About Elle Mundy & Process Things
Welcome to Process Things. I’m Elle Mundy, and this is where I showcase my music, photography, poetry, code, drawings, and essays. I’m based in beautiful Brooklyn, New York.
Process Things is built using Strapi and 11ty. If you’re curious, the architecture and migration from older blogs are detailed in the welcome post.
The Meanings of Process Things
- Processing emotions and life events
- Processing work to be done
- Writing about creative and work processes
Music
I started playing guitar in 1998, when I was just a little kid, and I fell in love with it. I took lessons from third grade to sometime in high school. In college, I was in a few bands, but then I fell off playing regularly for a few years, only practicing just enough to maintain my skills every now and then. But in 2018, I picked up a regular habit of practicing and songwriting again.
Inkjetski
In 2022, I started releasing music under my solo project, Inkjetski. Don’t ask me what the name means, or it might leak colors into the water. I play some combination of indie rock, folk, funk, blues, jazz, dream pop, and ambient. Listen to restore some semblance of flow and balance amidst life’s precarity. You can find me on all streaming services and Bandcamp.
Living Room Shows
In 2019, I started playing living room shows like my friends Claudia Matos and Tina Foster’s House of Abundance and Miller Pyke’s Apartment Party. I’ve collaborated with the very talented vocalists Carli Van Voorhis and Katie Turner.
YouTube Pandemic Concert Series
In 2020 and early 2021 during lockdown, I missed playing shows. So I got a good camera and hooked up my good mic and started a concert series on YouTube. More about that camera later.
Adam LaGreca
I met Adam LaGreca at a House of Abundance show sometime in late 2021, a few months after lockdown ended. He liked my music and asked me to play lead guitar in his solo act, a calm but intense folk rock outfit. Since then, we’ve been playing shows around New York City in venues such as Pianos, Mercury Lounge, Bowery Electric, Pete’s Candy Store, and Rockwood Music Hall (stage 2). I’m featured on the song “What Else?” on the 2022 EP “Deserted by the Sea,” available on all streaming services and limited edition 12".
Photography
I got my first DSLR, a Nikon D80, in college back in 2009. When I got my first iPhone, I just used that instead. I was uneducated, thinking such thoughts as, “This iPhone is just as good as that Nikon,” and “The best camera is the one you have with you.” That last one might be true, but here’s some unsolicited advice: bring the good one anyway.
A neat side effect of buying a camera for the YouTube concert series was it was also a great stills camera. I got a Sony α6400 and a few lenses. (Since those days, I’ve had two other cameras: Sony α7III and α7IV, my main camera now.) This was back during lockdown, and with little else to do, I got extremely into photography again. Through street photography, I rediscovered the enormous thrill of capturing the perfect shot. I started posting those shots on Instagram daily. However, with the disintegration of corporate social media, I’ll be posting to this site instead. Now, I seldom leave the house without my camera, and I regret it every time I do.
Poetry
In 2009, frustrated with the state of computer science education in my community college, I switched majors to English literature. I began writing poetry, reading in slams and open mics around New Jersey shore towns, and finding community through that writing. I transferred to TCNJ, a competitive small public liberal arts university, where I continued studying English. I find poetry to be extremely therapeutic, nourishing, and cathartic, which is easy to forget when I need it the most.
I’ve been published in Black Telephone Magazine, and I post more poetry right here on this site.
Code
I started teaching myself to code in high school back in 2006 on my dad’s old Apple ][+, which he kept in a closet for decades before I found it and started messing around with it. I first learned Applesoft BASIC, which was the coolest thing ever at the time, but which I now consider poison to any up-and-coming programmer’s brain. I then learned some C, C++, and PHP through the rest of high school and into college.
College
I started as a computer science major, but I couldn’t stand it and switched to English literature. I kept teaching myself to code on the side and participated in college hackathons like HackRU, MHacks, PennApps, HackMIT, and HackNY. I even helped start one at my school, HackTCNJ.
Front Rush
The projects I made in those hackathons were good enough to get me my first internship. I met the founders of Front Rush and they hired me to learn Ruby on Rails and develop the first iteration of Coach Packet on the web. I even learned a bit of iOS development for its app.
HackNY / DevPost
In 2013, I was a HackNY Fellow, which pairs college students with internships in New York City and puts them up in college housing for the summer. I worked for ChallengePost, later rebranded DevPost, a platform for organizing hackathons. At the end of the fellowhship, I returned to Front Rush and college. But I had fallen in love with the city, and I knew I had to go back. So I returned to DevPost and moved to Brooklyn, where I’ve lived ever since.
Hackerati / Bauer Xcel Media
In 2017, I worked for a consultancy called Hackerati for a few months before it became defunct. My one and only client was Bauer Xcel Media, where I worked on features and site reliability for their custom Ruby on Rails CMS, as well as training the team on agile development practices and going on call.
Meetup
From there, I followed a few people from both Bauer and Hackerati to Meetup. I figured I’d join a nice stable company for a while. A week later, WeWork acquired Meetup, and two years after that, WeWork imploded. But it wasn’t all a wash. I learned a lot about Scala, Bazel, AWS, SRE, XP, CI/CD pipelines, TDD, mob programming, and other things that have shaped my understanding of software development and the processes and practices around it.
Stride / Spotify
In 2020, I went to work for Stride Consulting, where several teammates and I were staffed at Spotify, working on its subsidiary SoundBetter. I took a lot of what I learned from Meetup and applied it there, and along with some fellow Striders, coached the team to become one of the fastest shipping at Spotify while mob programming remotely over zoom during lockdown. We worked on a complete redesign of the web app and integrated it with Spotify, migrating it from a legacy Rails app to a Next.js app. Unfortunately, we had to undo all our work when Spotify revealed it would be selling SoundBetter back to the founders.
In 2021, I moved on to a part time contracting gig on the Health team at Twitter, thinking I’d landed at a nice stable company. 2022 proved me extremely wrong. One day I might even write about it. It’s still too soon.
Sotheby’s
In 2022, I got tired of the instability of VC-funded tech firms and decided to join Sotheby’s, where I was a staff platform engineer, working on CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes deployments, a Bazel monorepo, and AWS infrastructure. I thought its longevity (“est. 1744”) meant stability. I was wrong. But this time was different. I decided to quit before the chaos got the better of me.
Uncut Systems
Nowadays, I’m immensely frustrated with the state of tech product development and VC-funded shiny new nightmares such as the metaverse, crypto, and AI. So I’m building Uncut Systems, a semi-secret company for making high fidelity, sustainable, human centered software and services. Death by 1,000 cuts is no way to live. Nothing to report yet, but stay tuned.
