Hack Week
Yahoo! Hack Week has been at Georgia Tech since 2008, and we’ve created plenty of interesting hacks, learned a lot about Yahoo’s technology, and eaten a lot of food. See Yahoo’s Hack Week website for more on the concept.
2010 Plans
If you missed out on the excitement in 2008 and 2009, there will be a Hack Week 2010, so be ready for more cool Yahoo technology, food, swag, and cool hacks than you can handle! If you have something you’d really like to see at Hack Week 2010, let us know!
Hack Week 2009
From Tuesday March 3 to Saturday March 7, 2009, GTACM and Yahoo hosted Hack U! (also known as Hack Week), a week packed with tech talks and delicious food that culminates in a 24-hour programming competition where the prompt is to simply “make something cool.”
Yahoo sent a number of big names, including Chris Heilmann (@codepo8), a “web evangelist” and Computing For Good guru; Douglas Crockford, the inventor of JSON; Paul Tarjan, the inventor of SearchMonkey (@ptarjan); Eric Wu, the creator of “Eric Conveys an Emotion” – look it up on Wikipedia (@emotioneric); Dustin Whittle, Y!OS superstar, and awesome recruiter Jamie Lockwood.
The presentations started out on Tuesday with an introduction to Hack Week and the competition rules; a few of last year’s hacks were demoed, including Syncr and the Campus Map Mashup. Wednesday featured presentations on Yahoo’s API and an introduction to their SearchMonkey and BOSS technologies by Paul. Thursday had Chris discussing accessibility and Computing for Good at lunch, and that night was all about the Yahoo Developer Network and the Yahoo Open Stack. Friday’s lunch let students meet Atlanta-area Yahoos and sign up on a Yahoo recruiting list. The hack competition lasted from Friday at 4:00 pm until Saturday at 4:00 pm, with the judging during the Javascript talk by Douglas Crockford and awards given promptly thereafter. Several participants had not slept for the entire 24+ hour period.
The first-place winner was Pick and Roll by Michael Xu and Alex Guan, who each received Yahoo wizard hats and a PlayStation 3. Their hack focused on tracking NBA teams and used a variety of APIs and technologies. Second place went to Series of Tubes, a small game used RSS feeds from twitter accounts to generate levels, and posts your result to twitter (by David Poore, David Hollis, Carlos Isales, and Elijah O’Rear). In third place was Emoticon, which most notably included a widget that allows you to tag parts of a video and search those tags.
There were a few category awards; Joshua Justice and Will Farrington won the Hack for Good award with their YQL.el, an emacs extension that allows users to use Yahoo’s YQL (a set of APIs that cover a huge amount of information) directly from emacs. This gives blind people a chance to use YQL, which is generally very graphics-intense. In the User Experience/Design category, caLLendar (by Gautam Arora, Kedar Toraskar, Kaustubh Sheth) was chosen for its clear workflow from setup to getting a reminder call. Lastly, for Y! Open, geoVacation was chosen as it was a fun use of the flickr API, YQL, and Yahoo Maps. For more information, including slides of the presentations given and links to each of the hacks, see Georgia Tech HackU is over… and the winners are and Georgia Tech University hack – talks over, let’s hack!
Overall Winners:
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Pick and Roll
Pick and Roll that helps visualize NBA teams as they travel, keeping track of all of their results, news sorted by date and the videos from NBA.com!
Team: Michael Xu and Alex Guan
Why we chose it: This encompassed many things that a great hack does: scraping, aggregation, and direct use of APIs. Using the map metaphor was nice for visualizing, and care was taken with overlapping icons. It was just an interesting perspective on this set of data.
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Series of Tubes
Series of Tubes is a timing-based puzzle-platformer game that uses RSS feeds from Twitter accounts to dynamically generate game levels.
Team: David Poore, David Hollis, Carlos Isales, and Elijah O’Rear
Why we chose it: It is obnoxiously viral and a novel take on a “twitter reader”.
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Emoticon
Emoticon is a game that is now scaled up with a embeddable widget for websites/blog, where you can now search within the video with keywords and tags. The result will provide the user with the instances within the video matching the query.
Team: Ashish, Manvesh, Chris
Why we chose it: Interesting for accessibility (learning disabilities). Nice rounded hack including a game, data collection, search, and embeds.
Best in Category
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Hack for Good: YQL.el
An emacs lisp interface to YQL which allows an emacs user to make YQL queries and filter the results from within emacs itself. Also comes with shortcuts for pre-designed YQL queries, such as yahoo searching, stock market updates, and getting a user’s twitter feed.
Team: Joshua Justice and Will Farrington
Why we chose it: Allowing you to use YQL from your emacs interface. Very nice for blind programmers wanting to integrate with YQL.
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User Experience / Design: caLLendar
Set appointments in Yahoo Zimbra Calendar using our UI application. These are then scanned and scheduled by our server application. Then reminder phone calls are made to the user with personalized content from Yahoo Weather and Traffic using our voip application.
Team: Gautam Arora, Kedar Toraskar, Kaustubh Sheth
Why we chose it: Excellent workflow from adding the calender event to getting the call live on your phone.
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Y! Open: geoVacation
Find a place, drop a marker, and get photos! The wasn’t my original idea, but I found it fast and fun to explore new places this way.
Team: Caleb Piercy
Why we chose it: Interesting use of the flickr API through YQL as well as Yahoo maps.
See the full list of hacks. Most of the hacks are available as open source projects on GitHub.
Hack Week 2008
This was the first occurrence of this event at Georgia Tech, with 20 hacks submitted, more than twice the nearest college to that point. This record was later broken by Carnegie Mellon. This year also featured PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf (@rasmus).
Participants and Results
- Roger Pincombe – OneBigCanvas
Collaborative drawing app in Java - Roger Pincombe – DialPrice
Price Checking service - Hemanth Pai – Accessibility Toolkit for Webpages
Javascript/CSS tools for improving accessibility - Christopher Sladky, Eric Goodwin, Patrick Eisenmann, Katie Collins – Trip Hacks
Geo location hack - Jeff Starker, Juan R. Patten -
See Them Live
YME Plugin - Deepak – YKids
Educational Maps hack for kids - Alex Guan – BusTracker
Mobile widget for tracking busses - Rohit Sinha, Akshay Goil, Sam Asghari, Evan Hurst – Absolute Everything
Meta-mashup of Yahoo, Google and Facebook - William Harris, Cameron Paul – Magic Player
Mouse-gesture driven video player - Enrique Santos, David Hollis, Andy Davis, James King -
Brainiac
MindMap hack - Travis Gockel, Jon Go – Mobile Quiz
Quiz-style study app - Jeffrey Bernard, Trevor Stone, Tuan Dang, Abs Jain -
Flixr
Qix-like game with Flickr images - Trevor Stone, Jeffery Bernard, Tuan Dang, Abs Jain – HandyMap
Map manipulation with LEDs on fingers of gloves picked up by Wii remote - Stan Komsky, John Oleynik, Shantanu Talapatra, Kenter Wu -
AutoPicSaver
Facebook app - Nick Padgett – Skedu
School locator maps mashup - Praful Rana, Sid Parmar, Jon Lee, Richard Grimm -
Buzzwords
Event listing with voting - Mike Pulaski -
Syncr
Synch directories with Flickr - David Foster – NetDraw
Javascript-based drawing program - Jeff Wei – ChatBlog
Automatically blog IM conversations - Michael Tanner -
Ajax JSON Edit - Andrew Guyton, Hillary Lipko -
GT Campus Information Mashup
The winners were DialPrice, Skedu and Trip Hacks.
Yahoo’s photos of the event are on Flickr.
