November 30, 2007

Memcached Hackathon at Yahoo: December 13-14th 2007

There are a lot of memcached hackers and power users in the Bay Area, so we're proud to be hosting an all night hackathon in a couple weeks.

Hack and code memcached. Active developers from the community will be joining us along with fellow Yahoo's for an all-night hackathon. We are working towards shipping new features and releasing the binary protocol. Drinks and food provided!

As the Hackathon Wiki says:

Pretty simple: it's a marathon coding session. The goal is to get something done. Come armed with a pet project of your own if you like, or just with some energy and a willingness to think hard and pound out code. It has a scheduled start time, and it ends when it ends.

Register on Upcoming.org: Memcached Hackathon @ Yahoo Campus. That'll help us figure out how much pizza to have on hand. :-)

Oh, and in case you're wondering, we do use memcached on a number of popular Yahoo! services. Drop by and you might get to meet some of the engineers behind them.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 8:05 AM | Comments (1)

November 29, 2007

Open Source Projects Welcome at MySQL 2008 Conference

Our friends at MySQL recently got in touch to let us know about the DotOrg Pavilion they'll have available at the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo on April 15rd-18th in Santa
Clara, California.

We are arranging a "DotOrg-Pavilion" where we would like to give Open Source Projects related to or based on the MySQL Server or other MySQL Products an opportunity to showcase their work.

MySQL AB will provide the booth space (including electrical power and Internet access) as well as free attendance to the conference and exhibitor hall for up to 4 people per project. In addition, we will provide one full, (shareable) conference pass per project, that permits access to the tutorials as well as all other sessions of the conference.

What you will need to bring/prepare your own computers/demo equipment as well as any banners, flyers, other marketing material (e.g. Demo-CDs, Merchandise)

If you would like to learn more about this, please contact me directly or the MySQL Community Relations team at community@mysql.com.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2007

Virgin America tunes up with YSlow

I get feedback daily on people using YSlow. The emails are all positive, even the ones that report bugs. The best emails describe how YSlow helped a company make their web pages load faster. It was fun to read this article on The Register today: Virgin America tunes up with YSlow. If anyone else has YSlow experiences they wish to share, please post them on the Exceptional Performance Yahoo! group or send them to YSlow feedback.

Steve Souders
Chief Performance Yahoo! and creator of YSlow

Posted at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2007

Yahoo! Is All Over Facebook

No acquisition rumours here, just Yahoo! APIs, and plenty of them. The ever-growing number of Facebook applications using our APIs is a testament to how easy it is to get our content on to other platforms.

One of the latest Yahoo! entries is Music Blogs, a slick Flash application that lets Facebook users search and play music from music blogs, post favorites to their profile, and share them with friends. Created by William White and Joseph Magnani of Yahoo!'s Media Innovation Group, the player has already received good press and has over 100 users on Facebook. Not bad for a week-old application.

The Thanksgiving holiday is a great time to sample some of those Yahoo!-based Facebook applications, some made by Yahoo! employees and some by 3rd party developers. Here's a, by no means complete, short list:

• del.icio.us - Creates a bridge between your del.icio.us and Facebook accounts, letting you display your recent bookmarks on your profile. You can also display recently saved bookmarks in the News Feed.
• My Flickr - Display your photos according to various criteria such as Recent Photos, Tags, Interesting, Date Range, Privacy Filter, Photosets, and sortings. Also displays your photos with different layouts.
• zuPort: Flickr - Automatically imports your Flickr photostream keeping your sets, collections, tags, and comments intact. Customize to pick how many photos to show, layout, and more.
• Upcoming.org - Shows you all the Facebook events you're going to, plus a list of the latest events in your city from Upcoming. Also updates your Facebook friends with all the public Upcoming events you're going to.
• Yahoo! Music Videos - Browse and share favorites in your profile, and send dedications to friends. Automatically spotlights videos that match artists found in your profile and your friends' profiles (check out our "making of" blog post on this one).
• Local Updates - Keeps track of where you've been, where you want to go, and where you're at. Uses Yahoo! Local.
• My Weather - Displays the weather forecast for your city using Yahoo! Weather.
• Yahoo! Finance - Add market data and dynamic charts from Yahoo! Finance to your profile
• Answers - Lets you show you and your contacts latest questions, from Yahoo! Answers, on your Facebook profile.
• Yahoo! Search - Get all the features of Yahoo! Search from your Facebook account.

Look for the Friend Folio application, winner of Bangalore Hack Day's "Most Viral" award, on Facebook soon.

Jason Levitt

Posted at 10:25 AM | Comments (2)

November 20, 2007

No Limits With RETS

It's one thing to be an open, unencumbered, standard, but it's another thing to become a widely adopted standard. For years, the Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS), an XML language for marking up real estate data, languished. It was never widely used and didn't fully serve the needs of B2B users. With the RETS 2.0 standard, however, large MLS (Multiple Listing Service) data providers are poised to adopt, and all kinds of technical real estate users are excited about its prospects. While RETS 1.x will still be used for listings transfers, the RETS 2.0 standard directly addresses the needs of B2B users - the brokers and MLS companies who need to distribute real estate data.

To sort out the state of RETS, and give a little insight into how developers can use the RETS data, I had the opportunity to speak at a session last week at the National Association of Realtors (NAR) conference with Chris McKeever, Strategic Architect for the NAR, and Matt Lavallee, Programming Lead at MLS Property Information Network. What I found out was that the RETS standard is quite comprehensive, with over 600 data points covering the minute details necessary for even the most demanding real estate transactions. However, the standard also defines data subsets that are much more reasonable to use with mashups and general web applications. Ever wonder if a house has a bank barn or loafing shed, is less than six blocks from the ocean, or has marlite wainscoting in a bathroom? This RETS XSD file (one of several) includes plenty of property interior description elements.

Here's a quick programming example I created using a very small subset of RETS data, in JSON format, plotted with our Yahoo! Ajax Maps API, and geocoded in real time. Download the complete sample code here.

Jason Levitt

Posted at 1:55 PM | Comments (3)

November 16, 2007

Stanford Hack Day: Simple Pleasures are the Best

The University Hack Day season concluded on November 9th, at Stanford. Here's your wrap-up, courtesy Rasmus Lerdorf, our man on the spot:

Simple ideas implemented well make for the finest hacks, and at Stanford we saw a couple of the best examples. Bring up Apache on an iPhone and use it to stream your music to any stereo with a PC attached. Or take thousands of Flickr photos and resize them to 1x1 thumbnails, and then check the color of each single remaining pixel and use it to build a mosaic based on a source image. Again, conceptually simple, but the visual effect is impressive when you build the mosaic with the larger versions of the images.

Here are your Stanford winners:

• First place: Loren Yu and Mike Fischer, for Flickr Fuse
• Second place: Joel Brandt, Jacob Leverich, and Marcello Basta-Forte, for Go2Pod
• Third place: Nathan Sakunkoo, Patty Sakunkoo, and Phakorn Peerapong, for Friend Cluster
• Honorable mention: Charis Charitis, for Music Searcher

Sorry we don't have any links for these, but as it turned out, all were machine-centric hacks that only ran on local servers.

Winners from each regional Hack Day will be invited to our next public Hack Day ... stay tuned to the University Hack Day page and hackday.org for further details.

Kent Brewster

Posted at 8:29 AM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2007

Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference

O'Reilly just announced Velocity, their first conference focused on web performance and operations. It's scheduled for June 23-24, 2008 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame. I'm proud to say that Jesse Robbins and I are co-chairing Velocity.

The idea for this conference came after a late night dinner in Seattle with several performance gurus including John Jenkins (Amazon), John Rauser (Farecast), and Nate Moch (Zillow). We had spent the night exchanging ops war stories and performance insights. I hated seeing the night come to an end and promised to find a venue for us and others to gather and share best practices. The idea of learning from other experts and sharing our lessons learned to help others avoid the pitfalls we had already discovered was exciting. JJ, Nate, and I, along with Jesse Robbins and Artur Bergman, met with Tim O'Reilly and Brady Forrest at OSCON and got the ball rolling.

If you're the person your company turns to to keep the web site running, you'll want to make this conference. More importantly, if you're someone who wants to learn from these industry leaders to find out how to make your site fast, scalable, and always available block your calendar for June 23-24. To help make sure we have the most relevant topics and speakers we've gathered an incredible program committee: Artur Bergman (O'Reilly Radar & Wikia), Cal Henderson (Flickr & author of Building Scalable Web Sites), Jon Jenkins (Amazon), and Eric Schurman (Live Search).

Velocity's Call for Participation is now open. We're looking for proposals in the areas of scalability, networking, Ajax performance, database performance, capacity planning, monitoring, and more. See the CFP for the full list. Proposals will be accepted until January 3, 2008.

Registration opens in March 2008. Until then, stay in touch using the official RSS feed. You can also join the Facebook group and Upcoming event. Please use velocity08 when tagging. I hope to see you in June.

Steve Souders
Chief Performance Yahoo!

Posted at 11:26 AM | Comments (3)

November 14, 2007

New YDN Blog: Hadoop & Distributed Computing

This is just a quick note to point out the newest addition to the family of YDN blogs: Hadoop and Distributed Computing at Yahoo!, a blog that'll focus on the Hadoop open source project and related distributed computing topics.

We're kicking off the blog with a video interview of Eric Baldeschwieler ("Eric14"), Yahoo's Director of Grid Computing. That means he manages the Hadoop Team at Yahoo.

In case you missed it, we recently announced a partnership with CMU that will help numerous students, professors, and researchers harness the power of Hadoop in their work.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

November 13, 2007

Video: MindTouch's Deki Wiki and Yahoo

A couple weeks ago, I sat down with Aaron Fulkerson and Steve Bjorg of MindTouch to talk about their Deki Wiki product and see how it integrates APIs from various companies, including Yahoo.

The 42 minute video is part interview and part product demo. They've done a great job of making it easy to plug all sorts of third party services into their Wiki product. They've also written about the video on their corporate blog too.

Thanks to Aaron and Steve for visiting Yahoo! We love seeing our web services put to new and interesting uses. Don't forget to check out all our other videos on the YDN Theater.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 12:34 PM | Comments (2)

Some Java With Our APIs

Today we offer up our new Java Developer Center, a helpful set of tutorials for developers who want to use the Java programming language with various Yahoo! Web Services. If you've been wondering how Java handles Flickr Authentication or BBAuth, come check out our code samples and articles. If you find that you have more questions, feel free to join the discussions in our ydn-java Yahoo! Group. Special thanks go out to Daniel Jones who did the heavy-lifting on the code samples and tutorials.

Posted at 11:35 AM | Comments (1)

November 6, 2007

YDN Theater: presenting Yahoo! technologies in action

Just over a year ago we posted our first video from YDN, the browser-based authentication screencast with Dan Theurer. Though we went totally low-fi on that first attempt, we realized immediately that talking about technology visually was very interesting.

We continued down the video path and interviewed developers like Joyce Park, Adam Rifkin, and Leah Culver; captured Tech Talks by several key Yahoo! thought leaders like Douglas Crockford, Ryan Kennedy, and Nate Koechley; shared presentations from guest speakers at Yahoo! like Grady Booch, Joe Hewitt and David Weinberger; and produced some entertaining Hack Day videos from the London Hack Day event, University Hack Day and our recent internal Hack Day.

Today we take the next step by launching YDN Theater.

There you'll find more of what we've been doing already plus new programs like Jeremy Zawodny's "Experts at Work" series including the first episode with Chief Performance Yahoo! Steve Souders this week and coverage from industry events like last month's Adobe MAX event in Chicago.

YDN Theater owner Ricky Montalvo is a professional videographer and digital filmmaker who will be cranking out new programs weekly. Since starting just over a month ago, Ricky has already raised our game dramatically both in terms of the quality of what we produce but also the number of interesting programs we have to offer. He not only makes developers look better (where possible) and tells a good visual story, but he also adds a nice touch of humor to what we do that makes our videos much more fun to watch now.

Of course, we offer YDN Theater via RSS, but you can also get your video fix from Yahoo! Developer Network by subscribing directly through iTunes.

Please let us know what you want to see us do with YDN Theater, what you like and don't like. We want it to be useful, primarily, but there are lots of ways to entertain you along the way, too.

Matt McAlister

Posted at 8:19 AM | Comments (1)

November 5, 2007

See you at Mashup Camp Dublin!

This upcoming weekend, I have the privilege of speaking at Mashup Camp Dublin, being held at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. As a beer geek, a mashup geek, and sometimes-literary geek (James Joyce's Dubliners is one of my favorite works of literature), I can't imagine a better place to be. I'm really looking forward to it. I'll be talking about some of the many great tools and services we offer for mashup developers via the Yahoo! Developer Network and might even be tempted to throw in some strained beer metaphors from my own home-brewing experiences ("The YUI libraries are the finishing hops of the web." Ok, maybe not.)

Other speakers at Mashup Camp Dublin include Woodson Martin from Salesforce.com and John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com. The real magic comes from the folks who attend and create their own sessions in the now time-honored unconference format, not to mention the mashup contest and the excitement of speed-geeking. David Berlind and Doug Gold (the organizers) know how to deliver an event.

If you're going to be in Dublin and want to get together for a pint, drop me a line (chadd -AT- yahoo-inc.com). Otherwise, I will see you at Mashup Camp!

Chad Dickerson

(Photo from Flickr user ctodriver used under Creative Commons license)

Posted at 11:45 AM | Comments (1)

November 2, 2007

Yahoo! University Hack Dundee Mark II - getting those students hacking

The European University Hack team went up to Scotland yesterday for a day (taking a turboprop plane from London no less) to start this year's Dundee University Hack.

The University of Dundee is taking the idea of our hack program very serious and made it part of the students' course work deliveries.This is why we don't go for the 24 hour hackathon we normally do across the pond but allow the students a week time to come up with a hack idea, get some feedback on it from the Yahoo! development team and deliver their hack in a month's time.

Yesterday we kicked off this year's program by explaining the idea and showing some of the technologies you can use to hack in the sense of the program.

We also introduced the students to some of the best practises we use and provided information about internationalization and localization using our own product R3 (which was already covered here previously).

You'll be hearing more about R3 here soon - for now you can check the presentations on hacking for university hack day and technologies for hack interfaces on slideshare.

Chris Heilmann

Posted at 9:01 AM | Comments (1)