Cristiano on Tech/Life

Melinda and I spent last weekend at the Yahoo Open Hack Day 2009 here in London. I have been to both the previous London Hack Day and the BBC Mashed Hack Day last year, so I was eager to meet up with a few 100 hackers again and see what will come out of it.

During the last two Hack Days I didn’t really get around to making or finishing my hacks, instead I spend time making swedes, which meant I never had a hack to present. This time I didn’t have any genius ideas either until the Friday before when we were having some food with some fellow Geeks after watching the new Star Trek movie (more on that soon).

The idea was to have a single-serving-site that would tell you wether or not it’s smart to go and backup your Yahoo data. It started as a joke, but I noticed the potential of it being both funny and an interesting way for me to explore some of the new APIs that I wanted to play with. For those of you who are not too familiar with Yahoo and therefore not totally understanding the joke: Yahoo has been having some financial issues lately and recently decided to close their ones popular hosting service Geocities by the end of the year, spawning an angry response from many geeks who think that web sites should stay online forever.

I ended up going a little bit further though by setting up http://ShouldIBackupMy.com (currently hosted on a sub domain until my DNS registry changes are processed). The idea was to set up a site a bit like http://isneilannoyedby.com/ (currently no longer enabled) where the is able to type in any word to get an answer to the generic question, obviously with some hilarious results to its effect.

So I quickly registered the domain, setup a symfony project, got the basics to work and then went to drink some beer. This all left me to do the cool part in the morning at 8am when I was only half awake. I played a bit with the new Guardian APIs (which is really easy to use and thank you Simon for helping me out with the API key process) and imported some relevant articles, then threw them through the YQL term extractor and made a decision on the state of the company. 

The resulting pages show the user a guess on wether or not it’s wise to backup the data or not, show a link to some backup tools, and some news articles surrounding it. I added a little admin interface for myself which allowed me to quickly customize some of the pages with some other details (other colors, custom answers, logos) and all was done.

I finally presented my product on stage with the following keywords: geocities, magnolia, yahoo, flickr, delicious, google. I honestly thought the Yahoo search would have lead to a “probably not”, but it turned out all the Yahoo products returned a “probably” which made me look more brave on stage than it should.

I didn’t win a price (really didn’t expect too either) but I’m glad that quite a few people did like the idea and thought I should have at least have won the prize for “best mockery of an event sponsor”. In the mean time I will just keep on continue using a lot of the Yahoo services and hope that they’ll survive and run more hack days, and I then hope to hack something more impressive together at the next Hack Day London.