programming
Yahoo! Open Hack Day: how it all came together
I have to admit — since Hack Day ended, I have been struggling with how to contextualize it. It’s hard to put a nice neat wrapper around something that was so profound for me. For the people who were there (and you can read for yourself), it felt like a defining moment. [...]
Loads of new stuff from Yahoo! Developer Network for Open Hack Day
Lest you think our Yahoo! Open Hack Day was all about Beck (yes, it was really cool to have him), we also released an incredible stream of stuff for the hackers to play with while they were hanging out with us at Yahoo! There is nothing like a big event with a hacker rock [...]
Yahoo! Hack Day: opening up Yahoo! itself
Ever since I organized the first Hack Day at Yahoo, people have been saying, “wouldn’t it be cool if you opened it up?” Guess what? That’s exactly what we’re doing — opening Yahoo! itself up, and in a big way. I’ve been to and helped organize internal Yahoo! Hack Days on three [...]
Collecting software methodologies
I’ve always enjoyed reading about software development methodologies and approaches (my favorite essay is Frederick Brooks’ “No Silver Bullet“), probably less because I love software and more because it’s interesting to see how people, who are inherently fallible, translate their hopes and desires into instructions for an inanimate machine. When you mix the innate [...]
Python developer center launch at YDN
In these times of snakes on planes, it seems fitting that we launched the Python Developer Center today on the Yahoo! Developer Network. The Python Developer Center was put together by Simon Willison (Simon also posted on the YDN blog).
This is timely for me, because like Jeremy, I’m beginning to learn Python after [...]
Yahoo! Hack Day tomorrow, and some of my inspirations
Tomorrow at noon, we kick off our fourth Hack Day at Yahoo! It runs from noon tomorrow until noon Friday, followed by demos Friday afternoon and a party. As I write this, I am fielding questions from Yahoo hackers who are planning to stay here all night tomorrow night putting together their [...]
Peopleware
One of the Great Books in the management-of-software-development canon is Peopleware. I’ve quoted lighty from it before, and wrote a column about the book for InfoWorld a couple of years ago. It still sits within easy reach in my home office. Kevin Kelly features Peopleware in his Cool Tools blog, and does [...]
Blown away (again) by Hack Day
I organized the second Hack Day at Yahoo! this past Friday, and it was extraordinary (check out some of the Flickr photos tagged “hackday”). Rather than write a long post with my own analysis, I’ll leave it up to some of the participants (it was extraordinary because of them anyway — I just try [...]
Ruby vs. the enterprise
The whole “what does it mean to be ‘enterprise’?” brouhaha (see posts from Dare Obasanjo and David Heinemeier Hansson) over James McGovern’s post “More Thoughts on Ruby and Why it isn’t enterprise ready!” grabbed my attention for a few reasons:
I used to write for an enterprise IT magazine, InfoWorld
I was also CTO and had real [...]
Yahoo! User Interface Library: amazing and free
In my very first days at Yahoo! working with the team that made the Local Events Browser demo using a bunch of Yahoo! APIs, I was really amazed at the Javascript/CSS talent assembled at Yahoo! As of today, a huge chunk of it is out there for anyone to use and the people who [...]