Hack days have been a quarterly tradition at Yahoo! for over four years, and the 2010 Summer Hack Day came and went a couple of weeks ago. I was eager to drink in the experience of my first Hack Day. It was Chief Product Officer Blake Irving’s first time as a judge at a Hack Day as well, and he was excited enough to tweet about it (@Blakei).
Our internal Hack Days are opportunities for all Yahoos (regardless of title or day job) to build software that can be taken from idea to working prototype in 24 hours. Summer Hack Day saw over 5 dozen hacks registered and demoed at the judging event on Day 2.

These rapid prototypes often pave the way for bigger and better things. The right hacks make their way into production. For example, the winning Search Slideshows hack from February’s Winter Hack Day has been live for several weeks now – you’ve probably seen it in the News slides. A winning hack from Spring Hack Day will be going into final testing soon.
Rules and stuff
Hackers aren’t afraid to bend, break, or ignore the rules, bearing in mind the spirit of the event and respect for fellow hackers. So the rules are few and basic:
There are judges and awards, but the real rewards are the hacking itself, presenting the results to fellow Yahoos, and getting those hacks to make a difference in our products and our company.
Patents
Quite a few hacks from Hack Day have gone on to become real patented ideas.
Yahoo! has fancy lawyers who do all the complicated paperwork for the hackers, and they attend Hack Day to scout out potential patents.
Share your stories
The enthusiasm and levels of smarts of the presenters, excitement of the audience, and executive support of the Hack Day showed me that hacker culture is alive and well at Yahoo! We encourage all our developers on YDN to share their YDN technology hack stories with us via this blog. Add a comment to this blog, and we’ll get the ball rolling.
Hack U visited The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-M) in Chennai — the land of the white dhoti, loud film posters, and tasty food — from August 13 to August 15, 2010. IIT-M is amongst the foremost institutes for higher technological education, and basic and applied research. We had heard a lot about the IIT-M students and more about the sprawling campus. Both did not disappoint.
Even before we reached the campus, there were over 180 registrations! The Yahoo! crew was hosted in the big spacious guest house rooms and welcomed by a curious herd of spotted deer in the guest house garden! The Yahoo! PR team had done a great job creating a buzz around the campus. The Yahoo! Academic relations head, Muthusamy Chelliah, kickstarted the evening with an introductory talk, followed by pep talks by the professors at IIT. Thiruvalluvan M.G, an architect from Yahoo!, presented a talk on Yahoo!’s efforts around Cloud Computing, which captured the attention of the research students.
To start off the Hack tech talks, I presented my “Introduction to Hacking” talk dressed in traditional tamil attire — a white kurta and pattu veshti. The students were pleasantly surprised to learn that “hacking” is actually constructive.
After this, Balaji Naraynan spoke about the popular YQL service. Like always, we got tremendous response for this YQL talk. YQL truly rocks.
After dinner, students got back to have a lively discussion and Q&A session about hack ideas and APIs on the web.
Next morning, the tech talks continued with Saurabh Sahni introducing Yahoo! Social Platform and Social APIs. Saurabh focused on how the Yahoo! social platform lets developers showcase their ideas on a platform as big as Yahoo! homepage or My Yahoo!.
From our past experience at hack days, we realized that OAuth is a very important topic, so this time Arnab Nandi did a hands on talk on OAuth. He interestingly drew parallels between OAuth and the infamous Hawala token systems.
The last talk by Gopal Vijayaraghavan was on Flickr APIs and innovation with information from pictures. He is a passionate photographer and some of his demos around Flickr APIs were really cool.
Once the official hack timer started, students really got into the groove. Many discussed their ideas among their friends. Some students decided to improve their current research projects. It was cool to see the number of students doing research on data on the Web. We had students from departments like Bio informatics and Mechanical Engineering hacking away all night. Students even helped each other, and seniors assisted juniors.
As we progressed into the night, the intensity of hacking had not died down. By midnight, some students decided to head to the hostels to take a quick nap, but more than 80% of students stayed back to hack on their ideas.
The tech crew enjoyed fielding questions and finding solutions. Like always, YQL, Pipes, Search, YUI, and Geo were the most popular services among the hackers.
The next day, we had a total of 25 hack demos. (The day was special because it was the Indian Independence day.) The judging panel included two IIT professors and two Yahoos. Among the ideas demoed, the following hacks were picked as finalists:
The all-woman team that created ‘Aspire’ took the prize for Best-in-Show hack. The other winners were SpellyCat, News Line, and Splanner.
Chennai is hot and humid, but the 6th Hack U in India was even hotter!
It’s been a few days since the amazing Open Hack day in Bangalore (Bengaluru), India, and we are still recovering from the event. As it was, it broke all the records we had from the 13 previous hack days.

The 2-day event in Bangalore’s Taj Residency Hotel saw 472 hackers (plus 106 “Info Geeks” attending the presentations only) from these different parts of India: Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgart, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Uttatakhand, West Bengal and, of course, Karnataka.
Before the 24-hour hacking period we had a few presentations. One presentation introduced what a hack really is:
The audio recording of this talk is available on archive.org.
Other introductions were to the Yahoo! User Interface library and the Yahoo! Query Language, as well as the Yahoo! Social tools and the Application platform.
With the addition of Yahoos and media representatives, the total number of people at the event tallied at just about 630 people.
If we venture for a short while into the biological world and away from IT and software, I can tell you about the amount of food and drink consumed. The following items provided sustenance for the attendees:
Another first for any of the hack days is that the wireless network never went down. This is especially noteworthy as the team had set up India’s first 300 connection IPV6 network, and they even managed to ramp it up to the extra 200 connections needed on demand.
Thus fuelled, the hackers managed to finish 110 hacks in 24 hours. Having that many hacks meant that overall the judges and the audience spent almost four hours looking at all of them — although folks kept to the normal 90-seconds time to present each hack.
You can see the full list of hacks and learn about the winners and other outstanding hacks here. If you don’t want to leave, here are the winners again:
All in all, we were blown away by the energy, the hunger (both in terms of information and other) of the hackers, and how smoothly the event went (even more remarkable as we initially had planned for fewer participants).
One personal thing I have taken away from this event is that whilst everything we release in Yahoo comes with a lot of documentation, nothing beats a good code examples to give to hackers. Which is why we assembled The Hackday Toolbox, to get people up and running faster next time.
It contains:
You can download the Hackday Toolbox on GitHub or try the examples.
All that remains is to thank everybody involved in organizing, running, and attending this event. It has been a blast — and now it is time to follow up on what can happen to the hacks built and groups formed there. Check out the photos on Flickr to get a glimpse of what happened.
Yahoo! India News reports record-breaking registrations numbers for the Open Hack India conference and an extraordinary number of hackers at the overnight open hack event.

Photo credit: Christian Heilmann (@codepo8)
Official report to follow — we just wanted to get the award-winning hacks out to you as quickly as possible.
See the full list of hacks submitted.
Christian Heilmann also lists these award-winning hacks alongside his favorites in his blog post on the event.

Namaste! Open Hack India is back, and we’re excited to see what creative hacks the vibrant Indian developer community can come up with. This is the 13th Yahoo Open Hack event we’ve hosted globally and will be the 3rd one in Bengaluru. The event will be held on the weekend of July 24-25 at the The Taj Residency, Bengaluru.
Registration is now open.
We will have all the old favorites you have come to expect from an Open Hack event, but we also plan to shake things up a little with more content and some surprises.
We are inviting over 300 developers to attend this free event, which will begin with a series of hack-related presentations from some of the Web’s most respected developers. We’ll then dive into 24 hours of hacking using a great collection of web tools, services, and APIs from the Yahoo! Developer Network, and other APIs and data from around the web.
We will end the event on the second day with the awards ceremony, which entitles winners to bragging rights until the end of eternity or the next Hack Day, whichever comes first.
As a Hacker Guru (see below), you will get a chance to play with our newest releases such as YQL, YUI3, YAP, Geo Technologies, and more.
Naturally, we plan to provide physical and mental sustenance throughout the two-day event.
Due to the limited size of the venue, we will be reviewing applications for attendance and giving preference to those we believe will best be able to contribute to the development of a hack at the event. You can hack individually or in groups, but please sign-up individually.
There are two types of registration choices:
Book your place now! You know you want to. We will send Open Hack Day Confirmed emails by the first week of July to all the selected registrations applications.
Everything you need to know about our open technology you can find on the Yahoo! Developer Network, which includes links to our latest open platforms.
We will add you to the pbwork site we will set up for the Open Hack India event. This site will contain all the information you need for the event. The site will go live by beginning of July and if you are selected to attend, you will be added automatically.
If you have any questions, please email me with “Open Hack India” in the subject field.
Hacking 101
For newbies to hacking, Christian Heilmann offers the following helpful presentation on Hacking 101.
Thanks, and see you in July
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