On Friday, June 10th (tomorrow!), seize the opportunity to stop by over 20 New York City-based startups and technology companies as they welcome visitors to drop by to see their spaces, learn about their services, and meet the teams. We’re proud to present Walkabout NYC!

Since the day we set up our first desks for the company, we’ve enjoyed visiting creative offices and workspaces for inspiration that we could bring back to our work environment. With more and more startups calling New York City home, it was time to organize an open-house event for technology startups. We’re thrilled to have so many great companies on board with the Walkabout NYC event, helping us inspire each other and being accessible to the community at large.

For all the details, head over to Walkabout NYC.  Come out and meet the neighbors.

• Michael Karnjanaprakorn is an avid poker player who will be donating 100% of his 2010 WSOP winnings to various charities. He’s been coached by Annie Duke and Rafe Furst, and will talk about poker, decision making, and why you should always throw paper on the first throw.
• Jordan X is a rock climber, mountaineer, and trader extraordinaire. When he’s not climbing rocks, scaling mountains, or watching the Dow tank in a matter of twenty minutes, he is one of more than twenty million people in the online dating scene in a quest to find true love or “the one” to join him in his adventures and high jinks.
• Brett Collinson is an experience designer from Melbourne, Australia. He visited New York for the first time a year ago and, like a kid in a candy store, saw theater every night he was here. Stimulated by this rich feast, he moved here 2 months ago and has been enjoying New York theater as a local ever since.

As always, you can see videos from previous Hobby events at our Hobby Channel, like Phin Barnes talking about his sneaker obsession at last months Hobby:

We look forward to seeing you at May Hobby!

Harvest was built from the ground up with Ruby on Rails, a powerful framework for building web apps. Rails has been part of daily activity here since back when we worked on client projects right alongside of Harvest. As an OSS project, Rails needs contributions of all sorts to continue evolving. The latest program to help push Rails forward is Ruby Summer of Code.

The Ruby Summer of Code program is designed to help fund student development of Ruby and/or Rails projects in the summer of 2010. Accepted students will be matched up with accepted mentors and will have two months to complete their summer projects.  Harvest is proud to support this inspired endeavor, and the future of Ruby development.

The student application window is from April 5th to April 23rd, so that means the deadline is just a week away.  If you are (or know of a) student with an idea for a great Ruby project, get your application in now!

Catch up on previous Hobby events on the Hobby Channel, and here’s a look at last month’s presenters.

Harvest co-founder Danny Wen talked about The Art of Light Touring:

Frank Macreery dropped knowledge on Constructing Crossword Puzzles:

And Elicia Berger gave some insight into the craft of Storytelling:

Thanks so much to our gracious and knowledgeable presenters for making March Hobby a success, and you can sign up to catch our NEXT Hobby, here at Harvest HQ.  Hope to see you then!

We hosted our first Hobby event last month, and we couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. Thanks to everyone who turned out for this sold out event, and our presenters, for sharing their stories.  They sparked some interesting discussions over hot cocoa, here at Harvest HQ! 

Our well informed Hobby presenters were:

Matthew Beale, speaking about his 20 years of playing the french horn, and the key aspects of getting it to make thunderous noise

Patrick Filler, the pizza fanatic, whose obsession is also a love story

Jerri Chou, our cultural guide through the still very-much-alive world of breakdancing

Thanks so much to our talented Hobbyists, and we’re looking forward to the next one, which is next Tuesday, March 23rd, at 7pm.  Reserve your spot for the upcoming March Hobby event, where we’ll hear about cycling, crossword puzzles, and storytelling – hope to see you there!

Everyone gave a brief presentation of what they made, and we had ideas about rating the best dishes when we were finished, but they were all so good, we forgot to vote.

We even had tons of desserts, which were the perfect end to a a decadent meal.

The conversations sparked by sharing food and sharing a table can’t be matched, and we’re stoked to have such great people around to liven up an early spring day.

While we spend our days here at Harvest listening to our customers and continually improving our service, we all have outside interests that keep us busy.  In honor of the often under-represented activity of the hobby, we’ve decided to host a monthly series called Hobby, beginning next Thursday, February 11th at our New York City office.

We’ll be inviting speakers to talk about their spare-time recreational pursuits, and they’ll be fielding questions from the audience as well.  First on deck: a French Horn Player, a Pizza obsess-er, and a breakdancer (we’ll leave it to them to let you know what their day jobs are!).

We hope you’ll join us in exploring how other people spend their spare, but equally valuable, time.

And speaking of time, you’ll need to act fast, as there are only 7 spots left for this first event – RSVP now!

We were thrilled to meet so many customers, colleagues, family, and friends.  Here are a few pictures of the festivities, and thanks for sharing such a great evening with us!

Where did you start, when Shawn (Liu) gave you the parameters of “Time + Harvest” – can you give us a peek at your process?

The first page is a freeform word association game, starting with words associated to both time and harvest and just letting my mind wander. I selected what I thought was interesting and used it as the inspiration for a few stories that could relate to each other. I wanted this book to be truly improvised and have themes inspired by Shawn’s two starting words.

The book was already made, done custom by my friend Deb Dormody at If’N books. I had asked her to make me a bunch for an art book project called Library I, and I ended up with 8 or so left over. I decided to use those for commissions, because they’re too nice to waste sitting in a drawer. So the page count is set, and I draw in the blank, finishing off with doing the painted cover.

How long does a book typically take you to make?

It depends on the project, I suppose. I’ve done commissioned books where I work on one page a day until it’s done, almost like a journal. In other cases I work in chunks, tailoring how much I do to what’s going on in the book. For your book, for instance, I did the first brainstorm page one day, then left it. I came back the next day fresh and looked at that and began the first story line. From start to finish I think it took about 8 days.

We couldn’t possibly ignore the first page – is this a usual part of your commissioned book?

No, but I wanted to try this for yours and I’m glad I did, it was really exciting. I had been reading a lot about improvisational theatre processes and thought it would be interesting to adapt it to a short book.  Each book I’ve done in this round of commissions is different, both in terms of concept and process. Everyone gives me a different starting point, and each one requires a different approach. It helps keep it interesting and makes it so that the patron doesn’t just get something similar to the last commission. I think the books are more valuable if they’re a real artistic project. I’m really fortunate that people are willing to place their trust in me, and I try to honour that by putting thought into both the process of making it and the final result.

I only take them from time to time when I have an idea for a group of commissions, so it depends. You can see some other commissioned books, like Coffee Money Zines, and Fireworks.

What was your favorite part of making this book?

The word association part was fun, because I had no idea at the end what would happen with it. I also love doing the cover at the end, because after all the black and white it’s nice to lay down some colour and finish it off.

We couldn’t agree more that the cover is inspired, and we’re thrilled to have this beautiful book to add to the Harvest HQ library.  You can check out more of Ray Fenwick’s work, and see the other fascinating art and illustration projects he’s been up to!