Yahoo Hack Day

2006 September 29-30 at Yahoo's campus in Sunnyvale,CA

Quick Highlights

So I attended Yahoo's Hack Day this past weekend, which is like a much larger, well funded BARcamp. It ROCKED! I have to stop and say thanks so much to the people that organized it and to Yahoo, which not only let the thing happen but didn't overrun it with recruiters, lawyers or PR hounds. It was extremely cool and they really tapped the spirit of the geek/coder/hacker/engineer. If anyone thought that Google was the only big successfull company out there that could still stay true to the hacker ethic, Yahoo showed them otherwise. It was inspirational, energizing and educational. And a whole lot of fun.

David Filo, founder of Yahoo, showed up and spent a lot of time talking with individual hackers (myself included) and spent time talking about technology as much as the event and Yahoo. To have a guy worth a couple billion and running a company worth $34 billion take the time to talk about API's and programming with the unwashed (literally, no showers available to the campers) masses was cool.

Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP programming language, gave a great talk on building scalable, high-performance rich web applications and PHP5's XML functions. In the question and answer time he answered the age old question of Mysql persistent connections and multi-threading support (he must get sick of answering those questions). He also said that working at Yahoo has been cool and that this Hack Day event is part of a shift in Yahoo. I mentioned in my flickr post that I think PHP is very reflective of his personality and I like both. Very cool guy. He, his wife, and his kid were there the whole weekend helping out and talking to people.

Beck, the rock band, threw a concert on Yahoo's lawn, did a cool video for the hackers and hung out with people the next morning. Their show was great! Beck will be in Wired magazine talking about technology and music issues at asome point. Very cool!

Tech Talks covering lots of topics, were given the first half of day 1. The flickr, YUI, Yahoo mail, and messenger developers were there. There was so much good data that I can't even begin to sum it up quickly. I met Iain Lamb who is UI hacker, all around brilliant guy and one of the developers of Odd Post (Yahoo's new mail client).. We had a good discussion about a pet idea of mine; the next generation of programming languages, that is more reflective of the physical world and the actual computing environment.

Lots of beer, pizza, music, camping, hackingand fun! Here are a few photos:

Hacker Fuel


Free as in Beer


Singing bears


Tents on the lawn


Hacking A Purse


Hackers in Wagons