During the first week of April, the Yahoo
Hack U™ team traveled to beautiful San Diego to host the final event for the 2011 Hack U™ season at UCSD. We were greeted by unusually cold and wet weather, but thankfully were given a warm welcome by the students, faculty, and staff at UCSD. This is the third year for Hack U™ at UCSD, where the students and faculty now fondly refer to the event as their “Superbowl” because of the large crowds and excitement the event brings to campus. The Hack U™ team consisting of
Subramanyan Murali,
Jonathan LeBlanc, and
Jamie Lockwood spent four days on campus interacting with students, giving talks about web programming tips and tools and of course hacking through the final night!
On the first day, Subram and Jonathan opened the standing room only kickoff event with an overview of the
hack program along with tips and hack examples followed by an introduction to
YQL and
YUI . These are easily the two most popular Yahoo tools that are used in hack days. The next day, the students were invited to the have an open discussion over lunch about various technologies or their hack ideas. This "API brain jam" session was an awesome time for the tech crew from Yahoo to interact with the students. We showed several more hack demos, brainstormed hack ideas and gave them some tricks to solve some common problems. Later that evening, students were in for a treat when
Douglas Crockford stopped by to give a guest lecture on "Using JavaScript Well," which focused on why JavaScript is a language deserving more study and research. We heard that some of the students had held an introduction to JavaScript class in preparation for the hack day so everyone was fired up to take their knowledge to a new level. Douglas's talk generated a lot of interest and was a great boost to the effort in spreading the popularity of JavaScript as a programming language in universities.
The next day we kicked off the 24 hour hack competition at 2pm with a packed room of about 65 students. By the end of 24 hours of hacking, close to 90 students worked on various ideas and turned up with over 30 innovative hacks to demo. We had almost 45 students actively discussing and working out problems all through the night —with endless coffee, soda, pizza, snacks and debugging keeping them awake. Some fun prizes were given away throughout the night to students who answered Yahoo trivia questions on the Hack U
twitter feed, which kept their minds at work while providing a welcome break from hardcore coding.
The judges were impressed by the wide range of hack ideas and innovative ways the students used the APIs. We saw everything from an iPhone app that gave you real-time information about what was in your ‘fridge’ and helped you prepare to shop for recipes based on the fridge’s contents, to an interactive tool that allowed you to search the web with the wave of a hand or nod of your head. All of the students did an amazing job this year and the judges had a very difficult time deciding on the winners.
After much debate, the following hacks were chosen as winners for UC San Diego Hack U™ 2011:
For the full list of hacks, please visit the Hack U™
hack tracker.
Congratulations again to all of the winners and special thanks to Professor Rick Ord and Professor Gert Lanckriet for serving as guest judges. Last but not least, huge thanks to Paula Kreger, Erica Kosa, Cody Noghera and Anne O’Donnell, the wonderful team who makes us feel right at home and organizes every last detail of the event. We had a great time and can’t wait to come back next year!
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