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 !!
Yahoo! University Hack day gets Bangalored!
Posted by Guhan | Filed under thoughts
This was my 3rd University hack day, this time in my home town, Bangalore. Earlier this year I was at IIT Delhi and IIT Mumbai for the other 2 Hack U’s
Its amazing how much the students think Hacking is a negative thing. In every college we first had to establish the difference between Hacking and cracking.
Bangalore has always been a place where you expect students to be technically savy and modern, and sure that was the case in IIIT Bangalore. They have an amazing campus and it was a good thing that they offered only computer science and Information science courses. Their education system is more industry driven and being in electronic city, close to Infosys, the equipment and infrastructure in the college was very good. They had every thing from well organized projectors in class rooms to smart boards and comfortable seating.
The Hack U in Bangalore in terms of student response was much greater than the other 2 IITs. Enthusiastic students turned out in large numbers for our initial kick off sessions and the DJ night. This was not the case in IITs where the Rock night had a very poor response. But again, its expected from a Bangalore crowd :-)
More details about the event on my YDN blog post.
I spoke about YQL, Pipes, YUI and how every resource in the internet can be considered a Data source. My presentation can be found on slideshare, and is titled Get me my data!
Over all for Yahoo! it was a successful event. The hack demos were not as great as we wanted it to be, but there were some bright students who had crazy ideas. Guess given little more opportunity, some even greater ideas will come up. There was one idea which particularly caught my attention. Couple of students wanted to pull video data from cameras on the street and identify patterns in vehicle movement and crimes if any. Their idea was to gather information about a vehicle in one camera and then to see if the same vehicle shows up in a different camera. Using this information, they wanted to predict traffic flow, congestion etc. Interesting idea I thought
Next year have a couple more Hack U’s, first in IIIT Hyderabad .
