« May 2007 | Main | July 2007 »
We're mulling over some changes to our web site here at YDN Central and are looking for some folks we can meet with in person to get feedback. If you meet the following two criteria and are willing to chat with us a bit in person net week, let me know. It's all pretty informal and low-key, but we'd be glad to give you a t-shirt and lunch in addition to time chatting with some of us on the YDN team.
Thanks in advance to anyone to can spare a few minutes.
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by jzawodn at 10:20 AM | Comments (1)
Over on Search Engine Journal, Raj Dash has a three part series about using Yahoo! Pipes to analyze Digg stories, votes, and submissions. Not only is this a good use of Pipes, but much of the information is presented in an easy to digest video format so you can see how things are built for yourself.
Check 'em out:
If you've seen any cool Pipes (or Pipes videos), let me know.
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by jzawodn at 9:16 AM | Comments (2)
Christian Heilmann, web developer at Yahoo! UK, posts a handy DOM cheat sheet on his blog:
He and Nate Koechley, front-end engineer at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, gave one of the particularly hot presentations at Hack Day in London: "YUI - The Elephant in the Room".
Christian has also recently posted screencasts on DOM essentials (see below) and step-by-step tutorials on creating JavaScript slideshows or carousels.
Matt McAlister
Posted by Matt McAlister at 4:01 PM | Comments (0)
Yeah, we can't shut up about YUI, AKA the Yahoo! User Interface libraries. Those feisty JavaScript libraries are winning reviews and getting serious enhancements while still averaging a thousand downloads a day. But maybe you haven't seen YUI in action on some well-known web sites? Sites like VersionTracker.com, Target.com, Slashdot.com, PayPal.com, My.Opera.com, DJindexes.com, and Digg.com, among many others, all use YUI in some parts of their site. For a detailed list of YUI usage at these sites and others, you can check out the links directory in our YUI support group (requires registration). For even more YUI usage examples, browse the Yahoo! Application Gallery. Using YUI? Feel free to add your application to Gallery or to the links directory.
Jason Levitt
Posted by at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
The Hack Day judges handed out prizes for some of the most interesting, entertaining, useful and 'I-shoulda-thought-of-that' hacks built at Hack Day in London. Almost all of the following are live (at the time of this post) for you to see and play with:
Best hack of the rules : Blue Steel, Beagle III
Should have been in the product yesterday on Yahoo!: Stephen Fernandez, Indicating Users in Flickr Photos with tags and notes (greasemonkey)
Should have been in the product yesterday on BBC: Dharmafly, Hack Hud
Best use of BBC API’s: Monkey Tennis, BBC Nwsr 24
Best use of Yahoo! API’s: Steffan Jones, Flickr Tunes
Most Useful: Richard Rutter & Andy Hume, "Get us Organised"
Best International Hack: Mnemosyne, You say potato, I say Solanum tuberosum (greasemonkey)
Funniest Hack: North and South, Top Gun
Best Overall: Nick Bilton and Michael Young, shifd.com
There were also a few special category winners presented by the Hack Day sponsors:
Make Magazine: Bli.mp
SecondLife: Supernova, SLorpedo: The mixed reality game of naval warfare
Flickr: Steffan Jones, Flickr Tunes (also "Best use of Yahoo! API’s". see above.)
BBC Radio: Erin & Kelvin, John Peeled
And if you want to see what else was built, Christian Heilmann posted the complete list of submitted hacks, and Frankie Roberto liveblogged the demos.
Matt McAlister
Posted by Matt McAlister at 2:37 PM | Comments (7)
This choppy little video hack was made on our own JumpCut in just a few hours. It's the short version at about 5 minutes. You can also see the full Hack Day London video (15 minutes) complete with some funny behind-the-scenes footage from the Friday before the event.
Matt McAlister
Posted by Matt McAlister at 11:08 AM | Comments (1)
If I could boil down the Hack Day ethos to one simple statement, it would be
this one: expect the unexpected. But who would have expected not one but TWO direct lightning strikes on
Alexandra Palace (or "Ally Pally" to the locals) over a very short period just as our London Hack Day was getting started? That's exactly what happened. The first bolt simply caused some electrical difficulties and sporadic power outages. The second bolt was, well, thunderous, and gave a jolt to Ally Pally's fire suppressions system, causing vents in the roof to open up to let in torrents of that infamous English rain. I had been finishing up a media interview when the monstrous BOOM! reverberated through the building and the chatter on the volunteers' radios became deafening:
"IT'S RAINING INDOORS!! IT'S RAINING INDOORS!!"
Nature had hacked the building! As hacker Jeremy Keith wrote, "Who knew that the first hack of the day would be trying to figure out how to hack Alexandra Palace? It was actually kind of fun? stiff upper lip; spirit of the Blitz and all that. . . ."
Once the shock (no pun intended!) wore off, it was was fun, but this was. . . . shall we say. . . "unplanned" for an indoor event. At the first Open Hack Day at the Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, I had worried about the automated sprinklers on the Yahoo! lawn since hackers were camping there overnight, but I never even thought about water from *above* for the London edition.
It was then that I learned something firsthand about the British "Dunkirk spirit" that I had always heard about in history class, but never witnessed personally (I wasn't the only one who thought of Dunkirk). As water poured through the open vents in the roof, I saw several hackers quietly whip out their umbrellas and keep hacking away (this photo says it all). Lightning isn't kind to wi-fi, so while the wi-fi was out, the hackers improvised, moving their hacking to whiteboards and pieces of paper. They turned the building itself into a wiki of sorts, dragging their "furniture" (a few hundred bean bags) out into the dry Palm Court area. After some inspired hacking of the building by the Yahoo, BBC, and Alexandra Palace teams, we were back up and running in the (slightly damp) West Hall. Ah, London. A little spirit of the Blitz here in Alexandra Palace.
As I write this early on Sunday morning, the hackers here in London are hard at work, the sun is out, and the vents in the ceiling are closed. The umbrellas have been put away (but still within easy reach!), the wifi is solid, and the energy is intense. In a city that was bombed heavily in World War II and in a building that has nearly burned to the ground twice, a couple of bolts of lightning were hardly enough to register alarm. The hacking goes on.
More later when the hack demos begin. . . .stay tuned! (and stay dry!)
(For more on the goings-on at Alexandra Palace, checkout the hackdaylondon tag in del.icio.us and Flickr)
- Chad DickersonPosted by Chad Dickerson at 2:24 AM | Comments (3)
With Hack Day nearly upon us here in London, I've been looking back at how the program has evolved. The Wikipedia entry on Hack Day defines the format pretty well ("an open participatory hacking session where attendees are encouraged to create web applications that utilize one or more of Yahoo's APIs and open source libraries") but it's a lot more than that. As Havi Hoffman put it, "Hack Day is a showcase - recognition and celebration - of grassroots engineering ingenuity that is happening every day now."
Here's a brief history of Hack Day to date, starting with our initial event:
December 8, 2005
With many sources of inspiration behind us, the first internal Hack Day launched within the Search team as an experiment in driving grassroots innovation. Hackers were given total freedom to pursue their ideas, some food and drink for sustenance, and presentations to your peers at the end of the day. The event exceeded all expectations. When the number of demos tripled our initial expectations, we improvised a new rule on the spot: only 90 seconds to present. The die was cast for future events.
March 24, 2006
The second internal Hack Day was even bigger, and the hacks started getting more sophisticated. On only the second event, a culture started coalescing within the company, best explained by Matt McAlister's post, "Top 10 reasons why Hack Day rocks". There was clear momentum.
April 21, 2006
Hack Day went international as the Yahoo! Bangalore team jumped into the game, and they even launched a product out of the effort called Our City that has become a big success in India. You can read more about the Our City story. GigaOM found this interesting, too:
"Taking bookmarks from Del.icio.us, events from Upcoming, Flickr photos, News and even blogs. Flickr modules are seriously hot. They are taking data from Wikipedia and adding it to the mix... Pretty easy to get a quick snapshot of what’s happening in a city. If they can roll this out across the world, I think they easily best Google’s local efforts."
The Bangalore experience confirmed a feeling I had all along -- the hacker spirit is universal.
June 15-16, 2006
All Yahoo! staff in the Sunnyvale Headquarters were then encouraged to participate in the June Hack Day in 2006. We had well over 100 demos. The results of Hack Day began to really show both in the way people operated internally and in the ways our products started improving. Teams began building new hacks on top of infrastructure from prior Hack Days.
July 4, 2006
Hack Day #2 in Bangalore. They now have their own polished and very successful program.
July 6, 2006
We then tried a pan-European Hack Day and linked the presentations from London, Germany and France. Despite a few glitches in the demo process, the hackers were really inspired and started pushing for more. They continue to run their own local program just like the US and Bangalore teams.
September 29, 2006
After so many successes with Yahoo! engineers hacking on Yahoo's platforms, bringing outside developers in to hack on the APIs we offer on the Yahoo! Developer Network made complete sense. Like our internal Hack Days, we wanted to step aside and leave plenty of room to let our outside developers be the stars of the show. We were looking forward to getting together with our developer community, but had no idea just how fantastically successful the event would be. Here are some of the numbers from that spectacle.:
54 hacks
55 dozen Krispy Kremes
250 pizzas
400 Hackers
4000+ flickr photos
I still can't believe how well it went, leaving some people to say quite simply: "Yahoo! is the s***". As I explained previously:
"If anyone out there is wondering how we pulled this off, I offer one clue: total pros rolling up their sleeves to do whatever needed to be done...I learned that inspiration might be the world’s only renewable energy source and it scales like a [insert expletive here]."
9 months later, I still feel just as strongly about it.
Recognizing the universal hacker spirit, it made sense to take the Open Hack Day concept abroad. The UK team was particularly receptive, and we found that there were some similar concepts being tested at places like the BBC. Their Backstage team has a very similar approach to openness with the developer community, and we immediately realized that Hack Day could evolve into something even bigger. We knew instantly that we were on to something good:
"One result of the first Open Hack Day was that our expectations of what a developer event could and should be were raised dramatically. Then we had the nice problem of figuring out how to do it again."
This is a great problem to have. As we extend Hack Day internationally, I think we'll always go back to some of those original inspirations, particularly Eric Raymond's seminal explanation of what it means to hack:
"Hacking might be characterized as 'an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it."
We will continue to apply that spirit in the way we run the event itself in hopes that it creates the right environment for people to explore the art of the hack.
I can't wait to see how it continues to evolve from here -- I'm looking forward to seeing what our new friends in London will come up with!
Chad Dickerson
Posted by Matt McAlister at 3:19 AM | Comments (2)
Our friends over at IBM developerWorks have posted a detailed tutorial on Yahoo! Pipes. If you haven't caught Pipes fever yet, be sure to check it out along with some of the earlier posts about Pipes here on our blog:
Have some fun with Pipes this weekend!
Chad Dickerson
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 11:11 AM | Comments (2)
Coldfusion has been around for more than ten years now, and, as a technology for quickly building dynamic web sites and web applications, it's more popular than ever. To help developers access Yahoo! Web Services using Coldfusion, we've now got a Coldfusion Developer Center on YDN. Wikipedia calls Adobe's Coldfusion an "application server and software development framework," but to the developers who use it, it's often the quickest way to get a dynamic web site up and running. First released in 1995, Coldfusion has evolved quite a bit over the years and now has books, user groups, and even open source clones. Thanks to Coldfusion pro Ray Camden for making this happen.
Jason Levitt
Posted by at 11:10 AM | Comments (38)
ZoneTag is a little prototype that was developed by Yahoo! Research Berkeley. A look under the hood shows that it's built on top of a couple of interesting APIs that we're opening up. Anything that ZoneTag can do, you could do as well.
Want to know the location of a cell tower? Update the location of a cell tower? Get a list of suggested tags for a location? Open your web service to any mobile ZoneTag user without having to do mobile programming? It's all possible! Have a look at the documentation.
Don't forget, WhereCampSF is happening this weekend. What better place to meet other geo-hackers and geo-enthusiasts, and play with ZoneTag location web services?
Posted by dantheurer at 3:26 PM | Comments (0)
Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy - Terms of Service - Copyright Policy - Job Openings