Hack Day India

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Published
October 8, 2007

I was at Yahoo! Open Hack Day at

Bangalore

on Friday and Saturday. 24 hours of hacking, meeting lots of old

friends, and sarcasm unlimited. It doesn’t get better than this.

  • 2007-10-05 Fri 02:30 PM
    • Arrived at Taj.
    • Registered myself, got the schwag
    • Met Raghu and discussed the presentation he’ll be making on Flex
    • Social networking, the offline kind
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  • 2007-10-05 Fri 03:30 PM
    • The presentations start.
    • Joe starts the ceremonies.
    • Chris starts the first talk on what Yahoo can do for you. YahooAPIs, that is.
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  • 2007-10-05 Fri 05:30 PM
    • On the fly, we three become a team: PradeepRaghuand myself.
    • Pradeep and myself know each other from Deep Root Linuxprojects, after college hours, in PESIT. Raghu and me arecolleagues. Pradeep and Raghu met the first time today.
    • We start discussing ideas…
    • WiFi’s good
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  • 2007-10-05 Fri 07:00 PM
    • Still discussing…
    • “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”— Abraham Lincoln
    • Deciding on “Flick Off” – a way of deciding whether to watch the movie or not, a big mashup.
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  • 2007-10-05 Fri 07:37 PM
  • 2007-10-05 Fri 08:48 PM
    • BeautifulSoup and IMDB…
    • Are we using anything Yahoo??
  • 2007-10-05 Fri 10:01 PM
    • Had dinner, met old friends like Supreeth and Shivashankari andalso other Thoughtworkers, etc.
    • Someone was belittling ActionScript/Flash, told them about theFlash on C++talkand how the Adobean ported Quake 2 to Flash, it knocked hissocks off.
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  • 2007-10-05 Fri 10:50 PM
    • Finally gotten somewhere with BeautifulSoup
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  • 2007-10-05 Fri 11:55 PM
    • La la la…
    • Having fun in the IRCchannel…
    • “Flick Off” -> “foff” ;-) -> “Foff it, man!” – our new lexiconaddition
      • It’s a synonym for “let it go” or “oh forget it”.
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  • 2007-10-06 Sat 03:13 AM
    • Still awake.
    • Now fetching Yahoo Movies ratings, etc.
  • 2007-10-06 Sat 04:32 AM
    • We’re surprisingly all awake at least the 5 of us i.e. includingTejas and Shreyas
    • I’m done with all the scraping and conversion a.k.a. massagingof the data
    • We just need to pull it all together now.
    • Raghu is mostly done with the UI,RandomWalklooking good now, but he needs real data to try it all out.
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  • Yep, that’s right, these photos are at 4.40 AM
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  • 2007-10-06 Sat 05:19 AM
    • Waiting for PKG to pull it all together because me and Raghu are done…
    • He’s trying to get my code working in Django but apparently already it’s breaking!
  • 2007-10-06 Sat 09:33 AM
    • Had breakfast, lots of laughs.
    • For some strange reason, we seem to be the only ones laughingthroughout, everybody else is so serious.
  • 2007-10-06 Sat 11:32 AM
    • Now re-architecting our whole design with 4 hours to go!
    • That’s right XML is split up, UI has to change, the whole works
    • Set up a subversion repo finally (yeah, Pradeep, we should’vedone this before…)
  • 2007-10-06 Sat 12:00 PM
    • Have to work on getting director data.
    • Things are falling into place
    • Raghu is doing some kick-ass UI and Pradeep is getting thewebsite and interaction all working smoothly
    • Raghu is helping people on Flex, I’m helping people onBeautifulSoup, Pradeep is giving career advice to someone, etc.
  • 2007-10-06 Sat 02:16 PM
    • Got working – directors, actors, get_moviedata.
  • 2007-10-06 Sat 03:09 PM
    • Got videos, goofs, pictures working.
    • PKG and Raghu are getting the UI and Django integrated
    • We’re using Y! Movies data, IMDB data including profiles andratings, YouTube, Y! Pipes, etc. Using Django and Python to runthe app server and data munging respectively. And Flex for thefrontend. The USP is Ely’s RandomWalk UI that we are using.
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  • 2007-10-06 Sat 05:03 PM
    • We go downstairs and outside, and decide our presentation. We’recutting down the material to talk so that we can present best inthe limited 90 seconds.
      • Active vs passive voice, and all that.
    • We come back and see the hack time is officially over. Peoplewere so quiet, that’s when I loudly started counting13-12-11-… and the other 4 started shouting, and soon thewhole crowd joined in, and when it was zero, Shreyas shoutedHappy New Year at the end of it… Filo must have been amused.
    • Time to get out of the place, finalize our stuff, and come backat 6.30 for the demo presentations to start. Then the partyafter that. I’m shutting off my machine now…
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  • 2007-10-06 Sat 07:06 PM
    • We did the first presentation!
    • Although there wasn’t enough time for my part, we did well.
    • A couple of people told us outside that they were impressed byour hack. That’s good enough for us. Most of all, we three hadfun hacking.
  • 2007-10-07 Sat 8:45 PM
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  • 2007-10-07 Sat 9:15 PM
    • ‘Thermal and a Quarter’, India’s most famous rock band, startplaying.
    • I’m not really into this music and definitely need some rest, sowe just exited the building and headed home.
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— Yahoo! Hack Day motto

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