New York is we have many strong ecosystems in New York City, many strong verticals. All of those verticals are being transformed by technology, so something special about the startup community in New York City is, it's not that we have a startup community that's in isolation, it's that all of our strong verticals, media, advertising, publishing, whatever, are being changed by technology and really creating a diverse ecosystem. So talk a little bit more about Hack New York. How do people get involved and talk a little bit about the ecosystem that you guys are developing? Sure, so again, we're trying to federate the next generation of hackers for the New York City innovation community. So what we do is we introduce new students to the hacker community. So we do that through hackathons that we have twice a year. We have one in the fall, one in the spring, either at NYU or Columbia, and this allows us to introduce new people into the ecosystem. We teach them what it means to build on top of an API. We give them a lot of the skills that they may not get in a traditional college education. And then of course, Chris referred to the fellowship program. This is we take the top hackers from around the world and we give them a much deeper dive. We introduce them to a lot of the people, a lot of the players in the New York City innovation community and they intern at startups during the day and there's a pedagogical program for them at night as well. So now you mentioned NYU and Columbia. Those are the two primary feeders for the folks that participated. The students come from all over the world. It's just, those are our day jobs. So Evan's been teaching at NYU for about a decade. I've been teaching at Columbia for about a decade. So those are communities that we know well, but the students themselves are coming from all over the world. And as Evan said, the Hack and Why Fellows program is sort of for students who really have shown excellence at coding and shown that they love to build in code. It's an intense 10 week summer program for some of the best minds. The other program Hack and Why organizers are the hackathons. Those tend to draw hundreds of students from all over the world who come to New York City for one weekend to meet New York City's startup community, but also to meet each other, which we think is really important for building a sustained community. So it's totally open. Anybody can participate, is that right? Any full time students. You just got to be an alpha geek. You just got to love to code and really to want to get to know the other students who love to build. Now we've been doing that for four years now and TenGen has been at every single hackathon and they bring some of their engineers into the community. And that's a way for our students to learn from people that are in the community. So they get to see what their jobs might look like if when they join the New York City ecosystem. So TenGen just announced some pretty substantial support at a $75,000, I guess you call it a sponsorship or underwriting of hack and why. Talk about that a little bit and talk a little bit more about TenGen's activity with you guys. Yeah, we're huge fans of TenGen. We love talking to people about TenGen and what a role it plays in the New York City community. They've been strong supporters of hack and why since the beginning. Ever since our first class of hack and why fellows in 2010, they hosted one of the hack and why fellows and they've been at every one of our hackathons sending evangelists to present MongoDB and also to work with students through the night as they try to build on top of New York City startups' APIs. They've also been strong sponsors and made it possible for many students to come to our hackathons by sponsoring buses all the way from the East Coast, all the way from the West Coast to bring students to New York City. So they've been very big strong supporters and we think of them as one of the startups that's shown success in growing and shown support for the ecosystem overall. It's really based on a tech that you can build on and lots of other New York City startups to build on top of MongoDB and TenGen as do plenty of major enterprise companies. So they've been very big help to hack and why as we've grown through the years. So when you guys do a hackathon, take us through, paint a picture of what it's like. You guys provide space, cloud infrastructure, what's it like? Sure, so a typical hack and why hackathon is a 24 hour endeavor. The first two hours we have New York City startups demo their APIs which are the application programming interfaces that students could build programs on top of. Then the next two to four hours we have tech ambassadors from around the city. Again TenGen has participated in this every single semester that we've had a hackathon where the people in the community help the students organize around ideas, help them form teams, help answer some of their technical questions. Then the students continue coding for until about two hours before the 24 hours are over and then the students demo the applications that they've built and we have a team of judges. Again TenGen has participated in this. A team of judges decide who the winners are and then we give the prizes away. The winners historically have demoed at the New York Tech Meetup. So they get, we're bringing college kids from around the country to New York and presenting them and they present their products to the New York City community. So what kind of innovations have come out of the first four hackathons? Can you talk about that a little bit? We try to emphasize to the students that we're not trying to get them to build companies or to try to build apps but just try to build something cool. We tell students that the only criterion is awesomeness. Just build something that you enjoy making and that you think that your other students will enjoy seeing. So golly, we've had a lot of really creative hacks over the years. This last hackathon was very hardware dominant so we had people doing cool things like one team that one used their iPhones as a virtual drum kit set. So these kids got out on stage at New York Tech Meetup and just took two iPhones and it was as though they and everyone in the audience had a drum kit in front of them to play. We've seen all sorts of things like in the browser machine learning to help you write an essay by automatically completing the rest of your sentences. We've had a variety of things from whimsical to artistic to really hard tech. It's really a diverse spectrum of student interest. And even outside of the main event of the hackathon, innovation comes from the community of people who are there. So for example, a couple of our former fellows along with a gentleman named Mike Smith, Mike Swift created an application called Hacker League. And now their software is actually used to run our hackathon and many other hackathons around the country. Hundreds of hackathons are using this one platform built by these three students, two of whom are hacking my fellows, Mike Swiss, who's a great friend to hack and why. So Hacker League has really, it came out of hacking my hackathons, but it's become a platform to empower the whole student community of student hackers. No, would you guys consider yourselves hackers, right? Is that fair? Sure, yeah. So we were just out at a Riley Velocity this week and Velocity is sort of the web performance, optimization, some serious hackers obviously going on there. We had guys from Google on and Yahoo and others. And it was sort of a big discussion around what they need, is the web getting faster and Google of course presents evidence that it is, others say it's not fast enough. So I wonder if you could talk about from a hacker's perspective, what is it that you need from the ecosystem, from the large players that are building out the internet, like I say, the Googles, the Yahoo's, the Akamai's, et cetera, Facebook with OCP and the like. What do hackers today need? What do they look for from those big leaders? I think a lot of, well, at least for the student hackers, which are the particular hackers that we interface with mostly, they're really looking for technologies that make it possible for them to build rapidly. And it's a community that fortunately is empowered to do so, to build these tools for themselves. So over the years at the Hackathons, you can see that more and more students are using Twitter Bootstrap to build a web app very quickly. Lots of students are using MongoDB, which itself is this open source tool that's built by the community. So particularly for Hackathons, people are looking for tools that allow them to build up a web app very quickly and on the front end and the back end. But fortunately, it's a community that knows how to build and knows how to share. So you really see that a lot of things from the ground up are being built by the community to address these specific needs. I should say at Velocity, one of the talks was from a Hackanwai alumnus. Abe Stanway gave a talk about something that he just open sourced at Etsy, which I think is another example of how Hackanwai fellows are going on to build this technology community. The best thing we could have asked for and dreamed of in 2010 was that these students would be out there in leading minds and builders and evangelists for New York City as a tech community. Yeah, that's a really, it's actually, it's an elite conference, a little very humble about it. You know, not a lot of chest snubbing going on. It's a conference for practitioners. So that's quite a testament. Talk a little bit about how coding has changed over the last decade or even half decade. I mean, things are happening so fast. On the one hand, you have new innovations things like Node.js, which open the world up to so many more developers and dramatically simplify things. And at the same time, you have all this complexity with things like clouds and hybrid clouds and security. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the sort of state of development and how that's changing and where you see it going. Well, I remember when I was building web apps in the 90s, there were so many more things you needed to do in order to create a web app. And these days, you have tools and environments and languages where you could very quickly prototype things and just get something out the door within hours, literally. Yeah, your ability to do things like A.B. testing are now just amazing. But at the same time, there's added complexities, which counterbalances that speed and agility. I think the stat I heard recently was the average size of a web page is 1.5 megabytes. And of course, if you're in gaming, it's probably 30, 40 times that. So how does the development community look at that balance between complexity and speed and agility, whether it's agile or dev ops and some of the trends that are going on there? So part of the conversation among hackers is how to scale and what are the right tools for helping you scale? Prototyping has gotten incredibly easy. So you really can sit down in the span of eight hours, make a functioning web app that does something new because there's so much platform technology that allows you to prototype. At the same time, transitioning from a prototype web app to something that's really a service that can scale and conserve millions of customers is a big topic of conversations. Not so much for Hackathon, but as companies grow, fortunately there's a lot of tools that are out there. I should say one thing that's changed about coding also was it is now very possible for a 16 or 17 year old student to make something that is seen by a billion people and really changes the world. And I just think that that's new in human history that somebody so young can create something that touches the lives of so many. And I think that really changes the awareness of young people about what their potency is. That they could create something that just has so much power to change the narrative at a young age with so few resources, so little capital. It's really just technical talent and creativity that are the necessary ingredients. And it's worth noting, since we're here at the MongoDB conference that you can use the same tools to create a very simple web app and tools like MongoDB can scale to very, very large applications. That's true. So students and employers are aware of this, that they don't want to be locked down to a technology that doesn't scale. And MongoDB is an example of something that people will use to prototype a web app and you can still use it even if you're CERN or IBM or anybody else. Yeah, with the leverage of open source and of course everybody's now hopping on the bandwagon, we often joke, IBM's the recovering alcoholic of open source and you've got many, many other companies as well. So I feel like we're entering this new wave of leverage from the open source community. Last question, I wonder if you would both chime in on this. Talk to the young people. You guys obviously deal with and interact with many, many young people. What's the bit of advice that you'd give them? People want to get into this field. They want to get into the technology field. They have a pension for hacking. What do you tell them? Well, first of all, I think it's really important that all young people do learn to code today. I do think it'll be part of the literacy of the future and I do want to see more computer science programs in the K-12 education system. But specifically, we live in the time, as Chris said, where you can build something in eight hours and if you know the language of the web, if you know how to build these applications, you can just put your apps out there and let people play with them. It's just an incredible feeling to sit down, write code for a couple of hours and have something that other people can play with. Yeah, I'd say the message to students is to build. Find something that you want to build and build it and don't get stuck. There's plenty of resources available to you online but there's also a community. I mean, what you find in this community is that it's a community of builders who want to welcome more builders. So students are really encouraged to participate and everybody is really helpful and wants young people to learn how to build. So there's plenty of resources out there and just not to get stuck and to find the community that wants you to join. Yeah, the great message, Evan, your point about K-12 and if there's not enough out there, go ahead and download the Google Glass developer kit and start hacking. So, excellent, all right. Chris and Evan, thank you very much. Good luck with HackNY and thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your time. Thanks for having us. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, from the MongoDB Days Conference in New York City. This is theCUBE, right back.