Abstract

We just finished the Georgia Tech Hack Week in Atlanta, Georgia, where the Hack U team (consisting of Jamie Lockwood, Paul Tarjan, Jeremy Hubert, and Chris Heilmann) spent a week with the students and talked about the goodies Yahoo has for mashing up the web. In detail, we talked about geolocation services, Hadoop, YQL, YUI, and building fast prototypes.

After the 24-hour hacking period (during which almost all students stayed at the uni and churned out code and designs) we had over 40 hacks to choose our winners from. In the end, we settled on the following:

• First prize: Video in Ymail by Shauvik Roy Choudhary, Sahil Miglani and Utkarsh Shrivastava
• Second prize: Importance Filter for Gmail by Roger Pincombe
• Third prize: Lyricist by Mike Hirth and Daniel Hooper

• Mobile - Music in Town by Craig Campbell and Phillip Vassenkov
• Hack For Good - Succor by Mandar Samant, Mrunal Upadhyay, Pradnyesh Gore and Ameya Nerurkar
• Design - Game Creator by Joy Buolamwini and Andrew Panfel
• Hardware - The ultimate Couch Potato by Ketaki Deo, Kedar Toraskar and Aneesh Tarun
• Flood the Hack - 7 hacks by Andrew Guyton and Hillary Lipko
• Best homage to dead technology - In Memoriam: 1994 - 2009 by Sean Hussey and Jenny Rainwater
• Smooth transition hack - Google Road Trip by Azhar Bande-Ali
• What the hell are you on about hack - Project Narwhal by David Hollis, James King, Josh Anderson and Anna Coley

For a full list of all the hacks and the details on the winners, check the Hack U hack tracker.

All in all we were very impressed with both the amount and range of the hacks created. All the hackers challenged themselves by using technologies they hadn't used before and there was a lot of collaboration and students helping each other during the whole night. The event showed that by using libraries, hosted services, and taking the time to read documentation before trying to re-build already existing technology, you can surprise both yourself and the world.

Chris Heilmann
YDN Evangelist

More information at:
http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/