Myles Recny

Bio:

Officially an Australian, I was adopted from the East London ghetto at a young age, and cast into a life of multi-national citizenship and bacchanalia. I've grown up in London, Sydney, the US and have spent a good year living in China. I attended Duke where I studied Philosophy of Science, Chinese, CS and the finer points of many a gutter.

After graduating I went to work as an engineer for a social gaming company (Klicknation) in Northern California, selling virtual capes of invisibility to virtual superheroes. Later, I was talked into becoming a hackstar for Techstars NYC, which is where I met the boys of Shelby (then Homefield) and became the first Shelby employee. At Shelby I've been actively involved in development at every level of the stack (node is my forte) and sometimes I successfully paddle a small white ball over a net.

I've recently become a part-time grad student at NYU's Gallatin program. Gallatin allows me to create my own course of study, from any class in NYU. I'm interested in studying complexity theory, with the end-goal of impressing people at cocktail parties.

I'm also legally blind, so don't be offended when I ignore as we pass on the street.

• Title: Cyborg from the Future @ ShelbyTV
• Age: 24
• Location: Williamsburg, Brooklyn
• Contact: @recborg

So Shelby is going through some major changes right now and you guys have rebuilt the code from the ground up. Why such a major change? What prompted Shelby to start again from scratch? What aspect of the new Shelby are you most excited about?

Shelby v1 was a beautiful way to aggregate online video content. However it didn't put any creative tools in the hands of the user. In v2 every user is not only a consumer, but a curator of video - your Shelby 'roll' is where you express yourself. We realized that our v1 data model was tied so closely to an aggregation-only system, that refactoring would probably take longer than rebuilding from the ground up. I think it was a brilliant decision, and one that will ultimately change the way we watch TV. What am I most excited about? That'd be 'Shelby Genius', who you'll get to know very soon.

London, Sydney, China...what made you lay down your roots in New York?

Because of my eyesight (I have optic neuropathy), driving is not an option. That limits me to cities that have a formidable public transit system. New York is one such city, and a fantastically debauched place. That said, I don't like the idea of laying down roots anywhere. I look forward to taking advantage of my multi-citizenship via more international adventures soon.

Gallatin is the "make your own major" school at NYU. Do you like the freedom of creating your own course of study? What are you hoping to focus on?

I'm using Gallatin as the 'skeleton-key' to NYU. Whatever interests me right now is what I'll enroll in...hopefully I can find a way to tie it all together into a thesis at some point. This semester I'm taking two courses from ITP, 'DIY Health' and 'Intro to Biohacking'.

If there's a common thread that runs through my studies, it's a search for complex behaving systems and finding ways to make computational models of things in academia that have yet to be modeled in that way.