The Yahoo! OpenHack 2009 – Fun two days!
Friday, October 16th, 2009
Last week I attended the Yahoo! OpenHack 2009. I had never heard of this event before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I have to say: I was very impressed with the event and had a lot of fun.
The event took place at the Millenium Hotel at Times Square and started with some sessions about the Yahoo! technologies. I was most impressed with the Yahoo Query Language (YQL) which enabled a SQL like way to talk to a wide variety of web services. Of course the recently released YUI toolkit looks also very promising. After lunch the hacking space in the 8th floor was opened. The whole space was decorated in Steam Punk fashion which is of courses appealing to us geeks. There was a gaming space (RockBand and Fussball), lots of sofas and a never ending amount of nice food and drinks (I’m talking real food, not just pizza 
). They even had some german beer which made me almost feel at home.
The hacking started early and went on the whole night. I won’t go into detail about our project and all the other great hacks (You can look this up on the Yahoo! NYC Open Hack website) but I can assure you it is a lot of fun and you meet great people. There were Yahoo! engineers around to help you with almost every problem. I sure learned a lot during these two days. I wasn’t familiar with any of the Yahoo! technologies and think it’s a shame that people only seem to look at Google and forget that other companies have great stuff too.
On Saturday afternoon the hacks were presented and some prizes were given away. Although I think most of the people were in it for the fun. The ceremony although was great.
If you ever have the opportunity to attend such an event you should definately do it.
