Archive for the ‘hackday’ Topic

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:

• Build something that can be taken from idea to working prototype in one day.
• Be ready to show off your hacks to your fellow Yahoos and special judges. You only get 90 bleary-eyed seconds before the hackmeisters starts turning up the music!
• Have Fun. Really! Not having fun is against the rules.

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.

Christine Dorffi
YDN Blog Editor

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:

• SPlanner – A comprehensive trip / outing planner tool. The User Interface for this hack was very neatly done.
• DropCrop – Organized retail of farm products through an internet auctioning system. This is a very useful and creative hack for rural India
• News On Map – Organized news from all over the world on an interactive map of the world. They partially implemented an algorithm to fetch the top news for a given location
• SpellyCat – A vocabulary helper. Hack to showcase new words, and really creative ways to remember the words using pictures and colors
• Aspire – Various Algorithms to figure out a Role Model for you and various opportunities around your field of interest
• Yahoo! Jockey – A cool idea to create play lists of Indian music depending on factors like weather and mood
• News Line – A cool new idea to list out the various stories from the web that have led up to a particular headline. They were trying to build a retrospective view of a particular news article.
• Desktop sports updater – A very useful idea for any sports enthusiast. This hack aimed at bringing the sports scores directly to the desktop as notifications.

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!

Subramanyan Murali (@rmsguhan)
Technical Yahoo!

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.

Anil Patel, YDN International program manager, adds: I knew this event was going to be different from the moment we opened registration. The fact that almost 400 people registered within the first 24 hours should have set off some alarm bells! Over the next 6 weeks, registration hit the 2,000 mark, with developers wanting to attend from all corners of the country. Using past registration data and drop-off rates as a guide, I accepted the number of registrations that would get us approximately 400 through the door. In the end, I accepted around 1,100; on the day itself, a mind-boggling 578 developers arrived at the registration desk, a much lower drop-off rate than expected. Also, for the first time, we had a high percentage of developers coming in from outside the host state of Karnataka, with some developers flying in specially. One developer came from Indonesia as he missed the one we did in Jakarta.

The presentations

Before the 24-hour hacking period we had a few presentations. One presentation introduced what a hack really is:

What the hack?

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.

Logistics: 4,800 cups of tea and coffee

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:

• 1,200 litres of milk
• 4,800 cups of tea and coffee
• 875 kg of vegetables
• 275 kg rice
• 1,900 eggs
• 320 kg chicken
• 120 kg sugar
• 240 cans of Red Bull

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.

The hacks

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.

Anil Patel, YDN International program manager, adds: Overnight, around 350+ developers stayed at the venue (again, the highest number we’ve had stay over for any Open Hack). By around 10:00 on Sunday morning, the energy levels started rising again as people started registering hacks. At 10:30, the hack.trackr showed that 40 hacks had been registered. When I came back 30 minutes later, it was 90. Then Christian ran over 30 minutes after that and said it was over 120 — I had to grip the chair in order to fend off the very quick panic attack I could feel coming on! In the end a staggering 110 hacks were presented over a 3.5 hour period. Almost all the hacks were presented within their 90 second allotment, and not one hacker used PowerPoint! Prizes included an xBox, iPod Nanos and Shuffles, and an iPad that was bought from the US (the iPad is not as yet available in India). The winner of the iPad almost fainted when he received his prize.

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:

• Github Badges (source) by Brian Guthrie, Tejas Dinkar, and Mark Needham are a collection giving Warcraft-/xBox-style achievement badges for Github achievements.
• Quizr by Prateek Dayal and Hemant Kumar is a quiz generator using Wikipedia and Flickr. The generated quizzes get pushed out to all the computers in the room live via HTML5 WebSockets.
• FlickrSubz by BabuSrithar, Sudeep Nayak, and Parashuram enables realtime closed-captioning in multiple languages for videos on Flickr. The hack utilizes a speech-recognition engine (Julius for Linux, WSAPI for Windows) to display subtitles in the chosen language (translate API) for videos on Flickr via a GreaseMonkey script.
• ChromYQLip (pronounced as Chromy-Clip) by Markandey Singh is a chrome extension for page scraping. Select some text on a page and click the extension icon, and it will populate the URL and XPath of the selection. Click “getmashup” to get a lightweight page that loads your content. A Sample URL and XPath for advanced mashup building is URL=”http://twitpic.com/photos/$1″ Path=”//div[@id="image-"]/div/div¹/a”, which results in $1 to become a form field to enter the TwitPic user name.
• Communicator by Mohan Gupta, Sri Ram, and Roshan is an API to include a real-time communication widget on any Web page. All the users viewing that page can discuss and collaborate on the content of the page in real time.
• Chirpshire by Preetham Venkky, Rohit Talukdar, Puneet Jaiswal, and Mohd. Amjed allows you to gain belts and grab badges for tweeting regularly and without using automation apps. Businesses can use this service to spread a meme. This could be a # hashtag or a physical location check-in.
• Shop Green by Nidhi Chaudhary and Anurag Jain is an interesting concept that allows sellers to print 2D barcodes for their products and buyers to simply scan them with their mobile phone and pay on the phone. No need for paper bills any longer. All the payments are made with PayPal.
• Democracy Tools by Ankur Patel, Ankur Gupta, and Yatin Kumbhare did quite a job of scraping all kind of government sites to collect data to answer the following questions: Who is your Leader? Where is your Constituency? Is there a government Website Search Engine? What is Media’s Opinion about your Leader? Another hack that did something similar is RepMeter.
• How Much Time Will This Landmark Take Me? by Susheel was a terribly clever hack that analyzed the EXIF data in Flickr photos to see how long it took people to take photos at a certain landmark. That can give you an insight into how much time to spend at that landmark on your next trip.
• Nirvana – your late night path back home is a mashup that allows people to tweet where the police currently does alcohol tests – in case you want to avoid that route when driving home.

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).

The hackday toolbox

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:

• An introduction to installing and using PHP with MAMP/XAMPP and debugging it
• YQLGeo for all your geo and location needs
• Demos of querying YQL in JavaScript, YUI3 and PHP
• Demos to display YQL data
• Authenticated example to access the Yahoo! Firehose
• Rendering Yahoo Geoplanet data as a map

You can download the Hackday Toolbox on GitHub or try the examples.

In conclusion

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.

Christian Heilmann (@codepo8)
Yahoo! Senior Developer Evangelist

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.

• Birdie award goes to Chirpshire – A Twitter hack
• Best Social Collaboration award goes to Communicator – APIs to include real-time communicator
• Government award for Democracy Tools – Mashup of Election Commission and Yahoo! Web Services
• Education award for Quizr – Real-time quiz application for use in classrooms
• Yahoo! Hacker brings bunnies to Hack award for GitHub Badges – Track your GitHub quest with series of badges
• Travel Hack award to Happy Feet – Tells you the popular landmarks of a city you visit
• Green Hack award goes for Shop Green – To save use of paper
• Burning Chrome award goes to Chromy YQLip – Extension for paid scrapping
• Best in show award for FlickSubz – Closed captioning for videos on Twitter
• Hackers’ Choice award goes to Nirvana – Your late night path back home

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.

Christine Dorffi
YDN Blog Editor

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.

What is Open Hack?

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.

Registration

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:

• Info Geek Those who are interested in attending the Technology Seminars and presentations on Saturday morning but not the main hack event. If you sign up here, you will be asked to leave after the tech talks end on Saturday.
• Hacker Gurus Those who are pure of heart or creative souls, love hacking up new ideas, possess entrepreneurial passions, or just want to build something for world peace…or for an overnight tech-mayhem-and-hacking-bliss. It includes the Saturday tech presentations, hacking through the night, Sunday demos, and judging.

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.

What do you need to know?

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

Anil Patel, Program Manager, YDN International,
and the Open Hack Team