Yahoo Open Hack Day: Hell Yes!
Posted on October 1, 2006
Filed Under hackday, hacking, yahoo | Comments
Well, that worked. 
As has been widely reported around the blogosphere, this weekend we pulled off Yahoo’s first Open Hack Day.
The event was successful on so many levels it’s hard to convey the way I feel. I will leave it to Chad, who deserves the credit for the event, to offer the official recounting. Beginning to thank people leads down a slippery slope, but I also want to call out Kiersten Hollars. Kiersten is purportedly in PR, but she basically ran point on just about every aspect of this event. Kiersten got almost no time in front of the spotlight, and my guess is that very few hackers who were there would even know who she is… But I assure you that the event could not have happened without her. Anyway, here are a few things that struck me…
I attended yesterday’s workshops and was really blown away. Yahoo! is the shit. Seriously, where else can you get the downlow on PHP from the guy who wrote it, sit next to the person who started Flickr as you learn how to hack the Flickr API, and get a tutorial on the Yahoo UI platform library from the people who designed them and then rock out to a private Beck concert, replete with a live puppet show? Punk. Rock.
Fuckin’ Beck! Beck totally got it. As far as I know, Beck isn’t really on the “corporate event” circuit (to wit he headlined Shoreline’s Download Festival on Saturday) and is probably peaking right now in terms of his popularity. (BTW I love the photo at left that combines the concert/corporate atmosphere.) The fact that he agreed to do this is a testament to the fact that he “gets it”. The Beck show itself was filled with hackerly goodness (the meta-brilliance of the puppetshow projected behind the band, the on stage dinner party, etc.) After the show Beck took the time to walk around, check out the Hacks, interact with some hackers, etc. Beck (and his very cool band) were nothing but gracious and engaged. It was perfect.
The Open Hack Day logo. This was another labor of love, executed under tremendous pressure (t-shirts didn’t arrive until the day of the event.) I think it’s perfect. A visual pun - hacking code. Beck’s folks loved it too and took a bunch. Hope they sport them!
The all-night nature of the event was so cool. It was great to see the tents, but also hackers sleeping on couches, in booths, on the floor, etc. I remember so many all-nighters I pulled in my younger days… I remember being so immersed in code, I’d dream code. I remember tag-team coding sessions with Martin (and John Maeda.) I confess I was not able to pull and all-nighter and actually crashed (in a soft bed) between 1am-5am. Folks like Matt Biddulph stayed up all night, despite Heather’s efforts to rock him to sleep…
Michael Arrington. It is friggin’ hard to emcee these events. Mike did it with grace, composure, humor, panache… He lent his voice, his endorsement, his goodwill… Mike’s involvement was another moving act of generosity and I’m personally grateful to him. Go read TechCrunch.
The traditional media that covered the event mostly “got it wrong” but in a really endearing, adorable way. I’m referring mostly to the local television affiliates that sent anchor people in suits and ties and who needed explanations regarding the difference between “hackers” and “crackers.” Hilarious. The blogosphere got it 99% right, mostly fueled by the bloggers that were onsite at the event. But there have been a tiny few that have speculated that this was a “Career Fair” in disguise, that it was all about Beck, that it was in some way disingenuous, etc. I could attempt to set the record straight but it’s not worth wasting the keystrokes. To understand this event, you had to be there. If sadly you weren’t, please take the time to talk to people that were rather than speculating. And not just the Yahoos… Talk to the folks who attended from Google, eBay, Microsoft, Adobe, etc., etc., etc.Probably the best part about this is that we (my team) have the unequivocal support of Yahoo, across the org chart. An event like this doesn’t fly under the radar. From the many, many (literally 100s) of folks that sacrificed their weekend to deal with countless last minute tasks (think stuffing welcome packets for 500), to the many teams whose toes we occasionally accidentally stepped on (only to have them turn around and offer unqualified assistance), to the huge support of our executives (Filo and Ash outlasted me on Friday night)… It’s been an overwhelming show of support. Kris Tate said it best - we’re a family. By the way, Kris’s post impressed the hell out of me.
Chad and I introduced Filo (who introduced Beck) on Friday night. As I said then… “We’re literally hacking Yahoo… [crowd cheers] and now the man who is giving us the axe… Yahoo co-founder David Filo!” We couldn’t do something like this without Filo’s implicit support… (and since I don’t work directly with David, “Filo” is a proxy for the “seniormost levels of Yahoo.) It’s my boss Ash Patel that is really directly empowering us with the resource and permission to make these things happen. A special shout out to Jeff Weiner too - I wouldn’t be at Yahoo but for his vision.
The only negative Chad and I have been able to conjure: “This is gonna be hard to top.” Good problem to have IMHO. We’ve already got some ideas
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14 Responses to “Yahoo Open Hack Day: Hell Yes!”
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hack yeah! congrats to everyone involved.
awesome idea…congrats to the entire team
-ariel
Turned out to be an amazing event. I really didn’t know what to expect. congrats to everyone. I really hope you do this again next year. Now if I could only get that many people interested in the Black Rock City Hacker camp for Burning Man next year (BRCHC.com).
- dave
The Open Hack Day was a success…
The geek in me wished to attend, but it was logistically impossible. The Yahoo Open HackDay was really a success and it is explained why by Bradley Horowitz himself.
The first basic lesson of this event is that the myth of the developer alone in…
[…] We’re all pretty wiped out from the weekend, which was described as transformative, off the hook, familial and hard to top. People came from Boston, Florida, New York, Tennessee, Chicago, Vancouver, and Abbotsford, Ontario. The hacks were judged by David Filo, Jeff Weiner, Ash Patel, Bradley Horowitz, Chad Dickerson, David Hornik, Peter Fenton, Gina Trapani, Salim Ishmael and Mike Arrington. […]
I knew it was in my best interest to get out there for Hack Day. Expecations were exceeded and I’m prouder than ever to be a Yahoo!
Yahoo! Hack Day: Beyond Beckspectations…
I’ve spent the last 24 hours at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale, camped out in the Yahoo! cafeteria watching hundreds of non-Yahoo! hackers work franticly to put together a demo in 24 hours using Yahoo! technology. I’ve participated (and written about,…
[…] Anyway, I just wanted to make sure that I told Yahoo! congrats. Any time you see this level of enthusiasm, it was clearly a very cool event, and it sounds like the attendees had a really good time. […]
[…] Bradley Horowitz says “Hell Yes” […]
[…] I have to admit — since Hack Day ended, I have been struggling with how to contextualize it. It’s hard to put a nice neat wrapper around something that was so profound for me. For the people who were there (and you can read for yourself), it felt like a defining moment. The best way for now is to point out some of the people who made it happen and tell some of the inside story. In some later posts, I’ll probably go through some of the principles that guided us in planning Hack Day (e.g. who we invited and why, approaches to making such an event work), but for now, I just want to provide some backstory and point out some of the people who helped make this happen. There are literally hundreds of people in the mix, so I apologize in advance for those who I have missed. This will be my first attempt “official recounting” (as Bradley put it in his post). Like all good stories, some things will be left between the lines, of course. […]
[…] You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Leave aReply […]
[…] 4. Beck @ Yahoo! I would think that this show was possibly the most blogged about show of the year. Rather than go into another (fully deserving) praise-fest of my employer and the web development community at large, I’ll just link to Bradley since he said it all much better than I ever could. […]
[…] UPDATE: There’s another link worth checking out: Bradley’s. Actually, I am sure that there are many more to check out, but Bradley, the executive sponsor for Hack Day and YDN, really sums up the overall impact of the event. Unlike many posts (like mine) written on Friday night or Saturday morning as a post-Beck geek-out, Bradley waited until yesterday to post and was able to truly capture the full magnitude of Hack Day. For a company like Yahoo! to literally open itself up, and for the obvious executive buy-in that is necessary for an event of this magnitude, it means that the dynamics of the internet and of media in general truly are changing even at the highest levels. And that’s damn exciting! […]
[…] Hack Day was started to let Yahoo engineers in the search group scratch an itch and show off their coding chops to their colleagues. With each successive Hack Day, the group of participants grew so now anyone, regardless of location or business unit can be part of it. It only made sense to continue this inclusive trend and open it up to outsiders. Expand the pool and raise the bar. Isn’t that how evolution works? I am so proud that Chad, Bradley, and the executives at Yahoo followed through on their intuition and made this event happen. It was a risk that they didn’t have to take. The standard developer’s conference is usually more structured and shys away from marshmallow guns. […]