Balaji Narayanan

Hacking 101

Hacking?

“Someone who makes furniture with an axe”

- Hacker in German

hacker: n. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities

“Hacking” is a constructive term.

“Cracking” is destructive

“Altering a system to do what you want it to do using

what is at your disposal”

- Christian Heilmann

Hack Day

24 hours of un-interrupted, unrestrained coding and

innovation

Hack

Eat

Get Help

Recharge

Have Fun

Hack

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rlerdorf/3250595638/

Fix

Present

Win

Where do I start?

A good hack starts with an idea…

Fix something you use every day

Build something you will use yourself

Hack for Good - Make the world a better place

Go local – tools for helping your local community

Don’t limit yourself to your favorite toys

A good hack doesn’t need to be a big thing

http://www.flickr.com/photos/capricorndragon/4000384412/

Don’t look for features. Concentrate on one thing

Don’t look to solve everything

You only have 24 hours

Find things that already work

And put them together

Show us what can be built using the systems we

(and others) offer.

http://developer.yahoo.com

http://www.github.com/

To build a typical web hack you need data, access

and an interface

Yahoo! has opened up its data

Search (BOSS), Flickr, Geo, Social, Mail,

Messenger…

And so have others

Programmable web lists 2182 APIs in their API

directoryTwitter, Facebook, Google, …

To access these you can use YQL

YQL is a SQL-Like Language that lets you

…

… filter, combine, tweak data across hundreds of Web Services.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console

How will you build a system to calculate distance between two places?

Use Vincenty's formulae

Or use YQL

YQL has more to it

There’s also Yahoo Pipes to do this visually

http://pipes.yahoo.com/

Data however is not enough.

You also need working interfaces

Technologies are easy:HTML, CSS, Javascript

Making it work on all browsers and OS is tricky

YUI

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui

What about reach?

You can build and wait for people to come

Or build where people are already there

YAP

http://developer.yahoo.com/yap

Presenting your hack

Do not show us slides about your hack

Instead show us what you have done

Technical glitches happen

Have a plan-B

And once you are done

Keep your hack live for others to see

Show other hackers what you have done

Publish your code on github

Join us and take it even further!

Innovation has no limits

Go Hack !!!Have Fun

Thank You

Balaji Narayanan@balajijeganhttp://balajin.net/blog/http://slideshare.net/balajijegan/

Hack Resources• http://developer.yahoo.com• http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console• http://github.com/yahoo• http://hackyourworld.org/• http://github.com/codepo8/hackday-toolbox/• http://talks.php.net/show/hacku/