Welcome to the Open Hack 2009

a Yahoo! Hack Day in India

 

Post Hack Day Page | Agenda | Checklist | Chat | FAQ

Hack-a-Valentine | Join-a-Team

 

 

 

 

Official Communciations

More Open Hack Days

Yahoo! is the Hack Partner for Great Indian Developer Summit the week of April 21st and will have a Developer Lounge at the event. There is a plan to have a HackLite Demo Day at the event. Spread the word! Looking for cool & unique hacks from the hacker community. Also you'll be able to interact with the Yahoo! developers for your queries.

 

Also Open Hack Day London has been announced. It's May 9th-10th. If any of you from India Hackers are thinking of being there let me know. I am going to be there. Hope to see some of you as well.

 

MetaMix

(Mar 25th 2009)

 

Hacks Going Live

So you thought that we just fell of the end of the earth after the Open Hack Day was over? Wrong! Certainly we have been feeling the post-hack-day blues like many of you but wanted to share some good news with you.

 

Just heard of the first hack going "live". The "Slideshare on Mobile" winning hack was just made live by the Slideshare team. Congrats to Slideshare for being persistent in taking their hack concept out to their customer. More details on this can be found on here & their slides. Try it out! (Also thanks to the Y! Mobile team in helping the hackers take their hack live.)

Also on TechCrunch!

 

Are you interested in taking your hack live?

Wanted to also communicate to other hackers who have pinged me earlier and those who are interested in taking their hacks live. We have gone through several hacks that we believe could be readied very quickly and made live by the hackers. What we would like to know from you is which hack you would like to take public and what support would you need from us to enable it. Are you facing any constraints in this process? Let us know and we'll try to help you as much as we can or point you in the right direction.

 

MetaMix

(Mar 19th 2009)

 

Some Recaps!

one more recap!

http://hhimanshu.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/yahoo-india-open-hack-day09/

Thanks

+ Harit Himanshu

 

Thank you for your valuable participation & feedback

I have received some very positive emails, tweets & blogs from many of you and I really appreciate the time you took to come and engage with us by sharing your creativity. Also the energy in the room even after 24hours of hacking was just amazing. It was great to see so many teams being formed among hackers who maybe did not even know each other before and coming up with all the cool hacks demo'd. Even if you did not demo your hack we hope you will be working to finish it and maybe showcase it live at a later date.

 

We do hope you found some value in the open platforms that we asked you to play with and yes while it may not "boil the eggs, make the tea and toast your bread every morning" we would like to hear feedback from you on how our platforms could help you in building valuable applications (out of your hacks) for you. More details to come shortly but in the meantime if you are interested in adding your name you can add it on the PostHackDay page.

 

Thanks again!

 

Turning off the annoying pbwiki notifications

I will turn off the pbwiki annoying notifications @ 1pm today (I'll wait for this one to go out first :-). Those who would like to keep updated on this as we will continue to work this site for some time with our post engagement can sign-up for the RSS feeds. For major updates I may still opt to send you all a direct email (only if absolutely necessary).

 

MetaMix

(Feb 17th 2009)

 

Some Recaps!

I'll post a few recaps from the hackers who were there. Thanks for all your inputs.

• http://ujjwalgrover.blogspot.com/2009/02/24-magic-hours-to-search-spin.html
• http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/02/openhack_bangalore.html
• http://ycorpblog.com/2009/02/16/bollywood-dancing-tech-info-and-hacks/

 

Post Hack Day - Hackangover?

Now that the Hack Day is over do we all go back to our usual routine?

 

Well that's what we have done in the past but this time around we'd like to continue the engagement a bit longer. We have a small group of people who will be reaching out to the hackers who participated and help those who are interested in refining their hacks further and taking them live!

 

If you are one of those hackers who is interested in taking their hack out live please standby for some details on this post-hack-day activities.

 

Some of you have also asked for feedback on your hacks (as in concept and potential). We will go through and reach out with any feedback we can provide that you find valuable. 

 

MetaMix

 

Hack Day Winners

Here are the 9 winning hacks (& categories) listed in no ranking order (they were all top notch):

• Best Search Inside - Y! Grep - (by pi: Ravi Bhushan Kumar & Ravi S. Math)
• Best Gone in 90 seconds - BOSS in 90 seconds (by The Flex Ninjas: Raghunath Rao Thricovil & Harish Sivaramakrishnan)
• Best Social Travel Helpdesk - Travel Assist (by Beanbag-Hackers: Nidhi Chaudhary & Anurag Jain)
• Best Keynote from a Traffic Jam - Slideshare for Mobile (& openMail by scriptease: Kapil Mohan, Sri Prasanna, Mani Kumar & Ciju Cherian)
• Best Crossing the Language Chasm - Translate This (by kroniks: sourabh behra)
• Best Confidential Messages - Redact Mail (by : BabuSrithar)
• Best Socially Mobile - Kiva Mobile (by SocialSync.org: Akshay Surve)
• Best Navigation Bangalore Traffic - MyBus (by Parageeks: Pradeep BV, Akash Mahajan, Aashish Solanki & Rohit Talukdar)
• Best Built from Scratch - Search Engine with Hybrid (Human & Artificial) Intelligence (by API (Advancing Predictive Intelligence): Antano Solar John & Niranjan Prithviraj)

 

Hack Day Stats

We had a blast! Some simple stats from the data in hack.trackr (more to come later).

• 66 Hacks submitted (unique, also a handful did not demo :-( )
• by 125 hackers (unique)
• 9 winning hacks by 19 hackers
• 26 hacks used BOSS (2 winners)
• 9 hacks used Blueprint (3 winners)
• 9 hacks used FireEagle (2 winners)
• 8 hacks used OpenMail (3 winners)
• 4 hacks used YAP
• 27 hacks used YQL (4 winners)
• 18 hacks used YUI (really only 18? & 1 winner)
• #hackdayindia on twitter reached #4 on trending (the first 3 were V-Day, Dollhouse & Valentine)
• 1020 tweets #hackdayindia since 8am on Sat morning!!!
• 202 photos on Flickr with hackdayindia tag taken after Feb 13th

 

MetaMix

(Feb 16th 2009)

 

Hack Demo Day Flow - PLEASE READ

To edit your hack entry go to this url http://developer.yahoo.com/openhack/show/2009/feb/openhackindia

 

OK so now that you are close to getting your hack finished. What not yet!!! Don’t worry man you still have time and the night jitters are the most fun!

So lets go through the flow of events from now on. What is it that you need to keep a check on?

12am Midnight Sat – Hack.Trackr Entry

If you haven’t already entered your hack in the Hack.Trackr I would strongly recommend you to add your entry, even if it is not well defined or you aren’t ready to share all the details. Put something cryptic if you will but do submit your entries. It will help us plan for tomorrows demo sessions. Remember to login to yahoo! Before adding your hack @ http://developer.yahoo.com/openhack/register/

7am-9am Breakfast

Food is extremely important on Demo Day. We don’t want you to pass out of fatigue or starvation before or on the stage. Take care of yourselves.

12pm Sun – Last hour call

This is the call reminding you that 1 hour remains for hacking as the clock is ticking down. Get ready for the demos.

By 12pm Sun - Hack Submission in the Hack.Trackr

Ask yourself “Have we submitted our hack entry yet? Oh No! Fret not just go ahead and add your hack entry ASAP. Even if your hack is not finished just submit whatever details you can, you will be able to edit it later. We will use this to plan tomorrow’s demo schedule so the earlier you add your shell entry the better. Remember to login to yahoo! Before adding your hack @ http://developer.yahoo.com/openhack/register/

By 12pm your hack entry should be complete with as much detail you can provide in the description field, the platforms used, your commercialization plan (if any), your team members and most importantly your Hack URL. It would be ideal if your hack is hosted on an internet URL where we can point to for your bragging rights.

By 12pm Sun - Hack Demo Planning

Begin to define your demo strategy NOW. Don’t wait for later. Demo your hack first and talk later about how you made it. Don’t even think of putting up a powerpoint slide, a flash demo or something. We want to see your working hack as much as possible live. You'll have a limited time – 90 seconds – to present. Here's what you need to SHOW in that time:

 

• The problem your hack solves.
• That it actually does solve the problem, right then and there.
• If there's time, how your hack works.

One of the most common Fatal Errors we see at Hack Day presentations is that our hackers, having spent the last 24+ hours getting their hack to work, want to cover Item Three first. (They've suffered for their art ... now it's our turn).

Please, whatever you do, don't do this. Say the problem, show the solution, and then talk about how you solved it, if there's still time. Remember the Judges already have details on your hack you entered in your submission on the Hack.Trackr.

12pm – 2pm Sun – Demo Setup - Test your Hack on the projection screen

This is time for you to test that your hack actually works on the projection screen as you expected.

 

• Make sure you have a laptop charged up for the demo
• Set your laptop to 1024x768 screen size @ 60Hz refresh rate (this works with most projectors)
• Practice your demo script on the demo laptop & projectors and make sure your demo takes no longer than 90 seconds (remember you could take longer with the real deal)
• If you need some “special” arrangement to demo please let us know ASAP by email.

1pm Sun – Hacking Ends

All hacking ends at 1pm. Pat yourself in the back, pat your friends back, you guys have done it! The challenge is over now its time to take a break, go get some quick Lunch and get ready for the demo.

2pm Sun – Hack Demos Begin

We will begin the hack demos going down the hack entries submitted in the order of the Hack #s on the list. If necessary we can switch with another team but please let us know before so that we can give you the right number. Please be ready near the stage with your demo laptops. Your hack # will be called out and you will need to quickly get setup after the previous demo.

Get in and Get out Fast is the Mantra.

5pm – Hack Demos end

After the demos are over the Judges will go into an evaluation discussion, while you all have the remaining beer (no punches required now).

6pm Sun – Award Ceremony & Closing

The winners will be announced and we will thank you all for making this an event to remember.

Thanks

MetaMix

 

 

IRC Channel change update for Hack Day

The Chat page is updated so nothing to do there. For others who are connecting via clients the new IRC channel is irc://irc.freenode.net/hackday.

 

Registration Desk will be Open for late comers! Don't worry!

MetaMix

(Feb 14th 2009)

 

Registration Flow on Sat 14th

Tomorrow Registration begins @ 8am. There are about 300+ people coming so you may want to come early rather than late so that you don’t miss out when the Talks begin at 9am. Given the tight security.

 

For the registration you may bring a copy of the email confirmation invite that you received from Anil (not necessary but good to have). We will simply need to match your email used for registration and a photo id.

 

Attached is the copy of the T&C for your reference. You will get a hard copy at the registration desk to sign.

 

Tech Talks will begin at 9am sharp. There are 3 parallel tracks so you can chose sessions in either of those tracks. Most talks are 45min presentations with 10-15 min Q&A and room change for hackers.

 

Filo will kick-off the Hack Day at 1:15pm at the Trinity Hall.

 

Thanks

See you there at the venue.

MetaMix

Polls Redone

I was having an error with the vizu poll and finally got it to work. So I recreated the "What award would you covet?" and published it in the sidebar. If you had taken the previous one on sodahead can you please answer again on this one? Appreciate it and sorry for the multiple edit notifications on this.

 

MetaMix

 

T-1 Days - a Glance at What's Ahead

Hello Hackers,

I’ve seen many of you active on the Hackers Lounge forming teams, asking questions, answering our Polls (Thank You), some chatting, signing-up for Hack-a-Valentine, and hopefully consuming the information we have been posting to help you make the most of the Open Hack Day.

This is now T-1 day to the event and I wanted to communicate to you a few things that would help you through the hacking.

1. First I wanted to thank you for your responses to the polls which have been very helpful in tuning the hack day. We are very excited to have you all be part of this effort.
2. Yesterday we tried to have a Pre-Hack Day Chat with Chris Heilmann, Sophie Major and our speakers and volunteers. Unfortunately maybe many of you did not either see the post or were tied up. We are trying one more time today to help you with any pre-hack day queries, jitters you may have. Take advantage of this. It’s from 1pm-2pm today (Lunch time Chat). Hope to see many of you @ Hacker Chat.
3. Many of you have already been forming teams either on the site or off-site. It’s great to see this energy. To further help you in both forming your teams officially and maybe beginning to create the shell of your hacks we are opening up the Hack.Trackr tool today to you all. Since your hacks will not be fully fleshed out yet or still early in the inception you could put in a placeholder for your hack & team and as it gets more refined you can update your hack entries with the details. This tool will also allow us to help you on your hacks through the 24 hour hack day. Here are the 2 steps you need to do follow to properly enter your hack:
   1. login to yahoo.com with your yahoo account so you can add/update your hack entries (or click this link)
   2. Enter as much details as you can or want on the Hack.Trackr (http://developer.yahoo.com/openhack/register)
4. For some of our APIs you might need to have a webserver or application server hosted on the internet. Some APIs require you to be able to have access to the root of a domain url and maybe PHP5 (for mobile apps). If you don’t already have such a server then we recommend that you sign-up for one for a short time. There are many application hosting service providers you can shop for and we’ll post a link to a few some of us have used in the past as leads.
5. Registrations tomorrow begin @ 8am with snacks & beverages. Please bring a photo ID and the email you used to register. You will be given a printed copy of our terms & conditions & event rules and will be asked to sign a T&C attached here as well for your reference.
6. Tech Talks will start promptly at 9am. There are 3 rooms with parallel tracks. We have setup the Talk agenda (with a few repeat talks) so that most of you will at least be able to attend 3 of the sessions of your interest. In case you do miss out on some then fret not. We have “Birds of Feather” table sessions through the afternoon for the hackers where our experts will drive the discussions around any queries you might have. We will also post our slides out for you to consume post the talks. The Tech Talks will dive deep very quickly and many will go through creating a sample hack.
7. 24 hour hacking will kick off at 1pm Sat. Only hacks that have been entered in the Hack.Trackr will be allowed to demo on Sunday 2pm. I will post details on the Demo Flows later.

 

I started out thinking I’ll list about 2-3 points but it became seven. I had read somewhere that an optimal number of list of information for audience is 7. So I’ll stop for now and have you digest this and send us queries on the wiki lounge.

MetaMix

 

Dismal attendance at Pre-Hack Day Chats on 12th. Trying again today @ Fri 1pm-2pm

Yesterday there weren't many people to chat with us. Probably the word did not go out. But hackers we were there to help you get the most out of this event. We will try this again today Friday same time 1pm-2pm. Login at the Hacker Chat page. I'll also send out an email on this to people.

 

MetaMix

(Feb 13th 2009)

 

Pre-Hack Day Chats w/ Yahoo! Daily 1pm-2pm

Hackers, in preparation for the hack day on 14th we thought it would be useful to get on the Chat Room with you. We will have Christian Heilmann, Sophie Major, MetaMix (myself) and other Yahoo!s on the chat channel on Thursday 1pm-2pm IST for any of your queries Live! Please join us tomorrow (Thur 12th) on the IRC Chat.

 

University Hack Days in India

Last 2 weeks we went out and initiated our 1st International University Hack Days aka HackU for the students at IIT-Delhi and IIT-Bombay. Check out the cool hacks (descriptions only for most of them) from IITD & IITB.

 

MetaMix

(Feb 11th 2009)

 

Hackxamples

I will update this entry with links to examples of hacks that I find on the net (I am not promoting any hacks or products here).

• Building with BOSS & one e.g.
• Updating your location data with a 2 min Fire Eagle hack
• Quick Y! Blueprint Tutorial & You can try and browse the Y! Go Widgets in your browser.
• Y! Mail Developer Platform Guide. See the Xoopit App in Yahoo! Mail.
• YAP & OpenSocial deck at the Brazil Hack Day. The presentation is more pictures but the comments below by Erik might be useful to go through.
• more to come...

 

Flashback - Open Hack 2007!

Was reading about what happened in Oct'07 Open Hack Day Bangalore. This time we expect the energy to be more intense and will have new categories of winning hacks. If you are still trying to figure out what to hack-up then look at what happened at other Hack Days - Sunnyvale, Brazil, Taiwan - might give you some ideas to pursue.

 

MetaMix

(Feb 9th 2009)

 

Hack-a-Valentine!

On Feb 14th we (Yahoo!s) are serenading all the confirmed hackers with our Open Hack Day entertainment planned on Saturday evening. We thought it would be fun to have you invite your significant other also for this entertaining session + dinner from 7pm-9pm. They can get a chance to see you in "HAcktion" and peek at what you are creating!

 

To manage the logistics we need to know who you are inviting so that we can let the event security managers be ready to show them in. Please sign-up here.

 

MetaMix

(Feb 7th 2009)

 

Join / Create a Team

I added a new page Join a Hack Team for people to begin grouping up if they want to. You could be hacking individually or as a team and you could be creating more than one hack or be part of many teams.

 

Hack Day Polls

I have been testing around several different free polling solutions and really no one poll service is the same as another. Finally I found one that at least does what I ask. Though I like the look of sodahead.com my pick for this site is vizu.com. Tried several others like polldaddy.com, pollauthority.com, twiigs.com, surveymonkey.com... Anyway settled on this one and I'll setup a few polls for your inputs. The reason for these polls is to get a grip on your sentiments on various issues to help us make this hack day very relevant to you all.

 

Please do send in your votes as you see a new poll coming up maybe every other day.

 

Thanks

MetaMix

(Feb 5th 2009)

 

Email Notifications (Updated)

We just realized that the pbwiki was sending out hourly notifications to all. Not intentional and we have turned it off in the settings page. For those who are interested to receive updates can sign up I guess for the RSS link.

 

[Update: Just realized that the RSS feed is equally noise. There seems to be no control in limiting what edits go on the RSS feed and which ones don't. What's your take, should I disable RSS? it's only noisy now because we are still setting up a few pages].

 

Sorry for the noise:

MetaMix

(Feb 5th 2009)

 

Fellow Hackers 

Thank you all for a overwhelming response to the Open Hack Day registrations. We received 700 registrations and several more over email beyond that limit. Regretfully due to limitations of the venue capacity and logistics we had to do a quick screening and sent out final invites to 350 registrants. Good news is that all of you (on this wiki's list of users) are those 350. And we are really looking forward to interacting with you and your hacks at OHD.

 

This wiki is an informal channel for us to reach out to all the hackers and send you critical information such as agenda updates, technology updates, FAQ, Hacker Checklist... We will be posting all our communications here as well. Please use this site as your collaboration tool with us and with the other fellow hackers.

 

Thanks

MetaMix

(Feb 4th 2009) 

 

Recent News

• Hack Day Agenda posted New
• Pre-Hack Day Checklist for Hackers Coming Soon
• Hackers Chat is live New

 

BOSS Lightning Talk Videos (http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/)

If you haven’t had a chance to take a look, check out the newest video releases on the YDN Theater — conversations with Ted Drake and Vik Singh about their work with BOSS. Stay tuned for upcoming releases featuring colleagues from the YAP team.

http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2009/02/ydn_lightning_talks_vik_singh_boss.html

http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2009/01/ydn_lightning_talks_ted_drake.html

 

Additional BOSS Screencast:

http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2008/07/boss_a_ydn_screencast.html

BOSS for IIT-HackU event

 

Blueprint 1.0 Walk-through (http://developer.yahoo.com/mobile/)

Here's a quick Blueprint widget development tutorial that was presented by Markus Spiering at one of the Mobile Monday meetings in Silicon Valley. It's a great resource

 

YAP Resources (http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/)

YAP webcast can be found on http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2008/10/yahoo_application_platform.html

 

Yahoo! (Open) Mail Developer Platform

Recently uploaded a documentation on the YDMP to help hackers build a Mail Applications Hack.

 

YQL Webcast (http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/)

http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2008/10/yahoo_query_language.html

 

Fire Eagle website (http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/)

Online API documentation at: http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/developer/documentation/

An initial presentation from the launch days: http://www.slideshare.net/rabble/liberating-location-fire-eagle-ecomm-2008

Also a more recent presentation for Hack event: http://www.slideshare.net/arnab.nandi/fire-eagle-presentation-for-iit-delhi-hack-u-event

 

 

 

Additional Links & Resources

The blog of course: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog

Chris Heilmann presentations on the subjects: http://slideshare.net/cheilmann & blog http://wait-till-i.com

The YUI theater: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/

The YDN theater: http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/