Last Day to Apply for a Free Hack-ation in NYC (via Grouper, Airbnb, Hipmunk)
Free Hack-ation in New York




Who is Grouper?

Grouper
is a small technology startup based in New York. We set up drinks between 2 groups of friends: 3 guys and 3 girls (or 3 guys and 3 guys, etc.). Our founders are 2 engineers (from MIT and Yale), and we received funding from Y Combinator. You can read more about the company, the team, our press, some stories, or photos from actual Groupers.




Why are you doing this?


We're all about hanging out with awesome people. That's what makes life great. That's what our product does. And we want to be around the best engineers and designers all the time, whether they're working with us or not. Plus, we have some empty desks :)




Do you need to be an expert-level programmer or designer to apply?


Yes.




What will Grouper pay for exactly?


Your airfare from anywhere in the continental US to New York, your accommodations for 6 nights (via Airbnb), and a free Grouper ($60 USD value). You'll also probably make out with some slick
Grouper tees
and a few snacks and drinks.




What kind of stuff does Grouper hack on?


Glad you asked. We're tackling the hard and largely uncharted terrain of the online-offline divide: logistics optimizations, matching algorithms, a real-time CRM we built from scratch, never-before-attempted feats on mobile, and much more. Scaling a website to a billion impressions a month is boring at this point (we've been there), but solving these problems is not.




What is Grouper's technology stack like?


Modern and fairly standard. Our web app is Rails-based, with CoffeeScript and some Backbone.js. We use the right tool for the job, though. For instance, Postgresql is our primary datastore, but we use Redis, MongoDB, and memcached as well for use cases that they're really good at. We use git and Github for version control; Macbook Pro's for our development machines; Rspec for tests; and a bunch of libraries, some of which we wrote, and others we didn't.




Can I really work on my own stuff while I'm there?


Yep.




How long will these hackations be?


We're thinking 2 to 5 days. So a weekend, a long weekend, or a work week.



