Students at work at Huge School.

Sara Chipps’ tech education started early. She learned to code when she was still in high school. She studied computer science in college. When she left school, she landed a job at a tech company in New Jersey, where she learned that despite all her training and efforts, her tech skills still weren’t up to snuff.

“Everything I know about software development, I did not learn in college,” she says. “There’s really no university out there that teaches web development. They hired me knowing that I’d never done this before and that they’d need to train me. That’s how I got started. I found people who believed in my skill set, and they taught me.”

Fast forward six years to the present. It’s currently Internet Week in New York, and more than 45,000 people from around the world (wide web) are here celebrating the advancements of the city’s digital culture and tech scene, one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the city.

Yet Chipps on-the-job training is still common because there is a huge talent gap within web companies. By some estimates, there are four jobs in New York for every developer, a shortage that has lead to the creation of new initiatives intended to train the next generation of web developers and entrepreneurs–many of them in Brooklyn.

These ladies got schooled, by Huge.

“One of the biggest challenges with our business is that there’s just a shortage of really great digital talent,” says Shirley Au, President of Huge Inc., a digital advertising agency in Dumbo that started as a web design shop in the neighborhood in 1999. As one of the earliest digital companies to establish itself in Brooklyn, Huge is ahead of the curve in many ways when it comes to implementing training initiatives to attract new talent.
Read More »

Brooklyn native Nigel Morris spent a lot of time at Coney Island as a child. In the summer, his parents regularly took him and his two siblings to play on the beach and enjoy the amusement park. They were quintessential outings with one exception: “We were forbidden from the boardwalk,” Morris says. “In the 80s, the boardwalk was crime ridden, for lack of a better term–a lot of crime, a lot of drugs, people were meeting below the boardwalk to do unspeakable things. We couldn’t go near it.” As is often the case when you place a taboo on something, Morris, now 34 and a photographer living in Crown Heights, developed a curiosity about the once off-limits boardwalk, which is evident by his latest project, “Coney Island: Faces of the Boardwalk.”

“I wanted to see if it’d changed,” Morris says. “I heard it’d changed, but I wanted to see for myself.” So he began taking weekly trips to Coney Island over two years ago, digital camera in hand, and spent hours walking up and down it. The result is a collection of candid portraits that capture a side of Coney Island that caught even Morris by surprise. “There’s a lot of different people out there from different backgrounds,” he says. “I was very surprised by how diverse it is. I’ve met doctors, lawyers. I’ve actually met a group of people who still live under the boardwalk.” The stories Morris shared surprised us, too, particularly the one about the doctor and his sea rabbit.
Read More »

While photographer Chris Arnade was walking around the city, eye trained to the sky, searching out rooftop pigeon keepers for a photo series about their hobby, he realized that there was a street level corollary: bicycle clubs. “They really do go together,” Arnade explained in a phone call with Brooklyn Based. “Down low you have the guys with bikes, up high you have the pigeons, and it’s the same men.” Read More »

Parish Hall, a Slow Money-funded restaurant from the owner of Egg, will open next month.

When Ben Rossen and Jay Lee started working as financial lawyers in late 2008, they saw how difficult life was becoming for independent businesses not far from Wall Street. “I was facilitating billion-dollar global transactions, while watching storefronts in my neighborhood get shuttered and replaced by bank branches and corporate chains,” said Lee, who lived in the East Village at the time, near Rossen. “It just seemed incredibly messed up to us.”
 
By 2011, they had quit their jobs and decamped for Brooklyn—Rossen to Park Slope, Lee to Williamsburg—where they’ve been focusing on a start-up that will give individuals more freedom to support businesses close to home. As Lee explained, “It’s crazy that all you need is 30 seconds and an internet connection to invest in an oil well halfway across the world, but it’s literally impossible to invest in your favorite restaurant or coffee shop down the block.”
 
Impossible may be stretching things a bit. If you’re among the “friends and family” of a business owner, or you’re a venture capitalist, then it’s relatively easy to invest in a local business. If not, you’re limited by 1930s-era securities laws that now seem woefully outdated in the age of crowdfunding.
 
A bill in Congress, nicknamed the crowdfunding bill, would be a boon for local investors and entrepreneurs if the Senate manages to pass a version of it. Until then, Ben Rossen and Jay Lee’s brand-new venture, Smallknot, and others like it, are helping individuals jump through the hoops that make it so hard to help your neighborhood haunts.
Read More »