This past Friday and Saturday I had a fun 24 hours coding at Yahoo's NYC Hack Day. The idea is Yahoo provides a big space, lots of junk food, and a bunch of Yahoo'ers to answer questions and you get to code with a bunch of interesting folks. At the end of it all, everyone demo's their stuff and there are prizes in various categories. You were encouraged to build stuff using Yahoo APIs, but by no means had to.
I ended up building a sort of mobile craigslist using the new geolocation support built into iPhone Safari and Firefox 3.5. Suffering from the MIT problem of building your own tools instead of just focusing on the application, I also had to build my own python app server yaaps (Yet Another App Server).
My friends from Hunch built some cool TV widgets. I had no idea that Yahoo had managed to get most of the major TV vendors to embed a linux based computer running widgets from the Yahoo app store. The Amazon widget, for example, lets you stream TV and movies on demand from the Amazon store.
The other interesting thing I learned about was YQL. YQL is Yahoo's effort to provide standardized adapters to load data from many different sources and then expose it through a SQL interface. Once someone writes an adapter for some source, anyone else can query that data without having to learn the peculiarities of the source's API. Plus, the YQL backend has lots of smarts so you can join different sources against each other, use aggregate operations like max(), etc that make complicated data access much easier than using the raw underlying APIs.
Monday, October 12, 2009
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