Sat 30 Sep 2006
Hack This!
Lerdorf discusses PHP 5
Only in the Valley (Plates read ‘Algortm’ and ‘Hack Me’).
Beck Rocks HackDay06
SIMS reunion at Hack Day ‘06
I’ve never been that enamored of Yahoo!, to be honest. For starters, the name bothers me. Call me a purist, but I don’t think words should have extraneous punctuation. Secondly, I stopped using many of Yahoo!’s (see what I mean?) features years ago as Google’s services started to come online. I snickered when the Yahoo Music Engine came online. In brief I felt as though much of what Yahoo! was trying to do Google was doing better.
But they’ve been doing some really cool stuff for a year or two now. Last year they opened the Yahoo! Research Lab in Berkeley and hired a bunch of really smart SIMS kids (and poached a faculty member to found it). They’ve acquired some pretty cool companies. They hire really, really well. And this weekend they are having the coolest tech event I’ve ever attended to showcase their awesome employees and APIs and motivate the developer community to get involved.
Welcome to Yahoo! Open Hack Day ‘06. I attended yesterday’s workshops and was really blown away. Yahoo! is the shit. Seriously, where else can you get the downlow on PHP from the guy who wrote it, sit next to the person who started Flickr as you learn how to hack the Flickr API, and get a tutorial on the Yahoo UI platform library from the people who designed them and then rock out to a private Beck concert, replete with a live puppet show? Punk. Rock.
This was a great idea from start to finish. Yahoo! gets lots of smart engineers playing around with their tools and services, possibly adds a few of them to their payroll, and spreads tremendous good will among the developer community. Attending engineers and researchers, in turn, get treated to a series of enlightening talks by the leading minds in the industry, sees the internal workings of a cutting-edge company, and get to network with like-minded people.
I’m looking forward to seeing all of the cool hacks that come out of this weekend. I’m also excited to start working with all of the APIs I was exposed to (ha ha) yesterday. Hopefully this is the first of many hack days at Yahoo!
September 30th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
I totally concur with your post – thanks for the good write-up!
October 1st, 2006 at 10:21 pm
[...] The Developer Day trainings on Friday were incredible. The fact that Yahoo is offering its services (but in particular the YUI Libraries) to the world and getting our best and brightest on stage to offer their wisdom gratis is so cool. But here’s someone who said it better than I possibly could: I attended yesterday’s workshops and was really blown away. Yahoo! is the shit. Seriously, where else can you get the downlow on PHP from the guy who wrote it, sit next to the person who started Flickr as you learn how to hack the Flickr API, and get a tutorial on the Yahoo UI platform library from the people who designed them and then rock out to a private Beck concert, replete with a live puppet show? Punk. Rock. [...]
October 1st, 2006 at 10:51 pm
[...] Hack Day was a blast. Someone called us “punk rock”, which is just about the best compliment I can think of. [...]
October 2nd, 2006 at 2:09 am
Great post. LOL that’s a great picture of my car “Hack Me”. I didn’t notice ‘Algortm’ parked next to me.. that’s great.
Now if I could only get 1/2 of the people who came out to HackDay to come out to burning man next year and join the camp I’m trying to start… the Black Rock City Hacker Camp (www.brchc.com)
October 3rd, 2006 at 1:54 pm
[...] After we got the idea rolling, I sent an email out to our internal Hack discussion mailing list (something I seeded after our first internal Hack Day in December of last year) and said, “who wants to help put together a public Hack Day?” Within a few days, I had about 80 people ready to help: engineers, product managers, business development, attorneys. . . . name a function and we had someone step forward. No coercion by management, none of the browbeating you might see in a typical corporate environment, no silly corporate brainstorming exercises, no discussion of “branding,” no PowerPoints (not one!) We had one planning meeting to kick things off (it was our first and last meeting), and pretty soon, I was standing back and watching the magic. People stepped up. We needed t-shirts, and they appeared. PR pros called BBQ vendors to arrange food. Some of the world’s foremost CSS experts stuffed welcome packets. Hard core backend engineers offered themselves up as low-level tech support for the hackers doing their demos. I talked to our totally awesome facilities team about our grass and the sprinkler system (needed to make sure the ground wasn’t too squishy for the campers). At one point when we were setting up the wifi network on Thursday, the guys needed 200 zip ties and several hundred feet of ethernet cable. I sent an email out to my list of volunteers and within the hour, it all appeared (thanks, Kent). Punk rock. [...]