ryan kennedy's blog

Now that I’ve gotten some sleep, some food and stepped away from a computer for longer than 5 hours…it’s probably a good time to do a writeup of my experience at the Yahoo! Open Hack Day. If you didn’t attend, I’m so very sorry. You missed out on an awesome event. Chad and his team really outdid themselves on this one. The internal hack days have been great, but the external hack day bordered on epic. For me, hack day boiled down to three things: the work, the people and the experience.

The Work

September 2006 was probably the most grueling month I’ve ever had. I don’t remember when Chad announced open hack day internally, but I do remember that it set into motion the events that would run my life for the month of September. I opened my mouth and said, “hey, we should hurry up and release the mail web service at open hack day.” Everybody seemed to think it was a great idea and I got really excited. Then September started. Guess what, we still had a ton of work to do in order to have the web service ready.

Thankfully, we have awesome engineering managers, product managers, directors and VPs. All of them thought it was a fantastic idea and everyone was 100% supportive. We bumped some higher priority work out of my way so I could spend September finishing the work on the server side, write up some documentation, prepare sample code and throw together some slides for my talk.

Along the way, we had our own internal hack day. I spent the better part of 24 hours hacking something together that used the new mail web services. Somehow I managed to win the “Technically Sweet” award for my hack. It was a fantastic moment, being recognized by numerous executives, a company co-founder, a coworker I respect (Iain Lamb) and the master of hack day disaster (Chad). It was the event that reinvigorated my efforts to get mail ready for show time.

With the last two weeks, I finished off some bugs in the web service, managed to get it deployed to production (thanks to our tireless, often taken for granted build master, Dan), wrote some sample code (which powered 2 hacks at hack day) and prepared slides for my talk. I showed up early Friday morning so I could make sure everything was set for my talk, perhaps a bit too early. The room filled slowly. For a while there were far more Yahoo! Mail employees in the room than visitors from outside the company. But steadily, the room filled to capacity with plenty of outside people who appeared hungry for information. The talk went well, plenty of good questions were asked and the feedback from my coworkers was very positive (maybe they were just trying to be nice).

The People

Once the talk was over, I switched to support mode. We’d just dropped a massive web service on an unsuspecting audience, surely those interested in hacking on mail were going to need some help. Many people came to Classroom 6, the unofficial “Mail API room”, asking questions and talking about their hack ideas. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. My manager Mike and my coworker Vijay were both there to back me up. We had frequent visits from other Yahoo!’s as well. At one point we were hanging out with Ash Patel (our Chief Product Officer) and Filo (our co-founder). Others curiously poked their heads in, said hello, snapped some pictures, borrowed a computer to check mail or just looked around and smiled. It was a fun place to be, even if it did feel like a cave at times.

One fun thing about hanging out in the room was all the people I met. One of the people I spent quite a bit of time talking to was Christine Hodges. She wanted to build something using mail but was having issues with the setup. I was able to help get her squared away and pointed in the right direction. She had been strugging a bit with all the moving pieces, so I wasn’t sure what to expect during the presentations the next day. To my delight, she showed up with a mail hack that parsed messages in your mailbox, highlighting things like dates and links. If she had more time, she was going to integrate those links with other products, things like Remember the Milk, for instance (which would have been cool, since I’ve met Omar). Christine also gave me a shout out at the end of her demo, so she’s alright in my book.

I also got to meet several people from Ruby Red Labs. I set them up with Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts on Friday night. Saturday morning I found them down in URLs and helped them debug a few issues they were having with BBAuth and then helped them make some requests to the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. Once they got rolling in the right direction, they were off in a flash. Their hack mashed up mail with flickr (flickr was an insanely popular choice of services to use in mashups, no surprise there) displaying a list of people who had sent you mail, using their flickr avatars to identify them. It was very cool and they were fun people to hang out with.

Saturday I spent a ton of time with Leah Culver and Tantek Celik. I met Leah down in the room where the Ruby Red folks were hanging out. She and Tantek had been planning a mail hack of their own, also mashed up with flickr. They were running short on time and still had to finish up some Greasemonkey hackery with flickr, so I stepped up and helped them out with the mail end of things. It was a fun collaboration. They sat to my right in the Mail API room hacking away on their script while I hacked up a PHP page to take POST arguments from them. It was a fun collaboration and allowed me to walk away from hack day knowing that I participated in a hack. Their hack took flickr and added a “Postcard” button, allowing you to send flickr postcards, emailing them to your friends through the mail web service. I’m proud to say that I am the first ever recipient of one of their flickr postcards. They also gave me a big shout out during their demo, which was much appreciated.

I also saw Toni Schneider briefly. I’m a little bummed I didn’t get to say hi. Toni was the first manager of the Yahoo! Developer Network. He really got the ball rolling. I, in particular, owe a lot to Toni. When I first started at Yahoo! to work on the web service, Toni was the one who helped me start spreading the idea of opening a mail web service to the public. While most people in the mail organization gave me funny looks whenever I brought it up, Toni enthusiastically took up the cause. He started talking to product managers within mail about the possibility. He left Yahoo! too soon to really drive releasing a mail web service, but he definitely provided the weight necessary for the initial push that got things going. Thanks Toni!

Most important of all, Yahoo! Mail showed up in massive numbers. I had a ton of coworkers show up to my Friday morning talk. Having a lot of familiar faces in the crowd was awesome. Later in the day, several showed up at the Mail API room to say hello, congratulate me on my talk, ask how things were going and even just sit and give me some company between visits from the hackers. It wasn’t just the mail engineers either, both product and PR showed up giving us hearty job-well-done’s. The support we’ve gotten from all over has been fantastic. Realize that we’re talking about opening up a web service to the largest online web application in the world. That would probably scare most product people into shutting us down, but they believed enough in it to let us do it. Kudos to them.

The Experience

In the end, it’s all about the experience, including everything I’ll remember about the event. From giving my first public talk to seeing an awesome show put on by Beck to meeting fantastic people. There will never be another experience like this one. Even if Yahoo! hosts another open hack day (which I hope we do), it won’t be the same (rightfully so, it would be boring if it was). I’m very happy I didn’t let this experience pass me by. I’m glad our managers let us release the mail web service early just for hack day. I’m proud of Chad for pulling off the greatest hack in the history of Yahoo! (so far).

Damn it feels good to be a Yahoo!.

Update: First a shout out during their demo and now I’ve got a shout out on Tantek’s blog.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 2nd, 2006 at 12:32 am and is filed under Yahoo!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.