Hacking for Innovation: IIT Kharagpur

Hacking for innovation
Saurabh Sahni
YDN Engineer, Hacker, Evangelist

Hacking???

There are few myths about Hacking

Hacking is a good thing
Cracking is Evil

In the Yahoo! sense, hacking is about solving problems innovatively

And a hacker is …

What is this Hack U thing?

Talks for two days about different things you can hack on

24 hours of un-interrupted, unrestrained coding and innovation

Get Help

Recharge

Have Fun

Hack
Fix
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rlerdorf/3250595638/

Present

The question is though: where
do I start?

A good hack starts with an idea…

Fix something you use every day

Build something you will use yourself

Hack for Good - Make the world a better place

Go local – tools for helping your local community

Don’t concentrate on your favorite toys

A good hack doesn’t need to be a big thing
http://www.flickr.com/photos/capricorndragon/4000384412/

Don’t look for features. Concentrate on one thing
Don’t look for features.

You only have 24 hours

Find things that already work
And then put them together

We want you to show us whatcan be built using the systemswe (and others) offer.

Some great resources

http://developer.yahoo.com

http://www.github.com/

To build a typical web hack you need data, access and an interface

Yahoo! has opened up its data

Search
Flickr
Geo
Social
News
Finance
Mail
Messenger
Address Book
Maps
Ansers
…

Also Others

Youtube
Twitter
Facebook
Google
Craigslist
Imdb
Last.fm
…

To access these you can use YQL

YQL is a SQL-Like Language that lets you …

… filter, combine, tweak data across hundreds of Web Services.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console

How will you build a system to calculate distance between two places?

UseVincenty's formulae

Or use YQL

Select kilometers FROM geo.distance where place1=“kolkatta” AND place2=“kharagpur”

Translate tweets

YQL has more to it

There’s also Yahoo Pipes to do this visually

http://pipes.yahoo.com/

Data however is not enough.

You also need working interfaces

Technologies are easy:
HTML
CSS
Javascript

Making it work on all browsers and OS is tricky

So, we have YUI!

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui

What about reach?

You can build and wait for people to come

Or build where people are already there

YAP
http://developer.yahoo.com/yap

Where to host your hack?

http://signup.joyent.com/yahoo_signup
Talk to us ot host at http://www.hackyourworld.org

How about some Hack examples?

I read lot of Indian Technology Blogs

But, I was tired of keeping track of so many of them

I just wanted daily gist

So, I built Webmeme.In

http://www.webmeme.in

Webmeme is powered by YUI, YQL, BOSS and backtype.

Two years ago there was a debate going on who are the influential twitter users?

Over a weekend, I created Retweet Rank – finding top users based on # of recent retweets

RetweetRank
http://www.retweetrank.com

I put it up and visitors started tweeting their ranks

And it became viral

askBOSS: http://ask-boss.appspot.com/

http://ask-boss.appspot.com

http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/

YQL Chrome extension

Presenting your hack

Do not show us slides about your hack
Powerpoint == Fail!

Instead show us what you have done

Technical glitches happen
Technical glitches happen

Have a plan-B
Record screencast
Do not depend on internet
Keep your stuff ready in browser

And once you are done
Keep your hack live for others to see
Tell us about your progress
Show other hackers what you have done in our fourms/groups
Publish your code on github
Join us and take it even further!

Lets have a demo

Updatesville

Hack Resources
http://developer.yahoo.com
http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console
http://www.github.com
http://hackyourworld.org/
http://isithackday.com/hackday-toolbox/
http://talks.php.net/show/hacku/
http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann

Innovation is not a skill

It is about wanting to
change what we have and be
ready to play

Realize your potential

The web is yours, go out and
play!

THANKS!
Saurabh Sahni
http://www.saurabhsahni.com
http://twitter.com/saurabhsahni
http://github.com/saurabhsahni
http://slideshare.net/saurabhsahni

Hacking for Innovation: IIT Kharagpur

by Saurabh Sahni

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