Hack Day: I won!
So earlier this week, Yahoo! had another Hack Day - an informal event where all are basically invited to “build something cool in 24 hours”. Avid readers might remember there was a public Hack Day just a few weeks after I arrived, with Beck playing on the campus… This time the event was more low-key, and I worked with two teams on two different projects.
The first one turned out to be really easy, I did it in 10 minutes or something…
The YahooGettyPurchasedBadge GreaseMonkey script scans pages from Getty Images for stock photos. It sends references for each photo to a web service, which checks a database of previously-purchased items. If a match is found, the images on the Getty site is decorated with a little “Yahoo! already purchased this” badge. This helps to prevent designers from buying the same stock image over and over again.
The second hack took me all night, and is pictured here. I worked until 5am to get this out before the deadline.
Instant iList is a Messenger blast-bot with a nifty web interface. Users can subscribe to the bot, and will then receive all messages sent to said bot. Latest messages are displayed on the website (with numerous ajaxy effects), along with a continuously updated subscriber list.
It’s tough to explain, but I think the later looks awesome and should become a product. However it was the first hack that was picked by David Filo to win the “Cheap Yahoo!” award.
