WebProNews » Hack Day

Yahoo Hacks New Shopping, Travel Products

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:05:52 +0000

The last Internal Hack Day at Yahoo, 24 hours of coding fun fueled by lots of pizza, has yielded a couple of new services that have been rolled out to their Travel and Shopping products.

Yahoo Hacks New Shopping, Travel Products

Though the intent of the Hack Day focuses on creating nifty applications while taking an enjoyable break from the daily grind, the efforts sometimes yield something that’s so good, they have to share it with everybody.

Bradley Horowitz, VP, Advanced Development at Yahoo, blogged on Yodel Anecdotal about a couple of applications that have made the grade. These products put a new twist on the existing services they complement.

For shoppers, the Shop by Color hack offers a palette of 56 hues for refining product searches. Click on a color, and it returns results for mint green or black or whatever the shopper chooses.

Clothing shoppers will likely be the group that finds Shop by Color most useful, but Horowitz wrote that beauty, home & garden, and electronics categories also benefit from this new hue of search.

The MapMixer for Yahoo Travel combines maps uploaded by users with Yahoo Maps of an area, and gives those uploaded maps Yahoo’s functionality. One example shows a map of USC’s main campus overlaid on the much more generic map of the area.

These maps can be embedded in sites and blogs for sharing with others. It’s an amazing little use of technology that should make MapMixer a very popular and useful tool.

Yahoo Wraps Up Hack Day

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 17:03:11 +0000

Hackers spent 24 hours on September 29-30 with various Yahoo engineers and other coders for fellowship and rapid application development using Yahoo’s myriad APIs and technology to build demos for fun.

After building their Hack Day demos, presenters had 90 seconds to show them off to the other attendees (no easy feat) before ceding the stage to the next demo.

When it came to declaring one demo ‘the best of the best’, the judging panel including Yahoo co-founder David Filo and TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington among others liked Blogging In Motion best.

Arrington’s blog carried details about the winning demo, built by a team of three women who topped 53 other projects created at the event:

The winning project, called Blogging In Motion, combined a camera, a handbag, a pedometer and the Flickr API to create a device that takes a picture after every few steps and then automatically blogs those pictures. The device was created by Diana Eng, Emily Albinski and Audrey Roy.

Before the event, the Hack Day organizers had promised their entertainment would be something different than people singing along with a DJ in the wee hours of the night.

They brought on Beck with a full band to jam for the hacking crowd.

Four discussion tracks occupied attendees for the opening hours of Hack Day.

A number of Yahoos gave presentations on an assortment of technologies.

One notable example was Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, discussing PHP 5 and its use for crafting the backend of web applications.

The Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag added a pop-culture coda to the Hack Day proceedings.

Overworked intern Beth Gottfried recognized one of the ladies who took top marks with the Blogging Into Motion demo:

I’m looking at the TechCrunch post about the winning team and the Asian girl looked super familar! Turns out she’s a Project Runway season 2 reject.

She was the annoying Asian young nerdy designer that got really drunk on one episode and turned red.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Yahoo To Celebrate Hack Day

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 14:44:02 +0000

Attendees of the first public Hack Day at Yahoo can learn a variety of developer tricks including some on Search.

Mark those calendars for Yahoo’s Hack Day event, taking place September 29th – 30th. Yahoo’s Rasmus Lerdorf posted about the festivities at the Yahoo Search Blog:

The first day, Friday, is a workshop-style Developer Day where you’ll meet a number of Yahoo! engineers and get hands-on information and training. The YUI guys will be there in full force showing off their latest Javascript magic. Douglas Crockford will teach you more about Javascript in an hour than you thought was possible, I’ll do my PHP thing, and you will hear from the Flickr, Del.icio.us, Mail, Messenger, Maps, and of course, Search folks.

Once the workshop wraps up, the joyous hacking commences:

What better way to create a hack involving Flickr than to work with one of the Flickr engineers? Or if you have trouble getting a certain neat CSS hack to work, grab Matt. PHP not cooperating? I can probably figure it out. There will be a critical mass of resources to solve just about any web hack problem.

Lerdorf is being modest about his PHP skills. He created PHP and worked on later versions of the popular web scripting language.

Chad Dickerson, who runs the Yahoo Developer Network, called this forthcoming Hack Day, “A big free festival of hacking, camping (the real tent kind), music, and good times.” He listed some other details about Hack Day on the event’s Upcoming page:

At this point we ask that you simply sign up and express your interest. Based on response, we’ll figure out a way to be inclusive as possible (modulo space and logistical constraints.) We do ask that you sign up (versus just crashing the party) so that we can plan accurately, print out your name badges, etc. Hackers/builders will get priority — as they should!

Entertainment has been planned, and Hack Day will have a number of guest speakers present. Most notably, TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington will preside over the event. TechCrunch’s popularity will make him a magnet for attention along with all the other hacking fun during Hack Day.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.