January 31, 2009

International University Hack Days are go!

We're right now here in Delhi, India, at IIT University to bring hack magic to the students of IIT. This sounds very corny but fact of the matter is that we've been greeted by a massive amount of huge signs announcing the university hack day sporting the little Hack-U wizard - so let's just roll with it:

For the last two days, we've introduced the students to hacking, Yahoo! web services, and the technologies used to build hacks. We covered BluePrint, BOSS, the YUI, YQL and Rasmus Lerdorf went through his veritable box of tricks how to retrieve, mix, and use the data in these using PHP.

My presentations covered the basics of hacking: I explained how every student can be an innovator as long as they believe in their idea and find the right people to make it happen together. My slides are available on SlideShare:

The second presentation covered the YUI and showed how easy it is to actually build good-looking working interfaces without having to deep-dive into the wonders of CSS and JavaScript. We wanted to make sure that people get the feeling that they can concentrate on the idea and effect of their hacks and not get stuck in wondering why things don't display the right way.

On the second day Saurabh Sahni introduced our open search product, BOSS:

All in all we had an overwhelming number of students sign up for the hack day and are very much looking forward to the hacks coming out of IIT Delhi.

Next on the agenda is IIT Bombay and the Open Hack Day in Bangalore, India. Then we head back to the US and bring hack to the University of Washington (Seattle), Georgia Tech, and the University of Michigan there. Check out the Hack U web site for details.

In Europe, we've already started with the Hack Challenge in Sunderland, England, and will go up to Dundee, Scotland next. There are some busy months ahead of us and we will keep you updated on the hacks and the happenings in the different universities here.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Posted at January 31, 2009 10:16 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Posted by: healthsprint.com at February 6, 2009 11:59 AM

Posted by: magic at August 16, 2009 4:22 PM