IISC University Hack Day
Posted by Guhan | Filed under Events
I was part of yet another Hack U. This was a first for me because it was at Indian Institute of science and all the students there are PhD students and doing heavy research work. It was a good experience talking with them because their view information and computer science is completely different. They are more focused on the science, algorithms, efficiency and more core problems. Me on the other hand am more about the applications and the end user experience side of things. So the discussions with the students was really interesting.
I blogged about this on YDN, so check out my YDN blog post
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 !!
