Welcome to the land of ‘hackers’--‘hack’ not in the illegal sense of breaking into computers, but in its original sense of creative programming.
Recently, Yahoo Inc opened its first public ‘Hack Day’ at its campus in California for 500 developers for a free all-day developer workshop, followed by a 24-hour 'hack-through-the-night' festival. Yahoo decided to allow outsiders to hack away at their programmes.
The challenge for developers was to spend 24 hours building applications around Yahoo's APIs. Software giants from across Canada and Australia travelled to Yahoo campus for the brainstorming hack fest. The hackers broke into different groups to crack the codes.
The event was aimed at inspiring software giants to come up with new ideas for the company, as well as to innovate the existing software.
Apart from web programming competitions, the participants of the ‘Hack Day’ spent a splendid evening with a musical festival and performance by pop music superstar Beck.
Yahoo ‘Hack Day’ event has served as a combination instant R&D mechanism and morale booster for Yahoo employees. Earlier, Yahoo had held internal 'Hack Days', where some of the results of these events reflected in Yahoo products.
Yahoo is not alone in its effort to open up to people who can programme web services using its tools. From major Internet companies including Amazon.com, eBay and Google to established software providers such as IBM and Microsoft, everyone has embraced such moves.
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