Simon Willison has joined Yahoo! This is exciting.

For those who don’t know Willison, it’s sufficient to say that every web developer in this world should be forced to read Willison’s blog to become better designers. To jog your memory even more, he is one of the guys who created Django.

Anush “interviews” me.

P.S. No, I did not select that photo.

We had a “Y! Bangalore Showcase 2005″ on Friday, August 5th, 2005.

It was an internal showcase where all the teams and groups have the chance to showcase their projects and interact and brainstorm ideas on how they can collaborate and use each others’ expertise.

For more than a week, our office had no walls, just posters everywhere, including the rest rooms. And there were some real corny but cool posters, like the DBA guys’ poster that said “Database Backend is the backbone and we are the lifeline” and the Multimedia Search team’s poster that said “If it’s not in our index, it does not exist.”

There were lots of contests and games going on, from quizzes to mazes of names where you had to pick out names of yahoos, to guess-the-ringtone contests. It was a whole fair going on. I spent most of the morning, explaining Buzz to a lot of people. I was finally able to go around and visit the other teams in the afternoon, and there were some real eyebrow-raising projects being showcased. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about the cool stuff or the teams (but it’s fun being in the midst of it all, and getting to tell you about it much later when the cool stuff is thrown out to public), so I’ll just let some of the photos show off the enthu that we had that day.

	Ajay boogieing
	Eat-the-chocolate-and-tag-your-partner-who-runs-next game during lunch
	Guess-the-Ringtone Game
	Philip Tellis giving Karma
	Our CEO and guest wearing the Data Drome headband and having fun with the group.
	Premshree and Gopal
	Our group, the Data Applications Group, won the grand prize! We’ll be soon going for a team outing to blow the dough.
	The Six Thinking Hats (Yeah, one’s missing)
	Our Group celebrates.
	The Yahoos
	The Yahoo! Employee Foundation India poster. I had taken that photo during our visit to Parikrma.
	“Employee Benefits” poster
	You Yahoo because we do.

Anush talks about an interview with Prabhakar Raghavan.

Note that Prabhakar heads the Yahoo! Research efforts and is not the CTO.

There’s an article in the Times of India today on the presence of the Y, A and G companies in Bangalore:

(Click on the image to view it in full size)

It’s nice to see the media showing that cool stuff does get done in Bangalore. As you can see, the Y! Bangalore R&D team is 400 strong now… that’s a population explosion considering we were only 80-90 when I started out. Aah, the good old days…

One thing to notice is that they have words from the CEO of Amazon Bangalore and from the CTO of Yahoo! Bangalore, but no one from Google Bangalore! Relatedly, I hear about people joining Yahoo! and about people joining Amazon – how come I never hear about people joining Google in Bangalore? Is something happening in Google at Bangalore at all?

Well, if you thought the ycantpark photo pool was funny, this one’s even funnier:

(from an IM conversation)

(12:12:20) Kapil: yesterday we were discussing about the population explosion at y! Bangalore. here is the proof: I cant get a ip for my pbook coz all the ips are exhausted. so if I want to connect my pbook from tomorrow then I need to come early in the morning

Siddharth Uppal asked about a REST API for Yahoo! 360° and it seems that it is in the works.

On July 1st of 2004 i.e. last year, I turned from an intern to a full-time employee at Yahoo!.

Wait a minute, one whole year is already over! OMG!

Hmm.

A while ago, there was an internal discussion on why people have worked at Y! for years and years and still stick around. So, I started to think of my reasons on why I like it here…

The single biggest motivating factor for me is the smart people here. I remember reading somewhere that “Great programming is not about great pieces of code. It’s about being surrounded by smart people”. It aptly describes my experience at Y!. The amazing part is that most people I’ve met here don’t see the difference between work and fun. They just have a ball at what they do. And I always learn something interesting everyday from them.

The second reason is that there’s something exciting going on here every single day. For example, the My Web 2.0 Social Search that was announced just a few days ago, and the Maps API that was released yesterday…

There’s excitement in my work too – there are too many projects coming up at work that I have less and less time to spend on my other activities which is a bit disappointing but I guess you can’t have it all

Coming back to Buzz, for which I’ve been the sole engineer for over a year, did you know it has a related billboard at Times Square in New York City right now?

( Note: Erik has more photos )

That’s right, Buzz is what generated that data for that billboard

Contrary to the easy-going lifestyle that you might have heard, I’ve been through many all-nighters but I’m better now and never gonna do that again

As the Chinese saying goes “May you live in interesting times”. That’s true more now than ever before in this computing era. I’m just happy to be in one of the centres where many of these interesting events are taking place and get to be a part of it.

As my tagline (in my internal profile) goes : Live. Life. Work. Yahoo.

Avinash was very busy in the past weeks and was all excited the past couple of days. Why? Yahoo! Map API was released and he worked on it. He’s also written a neat demo for it.

The finale before the release was quite interesting… because Google also released its maps API – a difference of mere 2 hours between the announcements!

McManus has written about his take on the comparison of the two APIs and details of the announcements are in this DevSource article.

TWiki must be one of the most underestimated tools out there. We use it quite extensively at Yahoo!.

What is TWiki? Officially, it is a “Enterprise Collaboration Platform” (yawn). What that means is that it is a wiki software that is meant to be used for intranet information.

I’ve used it minimally so far mainly because it looks ugly, but I see that the official latest version has improved by leaps and bounds. I have started to use it quite extensively.

Some of the things I like:

• Reasonably clean formatting rules – This factor can never be emphasized enough. TWiki’s rules are heck of a lot better than other wiki syntaxes I’ve come across (including MediaWiki’s).

• Help section is to the point.

• The list of plugins just makes me go wow.

• Good configurability and things like doc graphics and TwikiVariables

• Discussions are integrated into the pages like the page on StructuredWiki (our older version still doesn’t )

• Plugins, again – syntax highlighting, tracking actions embedded in meeting notes, bugzilla integration, and even headlines from RSS feeds and embedding PDFs

There’s a presentation that gives a good introduction to TWiki.

Aside: I wonder what tools other companies/organizations use.