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!)
Chad Dickerson's blog 
Awesome! Not sure I’ll be able to make it (think I’ll be in Europe), but it’s great to see this out there in the wild. Would love to get some ideas for Mash Pit from this event model…! And man, I gotta get my Valley Camp post out there!
This looks great Chad! Glad to see you guys are doing it.
What’s the plan for hackday.org? Is it going to be Yahoo exclusive? or are other companies going to be able to use it to promote their own hackdays?
Open it up ala BarCamp wiki style?
Let’s talk, right now I have last minute planning to do for our first Sabre HackDay …