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Yahoo!’s Open Hack London was held at the TUC Congress hall on 9th and 10th May. It was another great opportunity to learn about APIs, hacking stuff together and generally geeking out.

[Yahoo! boss David Filo welcomes the geeks to Open Hack 2009]

I had a play about with the BOSS search API, but wasn’t in an actual team as such. I also enjoyed an evening bike ride on the Flickr Bikes – which automatically took a photo every minute when the bikes were in motion. Riding round central London on a push bike was a bit of a hairy experience, but we returned unscathed to tell the tale!

[The two Flickr Bikes were available for a ride]

There was, of course, a little problem with the wifi (isn’t there always?) but the team from Yahoo soon sorted it out. And the was, of course, plenty of fuel for hacking geeks:

[Essential supplies for the hacking geek]

It was great to be in the company of such innovative minds (and a little intimidating too!). There were some great ideas put together during the session. Mr Duck was even on the winning team for Best Harware Hack! Clever duck…

Building on the Shoulders of Giants

Jonathan Snook

Culture
We come from a culture where developers tend to like to reinvent the wheel, whereas designers like to reuse. If, as developers, we want to use components of others’ work (under GPL or whatever), this provides us with some distinct advantages. Look how many times the Linux distribution has forked!

Tools
There are loads of PHP frameworks out there, and also for other languages. We dont’ have to write everything from scratch, but make use of pre-existing libraries and functions.

Flash - now has built in sockets support. Useful for charts in pages (if you need them)

Types of Data
Location, Time, Relationships etc

Pitfalls
Dynamic APIs can foul up your application; service availability; you are middleman – if something goes down people blame you, not the service provider.

Benefits
Dealing with well-tested code. Speeds up development. Solve problems outside original solution.

Ideas
Enables you to get stuff out fast. Iterate fast and often. Eg Overheard RSS feed built really quickly (using library elements from Cake PHP). You can see what works. You can put stuff out in hours, rather than days or weeks.

Jonathan’s presentation: slides (blog+links) | audio (mp3)

Professional Front-End Engineering

Nate Koechley

Nate began by giving us a bit of historical context to the way Yahoo! has evolved over the years.

He then covered topics such as Yahoo’s server architecture, graded browser support [see below], progressive enhancement, unobtrusive JavaScript etc.

He suggests we all have an interesting set of decisions to make regarding front-end design:

1. Do what is standard
   if impossible, then
2. Do what is common
   if impossible, then
3. Do what it takes

Then we get on to:

1. Do what is simple
   +
2. Do what is flexible & progressive
   +
3. Do what is open

This is in order to satisfy the multiple audiences for any website: Users, Developers, Machines.

At Yahoo!, they focus on 8 specific areas:

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. JavaScript
4. Accessibility
5. Internationalisation
6. Performance
7. Infrastructre & Process
8. Tooling

They use tools such as JSLint to check code for quality, and adopt the idioms it promotes to improve their code. Also, unit testing with YUI Test.

There’s much more detail in his slides (see below).

Nate’s presentation: slides (blog/slideshare) | audio (mp3)