On September 12th and 13th, each of the five Hack U teams will fly to Sunnyvale and battle it out for the championship, plus bragging rights for their school. Keep an eye on hackday.org for details ... and, lest we forget, here's a taste of the craziness from last time:
See below for more about Yahoo! Hack Days, cool hack examples from other universities as well as tips on thriving and surviving at your University Hack Day.
The winners were DialPrice, Skedu and Trip Hacks. Photos on Flickr
Winners: Demograph, Map Tag, and Traffic.
Winners: Pages--which we ought to just go ahead and put online in the YUI section--Telescreen, and FlightTracker.
Winners: Psychic Skype Hotline, Carpool Commuter Hack, INGAPO, and Capture the Flag Pac-Man. Pictures are up on Flickr.
Winners: Flickr Fuse, Go2Pod, and Friend Cluster.
During the fall of 2006, Hack Days happened on the campuses of five universities across the USA, including the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We chose five finalists and brought them to Sunnyvale in March to show their hacks to our founders and top engineering talent. And the winner is .... Greg Schechter, from UIUC
Faced with a diverse field of hacks mashing up sources from Messenger, Maps, Music Engine, Search, Flickr, del.icio.us, and YUI, the judges chose a hack built with Yahoo! Widgets, Greg's Slide Rule Widget. Here's a quick video of Greg's winning presentation, thanks to the new YDN Cam and Matt McAlister's Jumpcut editing skills. The widget itself is tough to see, but you'll get a good feel for its capabilities and the thouroughness of Greg's hack.
Greg later accepted a summer internship with Yahoo!, and became part of the team that won Best Hack at our summertime internal Hack Day. (Sorry, we can't show you the winning hack yet ... when it goes into production, we'll be sure to let you know!)
Got Widgets? Check out Greg's Slide Rule yourself.
We had over a hundred hackers, 31 hacks submitted, and a ton of photos uploaded to Flickr. Where present, we've included an URL; if it's not working, please let us know on the blog entry.
And now, the winners:
We were hit by lightning, twice. It rained, indoors. Umbrellas emerged. Hacking continued. Rockets flew, robots walked, The Rumble Strips rocked.
Here's the full time-tagged video, courtesy Yahoo! Research Berkeley:
"You can see a list of all the hacks (including which hacks won the judges awards), you can launch URL demos for many of the hacks, and, best of all, you can jump to any hack instantly to watch it (no waiting for it to load or fast forwarding through the video to try and find things). We've also displayed the list of hacks directly on the video time line, which makes scanning around for hacks incredibly simple."
Matt McAllister's full 15-minute video, with special bonus behind-the-scenes footage, is online for your remixing pleasure at Jumpcut.
Fun was had, felt was rubbed, Beck played, many hacks were completed. Videos are here:
http://video.yahoo.com/video/search?p=hackday
... but at the very least you MUST check out Mo Kakwan's contribution, Blabber. Mo won the Best Schtick award and made a short film and a start-up around his experience, which is awesome.
Over 4000 pictures made it up to Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=hackday06
... and a whole bunch of links were bookmarked on del.icio.us:
http://del.icio.us/tag/hackday06
The complete list of winners is on the Hack Day blog, here:
http://developer.yahoo.net/hackday/
... along with two of our best presentations, Matt Sweeney's "Web 2.0: Getting It Right the Second Time" and Ian Lamb's "The New Hacker's Tookit."
There are thousands. Here, courtesy Flickr, are the last few photos tagged 'hackday.' You'll see lots of internal shots from Sunnyvale, too.
We've been doing these things since late 2005; here are random notes and observations that might help, starting with some of the key differences between what we've done in the past and what we're doing with University Hack Days:
You'll have a limited time (90 seconds, maybe two minutes, maybe a bit longer) to present. Here's what you need to show in that time:
One of the most common Fatal Errors we see at Hack Day presentations is that our hackers, having spent the last 24 to 36 hours getting their hack to work, want to cover Item Three first. (They've suffered for their art ... now it's our turn.)
Please, whatever you do, don't do this. Say the problem, show the solution, and then talk about how you solved it, if there's still time.
There will be at least two available Windows laptops and two open monitor connections, with Mac adapters if needed.. For best results, you'll sit down in front of one of our laptops, open a fresh Firefox window, and demo your hack from a public Web host.
While we loves the OSX, really, we does, we've had mixed results connecting the Mac to the projector. Same goes for Ubuntu: runs well on low-end hardware, but when you try to hook up the external monitor ... not so much.
The best demonstrations are the easiest to set up. If yours is on a public host somewhere and not on your university's private network, chances are better that you won't run into network trouble.
There's also a big chunk of street cred assigned to hacks that are available for the audience to actually play with, right then and there. Watching the demo is fine, but what your audience really wants is to poke at it themselves and see that it really works.
Sorry, there won't be time to install anything, even as tiny as a widget, on one of our machines. And we won't want to run the risk of breaking one, which would not be fair to the rest of the hackers.
If you're demonstrating a hack that requires the user to be signed in to a particular network or service, be signed in before your turn begins. You'll have three minutes at a minimum to accomplish this before you get the microphone. (Bonus: you'll eliminate the chance of getting nervous and entering your password in the login box in front of a large audience, which has happened several times in our memory....)
By "special," we mean "anything that can't be shown on a laptop." Going to show something on a cellphone, or other monitor that won't plug into a projector? Need audio? A close-up shot on your Nabaztag or Chumby? We'd love to help ... please let us know early!
Actually do your demo for your team. If you're alone, pick some random people and do it for them. Answer their questions, think about what they mean, and then rewrite the demo if needed. It just might turn out that the hack you thought you made wasn't really the hack that the audience saw.
Remember, you're not just showing a hack: you're showing yourself, and (yes!) recruiters will be there, watching how you do in the spotlight. Be offbeat. Show your style. Let your freak flag fly, if you've got one. Most of all, engage your audience with your sense of humor and the clear perception that you are thrilled to be up there showing your stuff. Enjoy yourself; it really makes a difference!
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