Hack Day India

I was at Yahoo! Open Hack Day at
Bangalore
on Friday and Saturday. 24 hours of hacking, meeting lots of old
friends, and sarcasm unlimited. It doesn’t get better than this.

• 2007-10-05 Fri 02:30 PM
  • Arrived at Taj.
  • Registered myself, got the schwag
  • Met Raghu and discussed the presentation he’ll be making on Flex
  • Social networking, the offline kind

• 2007-10-05 Fri 03:30 PM
  • The presentations start.
  • Joe starts the ceremonies.
  • Chris starts the first talk on what Yahoo can do for you. Yahoo
    APIs, that is.

• 2007-10-05 Fri 05:30 PM
  • On the fly, we three become a team
    : Pradeep,
    Raghu
    and myself.
  • Pradeep and myself know each other from Deep Root Linux
    projects, after college hours, in PESIT. Raghu and me are
    colleagues. Pradeep and Raghu met the first time today.
  • We start discussing ideas…
  • WiFi’s good

• 2007-10-05 Fri 07:00 PM
  • Still discussing…
  • “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
    — Abraham Lincoln
  • Deciding on “Flick Off” – a way of deciding whether to watch the movie or not, a big mashup.

• 2007-10-05 Fri 07:37 PM

  • We finally started coding.
  • I’m looking into Yahoo Pipes.
  • We picked up a new phrase – “Don’t tase me,
    bro!”

• 2007-10-05 Fri 08:48 PM

  • BeautifulSoup and IMDB…
  • Are we using anything Yahoo??

• 2007-10-05 Fri 10:01 PM

  • Had dinner, met old friends like Supreeth and Shivashankari and
    also other Thoughtworkers, etc.
  • Someone was belittling ActionScript/Flash, told them about the
    Flash on C++
    talk
    and how the Adobean ported Quake 2 to Flash, it knocked his
    socks off.

• 2007-10-05 Fri 10:50 PM
  • Finally gotten somewhere with BeautifulSoup

• 2007-10-05 Fri 11:55 PM
  • La la la…
  • Having fun in the IRC
    channel…
  • “Flick Off” -> “foff” ;-) -> “Foff it, man!” – our new lexicon
    addition
    • It’s a synonym for “let it go” or “oh forget it”.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 03:13 AM

  • Still awake.
  • Now fetching Yahoo Movies ratings, etc.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 04:32 AM

  • We’re surprisingly all awake at least the 5 of us i.e. including
    Tejas and Shreyas
  • I’m done with all the scraping and conversion a.k.a. massaging
    of the data
  • We just need to pull it all together now.
  • Raghu is mostly done with the UI,
    RandomWalk
    looking good now, but he needs real data to try it all out.

• Yep, that’s right, these photos are at 4.40 AM

• 2007-10-06 Sat 05:19 AM

  • Waiting for PKG to pull it all together because me and Raghu are done…
  • He’s trying to get my code working in Django but apparently already it’s breaking!

• 2007-10-06 Sat 09:33 AM

  • Had breakfast, lots of laughs.
  • For some strange reason, we seem to be the only ones laughing
    throughout, everybody else is so serious.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 11:32 AM

  • Now re-architecting our whole design with 4 hours to go!
  • That’s right XML is split up, UI has to change, the whole works
  • Set up a subversion repo finally (yeah, Pradeep, we should’ve
    done this before…)

• 2007-10-06 Sat 12:00 PM

  • Have to work on getting director data.
  • Things are falling into place
  • Raghu is doing some kick-ass UI and Pradeep is getting the
    website and interaction all working smoothly
  • Raghu is helping people on Flex, I’m helping people on
    BeautifulSoup, Pradeep is giving career advice to someone, etc.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 02:16 PM

  • Got working – directors, actors, get_moviedata.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 03:09 PM

  • Got videos, goofs, pictures working.
  • PKG and Raghu are getting the UI and Django integrated
  • We’re using Y! Movies data, IMDB data including profiles and
    ratings, YouTube, Y! Pipes, etc. Using Django and Python to run
    the app server and data munging respectively. And Flex for the
    frontend. The USP is Ely’s RandomWalk UI that we are using.

• 2007-10-06 Sat 05:03 PM
  • We go downstairs and outside, and decide our presentation. We’re
    cutting down the material to talk so that we can present best in
    the limited 90 seconds.
    • Active vs passive voice, and all that.
  • We come back and see the hack time is officially over. People
    were so quiet, that’s when I loudly started counting
    13-12-11-… and the other 4 started shouting, and soon the
    whole crowd joined in, and when it was zero, Shreyas shouted
    Happy New Year at the end of it… Filo must have been amused.
  • Time to get out of the place, finalize our stuff, and come back
    at 6.30 for the demo presentations to start. Then the party
    after that. I’m shutting off my machine now…

• 2007-10-06 Sat 07:06 PM

  • We did the first presentation!
  • Although there wasn’t enough time for my part, we did well.
  • A couple of people told us outside that they were impressed by
    our hack. That’s good enough for us. Most of all, we three had
    fun hacking.

• 2007-10-07 Sat 8:45 PM

  • Awards presented.
  • Everyone gets a Y! bean bag!

• 2007-10-07 Sat 9:15 PM
  • ‘Thermal and a Quarter’, India’s most famous rock band, start
    playing.
  • I’m not really into this music and definitely need some rest, so
    we just exited the building and headed home.

— Yahoo! Hack Day motto