Yahoo! Hack Day Recap

Last Friday was the first Yahoo! Hack Day hosted at our Sunnyvale Campus and open to anyone in the company. Previous Hack Days were either geographically limited (Bangalore, for example) or hosted primarily by a single business unit (such as "Search and Marketplace").

Because I was at the Podcast Academy (also hosted at Yahoo! last week) on Thursday, I didn't hack. Instead I got to be Chad's assistant, herding cats (I mean "hackers") into the presentation queue, assigning presentation slots, and so on.

You see, when roughly 100 hackers or teams are each presenting for 90 seconds, you're looking at 2.5 hours--assuming that nobody wastes time not being prepared.

In short, I had fun. We had a killer lineup of judges (Filo, Sue Decker, Stewart, Larry Tesler, Ian Rogers, etc.), some amazing hacks, lots of energy, humor, pizza, and beer. What's not to love?

I've posted my pictures on Flickr. If you browse the public photos tagged with hackday, you'll find many, many more. I think that Brian "BigMac" McGuiness took way more than everyone else combined. He's always showing off with that Canon 20D. :-)

For a moment I was sure that Mike Arrington was wearing a Google t-shirt (how funny of him, right?). But then I got closer and realized that he also has a GEvil shirt!

Heh.

About an hour and a half into the presentations, he asked me how many hacks there were. I'm not quite sure what the look on his face was when I told him there were about 100. He certainly seemed satisfied by that answer.

Other coverage:

• Dav Glass
• Chad Dickerson (our fearless organizer)
• Mike Arrington (Mr. TechCrunch)

Oh, and you've gotta love the stickers and schwag...

Posted by jzawodn at June 18, 2006 07:11 PM