YDN Blog

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Photo Credit to Mark Fowler

Editor’s Note: Mirona Iliescu was a participant at Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day in 2007 and started her company MetaBroadcast based on a hack she built at this event. She is a great example of how hacking pays off even if one does not win the top spot at a hack event. We asked her to share her story.

What inspired you to become a hacker and learn about programming?

I started studying computer science and learned C++ in high school. My parents who worked in a computer production facility had a huge influence in developing my interest in computers. As a child, I liked to visit their workplace and when they brought home a computer along with programming books, I was excited about the idea of telling the computer what to do.

How did you hear about the 2007 Yahoo! Open Hack London event and why did you decide to participate?

I heard from friends that Yahoo! Open Hack was going on and decided to go along with them. Our group had already been looking at building an

Every Thursday is Tech Thursday where we share a random assortment of technical links we found and liked.

• Storyboard is a powerful tool in Xcode that allows you to build an App without a single line of code. It is possible to create a functional prototype in a matter of hours.
• A tutorial using nothing by the rectangle tool to create a simple 8-bit style pixel character in Illustrator.
• Magnific Popup is a responsive jQuery lightbox plugin that is focused on performance and providing best experience for user with any device, also Zepto.js compatible.
• Content Security Policy Header Generator makes it simple to create your own CSP in just a few easy steps.
• If you need help writing a Git commit message, Commit Message Generator is here to help.
• Doctor Who fanatic John Galantini has materialized the Time Lord's iconic police box into a whole new dimension: the modern browser.
• Progressive enhancement is a web development strategy whose basic principle is to begin with the simplest

Combining forces, Microsoft and Hortonworks were excited to provide all the hackers access to the HDInsight Service during the London Yahoo! Hackathon weekend. The hackers got a chance to learn about Hadoop and really put the new Hadoop Azure service through its paces.

Windows Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacentres. Sitting on Azure, HDInsight is Microsoft’s Hadoop-based service that brings a 100% Enterprise ready Apache Hadoop solution from Hortonworks to the cloud. HDInsight gives you the ability to gain the full value of Big Data with a modern, cloud-based data platform that manages data of any type, whether structured or unstructured, and of any size.

To get ideas flowing, the Hortonworks team kicked the morning with a walkthrough of common Hadoop patterns. If you are looking for idea of a new Hadoop project of your own, you

There is an awful lot of great data online which has the potential to power awesome next-generation apps and services. Open data, government data services, and many APIs provide relatively easy access to data which can be integrated with sufficient time and effort.

The Problem

However, the data your app or service needs is not necessarily available in a useful format. In fact, the vast majority of online data is locked up in web pages with no provision of data dumps or APIs in order to programmatically access it.

Frequently, the solution to this problem has been the development of so-called "scrapers". While scrapers may initially solve the problem of data retrieval, they come with a number of issues. First of all, they are technically difficult and expensive to implement, and even more so to maintain. Websites where the layout changes frequently and subtly can cause maintainers headaches while they fix the problems, with no data access in the meantime. Additionally, scrapers are specific

Every Thursday is Tech Thursday where we share a random assortment of technical links we found and liked.

• Here are some JavaScript best practices to get you coding like a pro.
• If you never wrote a shell script, Writing a Shell Script From Scratch is a good tutorial to get started.
• With traceGL you can see all JavaScript codeflow, in a high performance webGL visualiser. Its like an oscilloscope, for code.
• LayoutIt! is an interface builder for Bootstrap allowing you to create your frontend code quickly.
• Local Storage and how to use it on websites, a look at how easy it is to store information on a computer to read later and explain what you can use that for.
• ViewlikeUS, tests your website in any resolution you want in seconds.
• Shapecatcher, helps you to find specific Unicode characters, just by sketching their shape.
• Usability checklist, catch common problems before user testing.
• High-level overview for creating a JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game). The article will look at the

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Image credit to Toby Phillips

This weekend’s Yahoo! Hack Europe: London was a smashing success. 230 hackers from a record 18 countries submitted 44 hacks. From the amazing food to the perfect venue, this hackathon was a win for Yahoo! and for attending hackers. Of course, none won bigger than the talented hackers who took home the prizes. See all the hacks here.

We’re grateful to our sponsors and partners, some of which also provided prizes.

PayPal Winner: Image Piper Toolkit

This hack was a very cool graph-based image editor. Photographers can quickly and easily batch-process photos, adding effects with a drag-and-drop interface. The app can also monetize your photos via PayPal. It uses the PayPal and Flickr APIs.

Expedia Winner: HakaHotel

HakaHotel is a useful hack that lets travelers find a hotel by its amenities, with an interface that pulls in relevant Flickr photos taken near the location to see what it might be like in the area around each hotel. HakaHotel is powered by

The sun hasn't shined all day, but everything is great here at Hack Europe: London. Despite an early start, hackers arrived ready to learn and ready to hack. Though most folks were from the UK, we also saw folks from a variety of countries across the world, including Germany, France, Republic of Moldova, Austria, Italy, Spain, Romania, Scotland, South Africa, Turkey, Iraq, Sweden, Switzerland, Greece, Brazil and the US. We started the day with 3 hours of tech talks, including two hands on demos for hackers only. After wrapping up the tech talks, Jay Rossiter and Titan the Robot started the countdown for the 24 hours of hacking.

After a yummy lunch and loads of Pick & Mix, hackers were ready to collaborate. The afternoon was spent building and playing. Some hackers jumped right into hacking, others hacked for a bit then took a much needed break at the digital art wall. After a supper of Bangers and Mash, and a much needed trip to the chocolate fountain, hackers were refreshed and ready

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Our team is hard at work, setting up for tomorrow’s Hack Europe: London. We’re packing swag bags, hanging banners, testing wifi and sending out our final round of invites in the next few hours.

The speakers are confirmed, the judges are confirmed and the talks agenda is below. There will be two tracks, but for ease of reading, we've listed them all in order below. We hope to see you there.

9:30 - Welcome - Anil Patel, Yahoo!; Erik Suhonen, Yahoo!

Head of YDN, Erik Suhonen, and Head Of Developer Outreach And Community, Anil Patel, will welcome attendees to Hack Europe: London. They'll explain how Yahoo! Hack Days work and let attendees know how to get the most out of the event.

9:40 - YUI for Hackers - Satyen Desai, Yahoo! (Slides)

A tour of YUI, focusing on the parts of the library most suitable for getting a hack out of the door in 24 hours. We'll cover some basics, as well as introduce developers to the newest YUI CSS offerings, allowing hackers to get, not only a functional hack