Yahoo Hack Day was in town on 14-15 Feb 2009, and we all had an experience
of lifetime. This was my second Hack Day, and immensely empowering one.
Not only we came out of a situation, where we just saw my Hack not working and
skipping the Hack Demo, but also we demoed a perfectly working Hack and got
lot of compliments too.
It was an experience like none, 300 developers from all over the State, and may be
some from other parts of the country, gathered to take a holy dip in the river of
technical wizardry. A moment captured in 2 days measured as pure bliss to people
who have the passion to innovate and who seek the dungeons of impossibility.
After 24 hours of nail biting tension, we had the Hack Demos, where the Hackers
showed off their creativity in just plain 90 seconds. 24 hours of hard work for 90
seconds of Glory. And to judge the pursuits, we had the best of the cream of Yahoo,
among them the most notable David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo.
My Hack was titled OnYourMove, a mashup between Yahoo Maps API and Twitter
with some Reverse Geo-coding. End result was an app that lets users visualize
the route they want to take from Place A to Place B through map, and get latest
updates about the condition of the traffic, if any mishaps, or plain any update
about the route.
So say, you are travelling from Vasanthnagar to Ulsoor (in Bangalore), you
search for that route in our App, we put the route on the map, overlaid by
the different junctions (or roads) that you need to take. Over that, the Twitter
updates about the place (done by your friends), making you aware of the
impending traffic situations, events and anything worth to know. These
updates bubble up as a marker on your route, keeping you updated of
the route you will be taking before you start from the place.
Ofcourse, the above proto was just a tip in the iceberg, and we can keep
on mashing up new services on the Map making it more useful to the
users. I am still working on the extension of this map, and adding some
more features to it.
Lets come back to the event then. The 2 day extravaganza ended with
prize ceremony, and lots of Bean bags flowing around here and there,
as we were allowed to carry home one Bean bag of our choice. Quite
interesting, isn't it.
So thats all from me now. More updates and pictures to follow. Gotta work.
Bye and keep browsing.
- Vivek
Nice update there juju..
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