Brooklyn Engineering Salon · third Wednesdays

№ 029 · MAY 2026

The next salon

On the long shadow of the batch interval.

A talk on how a single arbitrary 5-minute window — chosen for a 2014 cron job — quietly shapes the latency budget of the system it was bolted on top of, a decade on.

Date: May 20; third Wednesday
Time: 18:00 – 22:00; talk at 19:00
Speaker: Priya Anand; Staff · Linnea
RSVPs: 47 / 110; 63 spots left

RSVP — free + Add to calendar List typically full ~4 hours after open

A typical Wednesday

Four hours, unhurried.

18:00 Doors. Drinks at the bar — cold IPAs, hot tea, sparkling water. Most people show by 18:30.
19:00 One talk. Twenty-five to forty minutes. The speaker is the only person standing.
19:45 Q&A. Open mic. We keep it to thirty minutes, even when we shouldn't.
20:15 Open hour. Snacks — usually pizza from Roberta's, two pies vegan. Small clusters form.
22:00 Last call. People drift to the bar next door, or home along Berry St.

§ I · The salon, in figures

Small. Quiet. Held.

28

evenings held

110

seats / night

2,840

salonniers, all time

$0

tickets, ever

§ II · How it works

A pattern we follow.

The salon began in 2022 when seven of us realized we had nowhere to ask each other small honest questions. The format has stayed essentially the same since.

If you've never come before: arrive at 18:00 if you'd like to introduce yourself, or any time before 19:00. The room is welcoming to non-engineers, though the talk assumes the room can read code.

i.

A short read on the topic

A week before each salon, we send a one-paragraph email — usually a paper, a blog post, or a postmortem — to set the conversation. Reading it is optional. About 60% of attendees do.

ii.

One speaker, one talk

Drawn from the alumni list, the NY engineering community, or a friend-of-the-host. Talks are 25–40 minutes. Slides are allowed; demos are encouraged; pitches are not. The speaker is asked to leave 30 minutes for questions.

iii.

An open hour

The room rearranges. Two pies of pizza from Roberta's, hummus from the corner, sparkling water. People talk in small clusters; the speaker is somewhere in the room, generally near the bar.

§ III · Past salons

Twenty-eight evenings, recorded only in memory.

No recordings · we keep one paragraph per

Read paragraphs on all twenty-eight evenings →

§ IV · The room

Atrium Loft · 47 Berry Street.

Editorial interior photograph of an industrial loft workspace with exposed brick and a long desk

Address

47 Berry St, 3rd floor

Williamsburg · Brooklyn, NY 11211

Open in maps →

Getting there

LBedford Av · 5 min walk south on Berry.

GMetropolitan Av · 9 min walk west.

B62Berry/Grand · stops outside the door.

FERRYN. Williamsburg landing · 12 min walk.

BIKEBike rack at the lobby; Citi Bike at Bedford+N7.

Accessibility

Elevator from the lobby (Berry side) — fully accessible. Single-stall gender-neutral restroom on the floor. Sound loop installed in '24 for the front three rows. Email [email protected] for anything else.

§ V · Friends

Three companies pay the bar tab.

No logos on the screen, no sponsor pitches, no booths. Just three companies that quietly keep this thing free. Thank you.

Brightwave

Covers the room rent

Brightwave has covered the Atrium rental every month since Salon No. 09. Their engineers come to the salon, but never present.

papercut

Covers the bar

Papercut keeps the kegs full and the seltzer cold. They opened a Greenpoint office last year — quietly the salon's biggest little patron.

Halcyon

Covers the pizza

Halcyon springs for the two — sometimes three, on a hungry crowd — pies from Roberta's at 20:15 sharp.

Want to be a friend? We don't take on more than three at a time. Write to [email protected] · we have a short waitlist.

§ VI · Attending

Free, with an RSVP.

There are 110 seats. RSVP opens the Friday before each salon at noon, and typically fills inside four hours. We hold 14 seats for the waitlist, released the morning of.

i.

RSVP

Add your name to the list. We hold the seat for an hour after doors — if you can't make it, please cancel so a waitlister gets in.

ii.

Waitlist

If RSVPs are full, join the waitlist. Last month we released 19 seats from the waitlist; the month before, 7.

iii.

Subscribe

Our monthly note (one paragraph, the reading link, the RSVP link) goes out the second Wednesday of each month. 3,140 subscribers; no other emails.

One email a month. Unsubscribe at the bottom of each. We never sell the list.

§ VII · A few notes from past evenings

What people say afterwards.

"My first time, I knew no one. I left talking to four people about a Postgres bug none of us could reproduce. I have come back every month since."

— Hana Suzuki · ML Lead, Glide.io · Salon No. 21

"You can tell within five minutes whether a room is performing or talking. This room talks."

— Yusuf Abara · CTO, Mercury · spoke at No. 16

"There is something deeply old-fashioned about this. Two pizzas, one talk, no agenda, no slides on a JIRA roadmap."

— Priya Anand · Staff Eng, Linnea · Salon No. 14

"I have met four people through this room who I now consider close friends. We text about our jobs the way we used to text about our exes."

— Marcus Tobin · Founding Eng, Cinder · Salon No. 06

"I'm not an engineer. I came as a friend's plus-one. I understood maybe half the talk and a hundred percent of the room."

— Ines Calderón · designer · Salon No. 23

"The Wednesday after Daylight Saving 2024, fifteen of us stayed until 23:30 arguing about hash maps. I think of that night often."

— Jonas Riedel · Principal Eng, Northwind · Salon No. 19

§ VIII · FAQ

Real questions, honestly.

Need a person? Write to [email protected]. Replies within a day or two.

Is there a code of conduct? Do you take it seriously? +

Yes — posted at bksalon.nyc/conduct. In four years and twenty-eight salons, we have enforced it once. The host that night asked the person to leave; they did. We don't take it lightly, and we never bury an incident. If anything happens, find a host (we wear a coral lanyard) or text the on-call number printed on your name-tag.

Are talks recorded? Streamed? +

No. We keep one paragraph in the archive — written by the host the next morning — and that is the entirety of the record. The salon is built for being in the room. About six talks a year are explicitly off-the-record at the speaker's request, but in practice we treat them all that way.

Can I take photos for my own memory? +

A few rules. Photos of the speaker — fine if the speaker is OK with it, and we always ask at the top. Photos of the room — please don't include identifiable faces without asking. We don't allow flash, livestreaming, or recording. Phones away during the talk; this is the only request we actually enforce.

What topics are off-limits? +

Anything technical is fair game — distributed systems, ML systems, type theory, accessibility, design tooling, on-call culture, the economics of open source. What we don't take: product pitches, hiring spiels, demo videos for company tools, partisan politics, and anything where the audience is treated as a marketing list. About 14% of talk proposals get redirected for this; it's the most common reason.

I'm not an engineer. Am I welcome? +

Welcome, genuinely. About one in eight attendees is a designer, PM, researcher, or partner of an engineer who came along. The content does assume the room can read code, but a curious non-engineer will follow most of it — and the open hour is for everyone. Come.

I'd like to speak. How does that happen? +

Email [email protected] with a paragraph: what you'd talk about, who you are, why now. We schedule about three months out and aim for a mix — half from people we know, half from people we've never heard of. We say yes to roughly one in nine pitches. We always write back.

Issue No. 29 · May 20 · Atrium Loft

See you on the third Wednesday.

Doors at six, talk at seven, snacks at twenty past eight, last call at ten. Free with RSVP, as always.

RSVP for May 20 Read the archive

A small room on the third Wednesday of every month.