Hack U !
Posted by Guhan | Filed under thoughts
I am a Hacker. Hacking is a good thing, and being a hacker is cool.
I do not break into financial system, I do not acquire military secrets nor do I make truck loads of money. I do not ‘Crack’
Yahoo! can take a lot of pride in establishing a sense of positiveness and creativity around the word Hack. Yahoo! has been promoting ‘HackDay‘ as a cool new event where creative minds, geeks and passionate developers come together and do some amazing stuff in 24 hours.
Hack Day till about 2 years ago, was an internal Yahoo! event to keep its engineers minds fresh and promote ground up innovation. In the 5 years at Yahoo! I have enjoyed the Hack days here and have won a couple of them in Bangalore.
It was such a great success inside the company, that Yahoo! decided to make it an open event where engineers and geeks from all over the industry came together for a day, shared thoughts, innovated and had a great time with like minded folk. The ‘Open Hack Days’ were a great success.
Hack days are like an open challenge to every geek to test their creativity and speed in putting some things together and solve a problem in a way they see fit. Creating something that works and solves a problem within 24 hours is a real rush and goes to show that if an engineer works on something he/she is passionate about, work will just get done in amazing amount of time.
From Open Hack days, Yahoo! has started this trend of University hack days, where a group of Yahoo! evangelists go out to a reputed university and conduct a Hack event for all the students. Catch ‘em young !
I have been a part of 5 University Hack days in India, the most recent one being IIIT Hyderabad.
More about that event in my YDN Blog post
Over all I think its a great concept. Its great to be a hacker, its bad to be a cracker !!
Tags: event, good, hack, hacker, hacku, yahoo
