ryan kennedy’s blog

I just posted over on the Yahoo! Mail updates blog regarding the new Messenger integration in Yahoo! Mail Beta. This was pretty cool because I did my first screencast for the blog. I had fun, although trying to come up with a scenario that doesn’t sound totally contrived is difficult (as evidenced by my performance). I’m looking forward to doing more screencasts, though. Using a trial of Camtasia I found out why it’s $300: the video editing capabilities. It’s not the most full-featured video editor, but it’s pretty damn simple to use. So I’ll be requesting that the company pony up the $300 so I can do more screencasts (I would have paid anyway, otherwise I’d feel bad about using a trial for a commercial screencast).

Anyway, I’m embedding the screencast below.

Coverage:

• CNET
• PCWorld.com
• Yahoo! Mail France - Damnit, their blog is both spiffier and updated more frequently than the one I run. This cannot stand.
• Download Squad - I love those guys!
• Press release

I saw Pipes a while back during our internal hack lunches. Ever have one of those jaw dropping moments crossed with one of those “duh” moments? That’s basically what it was for me. A slick, intuitive interface for manipulating RSS in a way that leaves every UNIX geek out there saying, “that’s what we’ve been talking about for decades!”

Ed Ho has some details on his blog. That links to a longer O’Reilly post that goes into some depth on Pipes.

Play with it, it’s awesome. And check out Uncle Hulka en Francais.

Update: As it turns out, I will not be attending Mashup Camp this month. I decided I really need to stay home these next couple of weeks and give my wife a hand. Things have been rough since we moved and after leaving her alone to deal with it for a week in November while I was off in India, I’ve decided it’s more important for me to stay close and help out than it is for me to attend Mashup Camp.

Back in November, Yahoo! was kind enough to send me to Bangalore, India to spend a week in the local office. This month they’re sending me to Cambridge to addend Mashup Camp 3. I like traveling, especially when I’m not the one paying for it. I like it even better when it’s somewhere I’ve never been before. This trip scratches both of those itches.

Anyway, in addition to doing a little mashing of my own, I’m going to be spreading the word about the upcoming Yahoo! Mail Web Service some more. I talked about the web service at the Yahoo! Open Hack Day. It’s hard to believe that was over three months ago. Hard and sad, since we haven’t fully released the web service yet (it’s coming, I promise). I was going to try to get one of the speaker slots on Monday/Tuesday at the camp, but they want $3,000 for a 30 minute block of time. Maybe instead I’ll do my talk on camera and post it on the web.

If you’re going to be in or around Cambridge January 15th through the 18th, come check out Mashup Camp. According to the who’s coming page, there’s room for 9 more people (I’m pretty sure they’re capping at 250). If you’re in the area and can’t make Mashup Camp but still want to rap about the mail web service, drop me a comment. Perhaps we can work out a get together.

We’re starting to push out a new update to Yahoo! Mail Beta. I’ve blogged several of the changes in this latest release on the ymailupdates.com blog. Lots of good stuff in this release and more good things to come.

Thursday/Friday was the Q4 Hack Day at Yahoo!. I’m pretty bummed that I didn’t take part this time around. The shingles were too much, I wasn’t going to (nor should I have tried, really) make it up for 24 hours to implement my hack. I actually have what I think is a great hack idea, too. So instead I’ll sit on it and either use it at the Q107 Hack Day (in March) or I’ll just work on it in my spare time and show it at one of the weekly Hack Lunches (yes, a group of us gets together every Wednesday for food and hackery).

Anyway, some other people have been mentioning Hack Day. I still think Hack Day is awesome. It helps to have executive support and I’m very fortunate to have managers that encourage participation. Unfortunately, neither of my hacks has been productized, but I’m hoping to change that once we’ve released the Yahoo! Mail Web Service to the public (yes, I wrote my last hack using the open web service).

For those wondering, yes…we’re still releasing the mail web service. Just sit tight.

Being so far away from home, I almost let myself forget that today’s an important anniversary for me. No, not the kind where I have to go buy my wife something (although, oddly enough, I did buy her stuff just the other day). Today marks two years at Yahoo!. I still remember starting at Yahoo!. And I remember my first year at Yahoo!. What’s amazing is, while I did a lot in my first year at Yahoo!, the second year has been epicly (is that a word?) insane.

I’ve taken on additional responsibilities, I’ve been recognized for my accomplishments. I have personal job satisfaction, I’m enjoying the work I do (even if I am feeling totally overwhelmed at the moment) and I’m very happy to be a part of a great company. Even though it feels like I’ve done a lot in two years, I can’t help but feel that this is only the tip of the iceberg. I think there’s much more ahead of me and that keeps me excited every day I come into the office.

Damn it STILL feels good to be a Yahoo!.

Ethan gave a demo of some a new feature coming in Yahoo! Mail Beta today at the Web 2.0 conference: Yahoo! Messenger integration. It’s pretty sweet, you can do messenger in your browser and, better yet, you can quickly switch context between IM conversations and email. Here’s some links to coverage that’s been going on:

• TechCrunch - Single Ajax Interface For Yahoo Mail & IM Coming
• CNET News - Yahoo to embed instant messaging in e-mail
• Webware - Chat meets e-mail at Yahoo

I’m going to post about this on the ymailupdates.com blog next week. I’d do it sooner but I get on a plane tomorrow to head to India, so I’ll be out of touch with the world for 24 hours or so.

UPDATE: Some love from Reuters as well.

I’ve always posted a lot here about Yahoo! Mail. Well, people have taken notice and as of today I am officially a Yahoo! Mail Beta evangelist. That means I’ll still post about Yahoo! Mail related things, but most of that will now happen on the ymailupdates.com blog. I’m very excited about this. I’ve always had a fascination with customer involvement. It’s only magnified by the number of customers we have.

So head over to the blog, give it a read. If you need me, I’ll be evangelizing.

Following up my Technically Sweet performance at our internal hack day, I’ve been awarded the “Dragon Slayer” award by our larger group: Communications, Communities and Front Doors, run by SVP Brad Garlinghouse. I won the award for my efforts in getting the Yahoo! Mail Web Service ready for it’s debut at Open Hack Day. It’s great to get recognition for something like that. I put a lot of effort in during the weeks leading up to Open Hack Day: coding, testing, documenting and putting together a quick SDK. The experience alone made it worth the effort, but the recognition is icing on the cake. It’s nice to know that everything I did was appreciated, not that I didn’t already know that since Ash Patel (Chief Product Officer) dropped by after my talk at Open Hack Day to shake hands and talk for a bit.

It’s been an awesome, but exhausting, two months. September was all about the web service and Open Hack Day. October has been all about the move from Folsom to the Bay Area. I bet you’d think I’m going to take it easy in November? Fat chance, I start off November with a week long trip to Bangalore to visit the Yahoo! offices there.

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.

By the time it was announced, everybody knew Beck would be performing at Yahoo! Open Hack Day. I made sure I was going to be down on the lawn to see it. The show was awesome. Beck’s doing a show tomorrow at Shorline (the Download Festival). If you have tickets for that show, you won’t be disappointed.

My favorite was when they played “Hell Yes”. I was expecting the usual version I’ve heard on the radio and in the video. Instead they heavily mashed it up with David Bowie’s “Fame”, Queen’s “We will rock you” and a little bit of Justin Timberlake’s “Rock your body” for good measure (I thought I also caught a little Parliament too, but I could be wrong). For an event that’s all about mashups, it was very appropriate.

Now of course we’ll have a difficult time topping the entertainment next time (hopefully there is a next time). But I have no doubt that the people setting up hack day are up to that challenge.

Filo blogged about the performance over at the Yahoo! Anecdotal blog. There’s even a video that was played partway through the sets. It was hilarious, poking fun at all of the Yahoo!’s that can frequently be seen anywhere but their desks (in the gym, on the basketball court, etc).

Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.

As I mentioned earlier, Niall Kennedy was at my talk earlier today where we unveiled the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. Niall has now blogged my talk, giving a bit more detail on what was discussed.

“I’m pretty impressed with the amount of effort spent on these APIs”

Yes…an unbelievable amount of effort put in by a fantastic team. Additionally, Reuters has also covered the unveiling of the web service. Both seem very positive of the release.

Totally sweet.

So there I was, flying through my presentation and everything was great. Then the Chief Product Officer walked in. He must have known that I was about to demo some running code, because right then I went to show something off and it bombed…spectacularly. As it turns out, the night before I had muddied up a config file before packing up the source as sample code and I never reverted the config. So there I was, presenting in front of a packed room full of people, CPO in the corner and at least one blogger two rows in front of me and the code didn’t work.

Well…I knew it couldn’t go 100% perfectly. Oh well. Let this be a lesson to you, when you’re given an extra 30 minutes before your talk starts, make sure the demo works.

Niall Kennedy snapped a shot of me giving my talk on the new Yahoo! Mail web service at the Yahoo! Open Hack Day.

…now you know where to find me. At 10am I’ll be sweating bullets giving my talk on the new Yahoo! Mail web service. This has been a long time in coming. When I joined Yahoo! almost 2 years ago, I was hired specifically to work on the web service. I’ve always wanted to see a mail web service made public and now it’s finally happening.

On Friday, we’re pushing a prerelease of the web service out the door just in time for Open Hack Day and I’m…totally freaking out. I’ve never given a talk this big before and I still have a bunch of stuff to do (writing some sample code and documentation, getting my slides together, etc). But I’ll make it.

I know this post is short on details, but be patient. I’m hoping we can get more information out after all the craziness of hack day subsides (September has been a very long, busy month). I’ll see if they will let me publish the slides from my talk here. I can’t say for sure when we’ll go from prerelease to official release, yet…but hopefully it won’t take too long. Most of the details are finished. Think of this as the “invite only” period of the web service.

If you’re lucky enough to be coming to Yahoo! on Friday to hack, then you already have an invitation to use the web service. So come to my session, learn all about the Yahoo! Mail web service and then “shock and awe” us all with a “technically sweet” mail hack.

Last Thursday/Friday was our latest internal Yahoo! Hack Day. Basically it’s a 24 hour period where any Yahoo! can hack up some neat prototype of their choosing. Some people work in groups, others (like me) fly solo. I participated in the last internal Hack Day (we do one a quarter) and had great fun. It’s like being back in college again: up till odd hours of the night, working against a last minute deadline, pumped up on pizza and caffeine. Unlike college, however, this time I get to pick the project (instead of the instructor).

This Hack Day was different, though. I had even more fun, built an even more kickass hack and…walked away with an award. Not just any award, mind you…I walked out with the “Technically Sweet” award. I’m not sure if I was being awarded for my personality and good looks or for the level to which my hack ruled, I really don’t care. The point is, some seriously heavy Yahoo!’s voted that I was one of 10 (out of more than 100) that was worthy of award. Don’t worry about this going to my head, it’s far too late for that now.

I’m hoping to be able to share some of the details of my hack soon, until then I’ll share some of hints for Hack Day (to compliment the ones JR put up):

• Get to the presentations early. Make sure your wireless works in the room and that your demo works over the wireless. Failure to double check this will lead to agony and suffering. Also, arriving early will ensure you a seat…one that isn’t on the floor. The demos last for hours, the last place you want to be is on a thinly carpeted slab of concrete.
• Practice your demo, at the very least run through it and make sure you can finish in 90 seconds. There’s a countdown timer and when it hits zero, the MC’s will do everything in their power to get you moving offstage. Seriously, you think the guys at the Oscars are bad? These guys don’t mess around (they play the company yodel when your time is up…loud).
• Make sure you can get the point of your hack across visually. If you have to depend on spoken words to explain what you’re doing, you’re screwed. You’ve just spent the last 24+ hours hacking away at code. You’re likely in a caffeine-induced state of semi-awakenness. Do you really think anything that comes out of your mouth is going to make sense?
• When someone says, “hey, we’re ordering pizza and watching ‘Hackers‘ in one of the conference rooms, who’s in?” you say “ME!” The movie is awful (it’s one of those “it’s funny because they’re trying desperately, in vain, not to be”…like watching Evil Dead) but you’ll meet up with a couple of cool guys, enjoy some pizza and have a good time.

If you’re really wondering how this whole Hack Day thing works, then I highly encourage you to sign up and come to the big Open Hack Day we’re having at Yahoo! It’s going to be a good time, the kind of thing you tell your kids about (unless your hack totally bombs).

We’re so open, we’re going to share Hack Day with the masses. I’m signing up to help out with the event and maybe I’ll see if I can squeeze in a hack while I’m at it (we’ll have to see how my creative juices are doing after the internal Hack Day). If you’re at all technically inclined, then you should totally sign up and come. It’s going to be a ton of fun.

Camping on the lawn, live entertainment and dorks as far as the eye can see. Seriously, what else could you want? The only way it would be better is if they waited until October and called it Dorktoberfest. Although, I guess there’s really no reason Dorktoberfest can’t be in September.

I just got a note on one of the Yahoo! internal mailing lists that the next Hack Day is fast approaching (September 14-15). I really enjoyed the last Hack Day, staying up for 24 hours getting something thrown together. Last time I thought I had a winner but didn’t end up taking home a trophy. I think my hack lacked the certain…flair, that would get it noticed. So this time I’m all about the flair.

Of course, the hack I have in mind I can’t get done completely in the 24 hours allotted, so I’m going to be doing some early fabrication of some of the base tools and skills I’ll be needing. I’ll save the meat of the hack for Hack Day itself.

I’m glad I work at a company with a sense of humor. Otherwise I couldn’t share this with you.

As many people have now noticed, we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff in Yahoo! Mail Beta. I know many people come here for details of the updates, here’s what I can tell you:

• There’s no change log available yet. Sorry.
• The release isn’t out to all users yet. Read this Yahoo! Mail Update post if you want to understand why.
• The crazy users (I mean that endearingly) over at the Y-Mail Yahoo! Group have screenshots of some the updates.

Yeah, okay…nothing juicy. I know. But we only just pushed the update.