On April 10th, after a very sleepless 24-hour hacking period at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the fourth season of Yahoo’s Hack U™ season came to an official close. For those of you who haven’t read about or participated in a Yahoo hack event before, it’s a very “Yahoo” event. Programmers and creative techies of all kinds get together for 24-hour sessions where the only goal is to stay awake and, hopefully, create a new application or Web experience (a “hack”) from scratch that can be demoed and judged by their peers at the end of the event.
Yahoo hosts different types of hack events, some just for internal employees in different offices around the world (such as Spring Hack, which we’re holding today at our headquarters in Sunnyvale), and some that are open to all interested hackers who feel like taking on the challenge. We call these Open Hack Days, and they’ve also been held everywhere, from Brazil, England and India, to our most recent U.S. event in New York.
As you can imagine, students are always game for a hack day challenge and while many of them have participated in our Open Hack Days (even winning some), we also decided that they deserved a series of their own. And so “Hack U™” was born.
The Hack U™ program officially started in late 2006. The week of talks leading up to the student hack competition focuses on Web programming curriculum support, which isn’t typically taught in traditional university computer science departments. From the beginning, it was clear that the students were hungry for knowledge in this space, even if it meant they had to teach themselves.
The hands-on experience of hack events was so popular that it quickly gained momentum and is now a regularly requested event for our Academic Relations team, by both faculty and students alike. Today, the volunteer-based Hack U™ team, which includes Douglas Crockford, the well-known inventor of JSON and JavaScript guru, rotate campuses each year and keep a waiting list in order to accommodate all of the universities who want to take part in the event. Thankfully the tireless Yahoo developers are passionate about teaching and hacking and believe that these endlessly inventive students hold the answers to a new generation of Web experiences.
At this year’s UCSD event, which closed out the spring season, David Vanoni and his teammates, all computer science students at UCSD, hadn’t slept in over 24 hours, but you wouldn’t have known it from watching the energetic pitch they gave to the judges about their “RockmyWorld” iPhone app. It was the second year David had participated in the Hack U™ competition and it was obvious from the moment he handed each of the judges their own iPhone and confidently walked them through the demo of their slick music locator app that he had come here to win. Luckily the judges agreed. David and his team are now part of an exclusive club along with the winning entries from seven other university hack teams at Carnegie Mellon; University of California, Berkeley; University of Washington; University of Texas, Austin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Toronto and Georgia Tech.
Full Hack U™ recaps for this season, including more information about the winning hacks and hottest trends, visit the Yahoo Developer Network. Here are the links from spring:
The next season of Hack U™ begins in fall 2010 and word has it there will be an entrepreneurial spin on the competitions. Stay tuned for more details and check out the developer network blog for more detailed campus overviews, pictures and the complete list of winning hacks.
- Jamie Lockwood
Academic Relations, Yahoo Labs
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