Welcome to Hack U

You hack

You present

We ruminate

You win

What’s our vector, Victor?

• Hack for 24hrs• Break for food, sugar, caffeine, and

conversations• Present your hack• Win!• Sleep like a victorious baby

Nitty gritty

• Up to 4 people on a team• 24hr coding period• IP & Code - you own it• Register your hacks:

developer.yahoo.com/hacku• Log into Yahoo! to edit your hacks

later• Schedule on the Hack U site:

developer.yahoo.com/hacku

So, who is this “Hacker”?

A hack is

a good ideabrought to

life

And good ideas come from …

• Noticing something broken and thinking of a fix

• Building something you’d use yourself• Automating something you’re too busy

to do manually• Finding a place where the world sucks

and figuring out how to make it better• Paying attention to local trends: mobile,

video, social, local, geo, gams, etc.

Examples

Shazel

• Anonymous, collaborative sound generation

• 1st place, CMU, Fall 2010• 2 person team• HTML5 canvas, Web sockets,

Node.js• Live demo allowed audience to

participate

Regex Battle

• Asteriods-like game where the goal is to build a given regular expression by shooting flying characters.

• 1st place, UW, Spring 2010• Websockets + SVG + self-recorded

sound effects == awesome

Rock My World

• iPhone app that displays local concerts

• 1st place, UC San Diego, Spring 2010

Search Wars

• Identify the most popular site-specific search terms against an opponent.

• Live demo• 1st place, UT Austin, Spring 2010

Hacking strategies

• Brainstorm, but converge quickly, and keep the best details of the rejected ideas handy

• Scope the work so the end is in sight: set an easy goal, and an ambitious one.

• Divide work by team member strengths.• Ask for help!• Minimize the amount of work by using

free and open source tech.• Don’t forget to Ctrl+S!

Demo Strategies

• “I swear it was just working...” - have a Plan B (screenshots, video, etc.)

• No static slides - leave PowerPoint for marketing.

• Practice your pitch a few times; make it easy on the ears, concise and funny.

• Make a bang: demo what’s most exciting and cool about your project.

• Tell us how you’d like the project to grow.

Surely Yahoo! can help

• Of course (but don’t call us Shirley)• Yahoo! free and open source projects

– YUI– YQL– APIS: Flickr, Answers, del.icio.us, Fantasy

Sports, Fire Eagle, GeoPlanet, Placefinder, Placemaker …

• developer.yahoo.com

Hack resources

• github.com/codepo8/hackday-toolbox• wait-till-i.com• isithackday.com/hacks• gist.github.com/ydn• developer.yahoo.com/hacku/

pasthacks.html• talks.php.net/show/hacku• flickr.com/search/?q=hacku

Roger that, Roger?(translation: any

questions?)