A sampling of projects that Hackerati work on in their free time!

I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig, almost twenty years ago, before I got involved with computers. I just finished re-reading it and found new relevance to the Art of software development. While Pirsig weaves together many themes, one thesis is that we…

Humans have always been compelled by faces. We like to look at them, we like to draw them, we like to take pictures of our own face, we see…

Using a career-focused social-networking site, I’ve gathered images of faces from different professions. For each search (eg, ‘software engineer’), I took the first 50 to 80 faces that the career site displayed that were forward-facing and in color. …

Agile engineering is just as important to streamlined software delivery as agile project methodologies. Here’s an end-to-end, fully functioning (albeit trivial), automatically testable and deployable Node/Express project that represents only one point of view of what’s good and what works for a basic Web or micro-services application that supports an…

Principal Component Analysis and Fashion Any set of images can be broken down with Principal Component Analysis. This has been done pretty successfully with faces. Here we’ll take a look at style. Our dataset is 807 pictures of dresses from Amazon. They have a standard image size, but unfortunately do not have a standard model…

It seems like everyone wants to be more agile these days. Scrum, Kanban, and other agile project methodologies are all the rage. These methodologies generally speak to how product and development teams collaborate to deliver functionality, but they don’t prescribe how engineering teams complete that work. In order to practice…

In our deepnightmares, we’ve seen monstrous slugdogs, shoggoths of endless eyes, creatures beyond all reckoning. Wherever we look, a dog’s face stares back at us, with their cohort of unflinching finches, all beaks and eyes. We try to escape into different layers, but we are still confronted with monsters of…

We hosted our first Startup Office Hours meetup almost two years ago as a means of supporting New York’s vast entrepreneurial community with insights into what it takes to build a successful startup. …