Fireball

This one was a long time pending post, but reading the blogs of few other lazy people encouraged me to continue to write,after three weeks. After the Internal Hackday, Yahoo! hosted the first Open Hackday in India. The idea was awesome. Around 100 geeks gathered at Taj Residency, MG Road just near Yahoo!’s MG road Office, on 12 , and there were a few who were jealous!

I got the chance to be a part of the organizing team, thanks to shivku. David Filo,Bradley Horowitz and Chris Heilmann were some of the invitees from Yahoo! US and UK. There were talks by Chris,Bradley, Shivku and Raghu Ramakrishnan.

Anil Patel, spearheaded the whole event. I got to meet Pradeep Gowda and Swaroop CH, whose blogs I have been following for quite a long time. Most of the hacks were mashups or some smart mixup, I really wanted to see something like this. Most of the hacks were impressive, my personal favourites were Vizualizr, and Maps doodle. Started at 2:30PM on friday, ended at 2:30PM saturday, and the demoes were at around 6PM, perfectly planned. After demoes-prizes-vote-of-thanks, we had a band Thermal and a Quarter. Joe and others started dancing! I managed to take a couple of photos from Vishal’s camera. Mine sucked.

One of the things that came to my notice after Hackday was the resources available in YDN (aka) Yahoo! Developer Network. YDN is *the* destination if you want to learn Frontend Development.

YUI theater is simply awesome. Lectures by Crockford, Joe Hewitt and others in YUI are really worth spending time. I had an impression that Javascript is a language that doesn’t require importance enough to learn, which was easily proved wrong by Crockford. Crockford isn’t biased, he points out the disadvantages of the ECMA standards, as well as the good parts of Javascript. While debugging javascript was irritating with alert boxes, Joe Hewitt’s Firebug is a saviour. I am using Firebug heavily these days. Have a look at those videos, when you are free.

And, Yahoo! Maps India has got driving directions now.

PS:This is how you write a post totally away from the topic.