eTech 2007: Session: Hacking Yahoo
Chad Dickerson on Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!.
This was a presentation on Yahoo’s Hack Day event.
Starts by showing off Yahoo’s developer network and defining what is a hacker.
Key principles of the HackDay @yahoo:
- Build something in 24 hours
- Present it to everyone at the end of the day
- No prior review of projects
- Thats it
Result: Hundreds os prototypes build.
Shows internal E-Mail from Rob McCool on Yahoo’s hack day and how excited the whole company was about the event.
Why we wanted to do Open Hack Day: we wanted to do something big.
Shows Hackday cycle of innovation and developers helping developers, an highly collaborative environment.
Invited Beck, the hacker musician, to do a concert on the event.
Explains the invitation process, how open it was, people were coming from all over the world, including people from the competition, which was totally OK. Open “request for invite”. Asked only ONE question before acceptance: Are you going to build something ?
Something special happened at Yahoo many press writers said.