Derek “MixedByAli” Ali, a multi-Grammy Award-winning audio engineer, has recently raised $7.5 million for his startup, EngineEars. Ali’s journey in music has been marked by his work with influential artists like Roddy Ricch, Donald Glover, and Kendrick Lamar. Ali’s Journey To Music Ali’s passion for music emerged from having little to no formal musical training and growing up with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He found his calling in high school by experimenting with technology and music, leading to his early experiments with custom ringtones that laid the groundwork for a
Snickerdoodle, an NFT data, and privacy platform announced that it’s partnering with FTX and Animoca Brands to launch NFT Lotería, a game centered around a series of community-focused NFTs derived from Lotería, an image-based game popular in the Latinx community. The NFT series will highlight Hispanic artists, and its sales will benefit national Hispanic nonprofits including the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, the Latino Community Foundation, and the Rising Tide Network. Proceeds will engage and train young Hispanic Americans to enter the tech sector and the emerging blockchain industry. Snickerdoodle developed the
Tower Hamlets has successfully secured £250,000 of funding on behalf of the four borough LIFT initiative to deliver a Digital Hub as part of the Mayor’s Academies Programme, which aims to support Londoners hardest hit by the pandemic. The funding, which has been awarded to organizations across London, will help establish hubs to support residents into good work across a number of long-term economic growth sectors including digital. The LIFT initiative, which includes Camden, Islington, and Hackney, has allocated this funding to establish a digital hub in Tower Hamlets that
Congratulations on getting into YC and being the first non-profit. Yeah. We’re about one of 15 non-profits, so I think USA Today called us out as the first diversity non-profit. It’s still a very early program for non-profits in there, they’re still adjusting to it. Why did you start /dev/color? And what has it been like thus far? I started it just seeing my friends and people that I had been connected to, as I discovered tips and secrets that were novel to me, I would share them with people
Senior Frontend Engineer at Eventbrite Why don’t you go ahead and tell me about yourself? I got excited about computers at an early age. Probably early elementary school. My mom had a 286 computer that only ran DOS (pre-Windows). When she’d come home from the store, I would take the receipts and type them up in the word processor. I loved it! I learned basic DOS commands; enough to games like Math Blaster, Word Muncher, and Typing Tutor. I owe so much of my trajectory to those early moments. I went
Chief Technology Officer at Jopwell How did you get into technology? My interest in making things started when I was young. My mom’s an art teacher, so my brother and I were always working on different projects around the house. I played with an astounding amount of LEGOs and got super into origami at some point during middle school. It wasn’t until college that I learned about programming as a craft, where you can create stuff that is in itself an intellectually stimulating discipline and could also be a
What made you decide to work in tech? After several years of working as a structural engineer, I started to feel bored and unchallenged by the slow pace of construction projects. A project I might be working on would typically not finish for several years and most of my projects required the same types of calculations over and over. I wanted to work in an industry that was faster paced with more innovative technology and decided that that was the “tech” industry. What was an obstacle you faced and how did you overcome that obstacle?
Lead Mobile Developer at LegalShield http://forge42.com What made you decide to work in tech? I’ve always been drawn to programming, ever since I was 13. I remember I used to spend all my time reading as many programming books as I could to build my own games and simulations. This idea of being able to manipulate and create new experiences fascinated me. So I knew I would pursue some sort of engineering education. In high school, one of my teachers, Mr. Tom Guarino, always
