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Matt McAlister joins Yahoo! Developer Network

26 Sep

There’s too much going on right now to post anything too lengthy, but suffice it to say that I am absolutely ecstatic that Matt McAlister has joined the Yahoo! Developer Network team. Read Matt’s post for more details.

Matt and I worked together very closely back at InfoWorld — working with Matt was one of the best parts of the job. We worked together on some innovative experiments there (e.g. rolling out RSS advertising ahead of the Google patent application on same) while having a lot of fun and pulling at least a couple of semi-delirious all-nighters in the process. We came to Yahoo! within two weeks of each other and had been working in different parts of the company — until now. I’m looking forward to great things working with Matt again. Welcome, Matt!

Yahoo! Hack Day tip: presenting in 90 seconds or less

24 Sep

Over on the Hack Day blog (feed here), I posted a must-read on presenting at Hack Day: Hack Day tip: demoing your hack in 90 seconds or less, pointing to Matt McAlister’s excellent set of tips on that subject.

Stay tuned to the Hack Day blog (again, here’s the feed) for updates leading up to the actual event.

Yahoo! Hack Day: kicking off next Friday 9/29. Sign up!

20 Sep

Planning for the big open Yahoo! Hack Day that I wrote about three weeks ago is well underway, as it should be — we kick off next Friday, September 29 at 5pm, and man, we are EXCITED and have some amazing things in store. If you’re interested in attending, submit your information on the form at the bottom of the hackday.org homepage, or mark yourself as “attending” on the Upcoming page for the event. Space is limited and we’ll have to cut off signups before the event, so sign up now. We’re still issuing invites, so if you haven’t gotten one yet, don’t despair (for logistical reasons, though, we ask that you sign up and not crash so that we can plan appropriately, print out your name badges, etc.)

Also, don’t forget the free Friday developer workshop — here are all the details. To come to this, just fill out the form at the bottom of the hackday.org homepage and indicate that you want to attend the workshop.

YurtSo far, we’ve been contacted by hackers, designers, mimes (!), and at least one yurt enthusiast. Well, it takes a village to pull off a Hack Day, so if you’re coming, prepare yourself (and your yurt, if you so choose) for camping on the beautiful Yahoo! grass, good times with your hacker pals and the new ones you’ll meet, and the opportunity to demo your work in front of your peers and some other very cool people we’ll have there. Mike Arrington from TechCrunch is our emcee.

At this point we already have carloads of people coming from all over the Bay Area, planes from Canada, college students flying in from Florida, a strong Chicago contingent, and people from everywhere in between (one person is trying to make it in from Australia!)

If you’re coming and don’t know who you’re going to hack with, don’t fret — we’ll be doing on-site matchmaking and people like myself, Rasmus Lerdorf, Jeremy Zawodny, and many, many other sharp Yahoos will be on-hand to help you as well.

For more details, check out these resources:

We’ll be posting ongoing updates on the Hack Day blog. Stay tuned!

Product manager job is filled / LinkedIn becomes essential

10 Sep

For those of you who saw the Product Manager job at the Yahoo! Developer Network that I posted to LinkedIn (and got posted to CrunchBoard by someone), that position has been filled. I’ll announce soon.

Thanks to everyone who contacted me. There were many excellent applicants and I hope to be getting back in touch with many of you in the coming weeks as I hear of other opportunities at Yahoo! My apologies in advance for not being able to get back to everyone personally.

Incidentally, although I’ve been a user of LinkedIn for about 2.5 years now and I’ve always thought it was “cool” (I even wrote about it in my old InfoWorld column), I had never found the service absolutely essential, but this particular hiring experience suggests that it will be in the future, even though the person who ultimately got the job didn’t come directly through LinkedIn. Still, it’s clear to me that LinkedIn is the most efficient way to reach out to my personal network and get in touch with quality people.

Yahoo! Hack Day: opening up Yahoo! itself

26 Aug

Ever since I organized the first Hack Day at Yahoo, people have been saying, “wouldn’t it be cool if you opened it up?” Guess what? That’s exactly what we’re doing — opening Yahoo! itself up, and in a big way. I’ve been to and helped organize internal Yahoo! Hack Days on three continents now and I’ve witnessed the incredible fun and creative energy firsthand, so opening up Hack Day was one of the first things I wanted to do when I started running the Yahoo! Developer Network.

Check out all the details on hackday.org, just launched yesterday. The fun begins on Friday, September 29 with an all-day developer workshop where we’ll be teaching you how to do real stuff with some of the tools from the Yahoo! Developer Network. That evening, we’ll kick off the Hack Day itself (the coding part) with some music that will go into the wee hours (if you need quiet areas to hack, we’ll have that for you). Don’t worry about how you’re going to get home, because you’ll be able to pitch a tent at Yahoo! (see our campus in the photo) to get a bit of rest before the fun continues on Saturday, where we’ll have demos on Saturday afternoon/evening, followed by even more high-quality entertainment (stay tuned). Mike Arrington from TechCrunch will be our MC (thanks, Mike). It’s going to rock — we guarantee it.

All this is being organized with the help and advice of Yahoo! hackers themselves — everyone is pitching in to put this thing on. If you don’t work at Yahoo! and want to be help out, let me know (just put “chadd” and “yahoo-inc.com” together and drop me a line).

We will have limited space, so let us know if you’re interested in attending by filling out the form at hackday.org.

Major thanks to two folks on the Yahoo! Developer Network team: Kent Brewster for the design and Vernon Marshall for the backend stuff. Also, a big thanks to everyone at all levels Yahoo! who not only approved all of our strange requests, they did it enthusiastically.

More on this Yahoo! Hack Day:

More on past Yahoo! Hack Days can be found in my del.icio.us bookmarks, tagged “hackday+yahoo.”

(Photo of Yahoo! campus by Premshree Pillai, one of the best hackers at Yahoo!)

Tags: hackday, yahoo

One year anniversary at Yahoo!

15 Aug

Today is my one-year anniversary at Yahoo! I could write a really long post looking back at my first year at Yahoo!, but suffice it to say that I like the people I work with, the work continues to be challenging in a good way, my management rocks, and we’re in a competitive industry where the only thing we can depend on is constant change (perfect for the neophiliac in me). Add in the honor of either organizing or just helping out with Hack Days on three different continents in one six-month stretch alone, and this has been a pretty exciting year at work.

(photo by Roger Butterfield, licensed via Creative Commons)

Python developer center launch at YDN

8 Aug

In these times of snakes on planes, it seems fitting that we launched the Python Developer Center today on the Yahoo! Developer Network. The Python Developer Center was put together by Simon Willison (Simon also posted on the YDN blog).

This is timely for me, because like Jeremy, I’m beginning to learn Python after being a Perl guy for a long time (with a little PHP thrown in in recent years). I had some mild tangles with Python back in 1997 or so when we used the Ultraseek search engine at CNN, but I never got very deep into it. Now’s my chance!

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We're hiring for the YDN Bangalore team

4 Aug

In addition to the Yahoo! Developer Network team at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale, California, we also have a small team of developers in our Bangalore, India office who work with us on our core projects. I visited Bangalore in April for their Hack Day before I was directly involved with YDN, and I was really impressed with the talent and creativity in the office there, so when I joined YDN, I was looking forward to working with the team there more closely on “real” YDN projects (though being Hack Day maestro was fun, too).

Right now, we have an open position on the Bangalore team. Here’s the semi-official job description:

Yahoo! R&D, Bangalore is looking for a strong senior engineer/lead engineer for its team that works for Yahoo! Developer Network (http://developer.yahoo.com/). Opportunities and challenges include designing, building and evolving products in the emerging areas of web services and web platforms. Technical requirements for the job include C++, Unix and/or web services/XML skills. Also important are: innovative mindset, ability to learn quickly and desire to work in the fast-paced Internet industry. Experience in building highly-scalable high-performance systems is a big plus.

If you live in Bangalore and are interested in working with us, please send your resume to me at my Yahoo! address (chadd@yahoo-inc.com) and tell me why you want to work for YDN (I will forward them on to Pankaj, our hiring manager there). Note (and I hate to say this but past experiences suggests that I have to): any resumes from staffing agencies for this position (or any others) will be ignored, so please don’t take my post here as an open invitation to send me resumes. I want to interact directly with the candidates without professional intermediaries. Of course, I will gladly accept referrals from other developers in Bangalore for their friends, especially from people I met on my visit there.

Also, if you want to have a look around the office, a search for “yahoo bangalore” on Flickr turns up almost 2,000 photos, including some I took during my visit in April.

See you at OSCON

25 Jul

As I posted over at the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, I’ll be at OSCON in Portland along with several other folks from Yahoo — see you there!

IBM does Hack Day

11 Jul

I was pleased to see that the folks over at IBM recently ran their own Hack Day modeled on the ones we’ve been doing at Yahoo! (which had its own inspirations, of course). IBM is still one of the giants of American business — #10 on the Fortune 500 list — so this is significant.

Kelly Drahzal reports on what happened. Be sure to check out the Hack Day participant map and more on how they are handling their presentations. From what I can tell on Kelly’s blog, she totally nailed the spirit: Looking forward to seeing where this goes next, but my message is … Just DO it. Nice work, Kelly and IBM.

I’m just back from vacation so I don’t have time to write much more now, but in the quiet U.S. holiday period last week while most folks in the states were kicking back on the beach or enjoying backyard BBQs, Yahoo! had two more large-scale Hack Days: one in London for the entire EU (which exceeded all expectations. . . I was in London to see the presentations from all over the European continent) and a second in Bangalore, India. Amazing stuff.

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