Chad Dickerson's blog » yahoo

We're hiring at Brickhouse in SF!

Chad Dickerson — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:15:39 +0000

We’re hiring at Brickhouse, our San Francisco office at the corner of 3rd and Bryant, where there are lots of great things happening. If you like working on small startup-like teams to deliver products like Fire Eagle and Yahoo! Live and invent entirely new things, then check out the openings below. If you’re interested, email me (chad @ this domain) and tell me why you’re perfect for one of the roles.

Software Engineer, Brickhouse (you will be working on Fire Eagle initially)
Community Manager, Advanced Products / Yahoo! Live
Flash Developer, Yahoo! Live

(Photo from our very own Tom Coates)

Fire Eagle Developer Evening: this Thursday at Brickhouse

Chad Dickerson — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:20:37 +0000

As Upcoming says: “The first in a series of developer workshops for people who are interested in building apps using Fire Eagle – the new geo-platform from Brickhouse. For people who aren’t familiar with it, we’ll be giving a quick overview of the service plus an introduction to the API, help with OAuth and a table completely covered in pizza!”

Go sign up on Upcoming!

2nd anniversary at Yahoo!

Chad Dickerson — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 22:53:53 +0000

I just now realized that today is my second anniversary at Yahoo.

Pumped about London Hack Day / Dopplr

Chad Dickerson — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 10:24:15 +0000

It’s 2:45am on a Saturday morning and all I can think about is the upcoming London Hack Day we’re doing with the BBC next weekend. I arrive in London on Monday to begin some of the pre-event preparation. I can’t sleep thinking about it. I’m turning 35 soon and I’ve flown many miles and been many places, but I still get excited like a little kid when I travel every time. Add in the fact that each Hack Day I’ve been involved in both inside and outside Yahoo! has blown my mind in a different way and you’ve got a recipe for insomnia of the most wonderful sort.

And I’m not sure even I have grasped how amazing the location is. In his post “The Ultimate Party,” Ryan explains just how special the venue is:

The event is at Ally Pally (Alexander Palace), a venue with so much tech and media history it puts whole countries to shame. In 1936 Ally Pally became the headquarters of world’s first regular public ‘high definition’ television service, operated by the BBC.

. . . then quotes from the Wikipedia entry on Alexandra Palace:

The palace continued as the BBC’s main TV transmitting centre for London until 1956, interrupted only by World War II when the transmitter found an alternative use jamming German bombers’ navigation systems (it is said that only 25% of London raids were effective because of these transmissions).

After that it continued to be used for news broadcasts until 1969, and for the Open University until the early 1980s. The antenna mast still stands, and is still used for local analogue television transmission, local commercial radio and DAB broadcasts.

Ryan continues:

How incredible is it that the people working at the forefront of the next revolution/evolution of media and broadcasting will be getting together at such a historic venue.

Anyone working in media and or technology in the UK holds Ally Pally close to their heart – I’ve spoken to BBC engineers who see it as a sort of spiritual home – a mecca of media innovation.

Wow. I can’t wait to get there!

Speaking of travel, I’m on Dopplr now. What does Dopplr do? From the About page:

It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you’re planning to visit.

Ping me if you want an invite.

Yahoo! hiring in Seattle

Chad Dickerson — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 08:48:30 +0000

My colleague Steve Makofsky just posted about a batch of engineering and product management jobs we have opening up in Seattle. Check it out.

MyBlogLog adds tagging

Chad Dickerson — Fri, 25 May 2007 15:53:00 +0000

Yes, MyBlogLog has implemented tagging. Get all the details here, along with some thoughts from Mike at Techcrunch.

Nice job, Eric, Todd, John, Steve, Chris, Robyn, and Ian! (yep, that list is getting longer)

For now, I seem to own the tag “optimist.” I’ll take it!

Oh yeah, the team is hiring.

Kids Day at Yahoo: what I learned

Chad Dickerson — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 22:35:36 +0000

Bradley invited me to join him in speaking to two groups of kids today at Yahoo! The first group was 11-12 year-olds, and the second was all 8 year-olds. Bradley and I talked a little bit about what we do, what it’s like to work at Yahoo and what we wanted to be when we grew up (me: architect, Bradley: something with computers), and then we answered a bunch of questions while asking some of our own. All I can say about these kids of Silicon Valley is: WOW! Here are some relatively unstructured notes.

What some of the 11-12 year-olds said they want to be when they grow up: large animal vet, photographer, pediatrician, Egyptologist (!)

When Bradley asked the kids if they knew what “innovation” meant, one of the kids said, “inventing new stuff.” Not bad.

When someone asked how much I worked every day and I said a lot of my work doesn’t feel like work because I enjoy it (but in a more rambling way), a kid interjected, “Find a job you love and you’ll never ‘work’ a day in your life.” Very succinct!

Bradley mentioned in passing the company he started before Yahoo, and one of the kids asked, “Is your old company still alive?” (Yes.) Then, “Who bought it?” (Autonomy.) I think we were about to get into preferred stock or accelerated vesting schedules before another kid rescued us with the question: “how many interviews did you go on before you got your job?”

When we moved to the group of 8-year-olds, things got even more interesting. When we asked them how many had cell phones, 50% of the hands went up (at least) — and we weren’t talking toy cell phones. When Bradley asked them how old they thought we were, we got answers ranging from 28 to 100.

In both groups, the kids were amazingly well-traveled. No one seemed all that excited about the places we had been because many of them were born in those places and travel regularly (although the wannabe-Egyptologist had not yet been to Egypt!)

We’re always looking for product feedback, so when asked what Yahoo! should be doing, one kid said: “Yahoo! Robots would be AWESOME!”

I’ll see what we can do!

While I was out. . . .

Chad Dickerson — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:58:08 +0000

. . . a bunch of good things happened (besides a wonderfully relaxing honeymoon — thanks to everyone who asked!)

JR Conlin joined the Yahoo! Developer Network team. JR was born to work for a team like ours, and we’re really looking forward to working more closely with him. All your prominent Yahoo! bloggers are belong to us.
Upcoming 2.0 launched. Congrats to Andy, Gordon, Shawn, Neil, Vince, and team — nice work!
We announced our first public European Hack Day on June 15-16 — at a freakin’ palace in London! Yes, the whole deal is taking place at Alexandra Palace. Big, big thanks to Matt and Tom at Yahoo! for making this happen. We’re working with the BBC Backstage guys on this, too (more from Matt Cashmore and Ian Forrester).

(Me, I was sitting by a pool in Mexico practicing my Spanish (primarly Tecate, Negra Modelo, and Dos Equis).

Yahoo! Mail Web Service released!

Chad Dickerson — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:24:32 +0000

Off to catch a plane, so more later, but today we announced the release of the Yahoo! Mail Web Service — the same mail platform we use to deliver Yahoo! Mail, the #1 web mail platform in the world with almost 250 million users. Now developers can build on it, too. That’s a big deal.

Very, very cool. A hats off to the many people who made this happen! Can’t wait to see what everyone builds.

I'm not at SXSW, but the Shiners are on me

Chad Dickerson — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 01:18:45 +0000

Yeah, I’m not in Austin this year. Between a speaking commitment here in the Bay Area tomorrow and a wedding-related commitment on Saturday, the schedule just didn’t work. Sigh.

Never fear, though — there are plenty of good folks from Yahoo. Be sure to hook up with the MyBlogLog guys, or the Yahoo! Developer Network team — Kent Brewster, Jason Levitt (who moderated this panel), and Dan Theurer. If you see any of them, tell them I said the Shiner is on me. Or just show up at Yahoo! BarTab and cut out the middleman.

See you in Austin next year!