Third Overall at Yahoo! HACK U

Two weeks ago, strange posters with the title “Hey Haxor” and showing a fist in ASCII art started to appear all around the University of Waterloo engineering buildings. There was absolutely no other useful informations on them except a url: http://hacku.impact.org. When I got back home, I went on the website to figure out what was that Haxor thing they were announcing. It ended up being the Yahoo! Hack U event, a univerisity version of the Yahoo! Hack Day. The rules are simple, you have 24 hours to create a web application that can impress the judges. Having nothing to lose, I registered and started to think about a hack for the competition. I looked through all the Yahoo! APIs, searching for something that could be fun to hack. After a week of conferences and 24 hours of coding last thursday/friday, I ended up creating Globami, a social networking tool using the Yahoo! map API. The main goal of the website is to offer an alternative to the classic list view of your friends on social networks. With Globami, all your friends are displayed on a map based on their location in the world. By putting your mouse over someone’s marker, you get all sorts of informations on him depending on the social network you chose. You can then change the map view to his friend network by clicking on him. I first chose to integrate Twitter and then wrote the code for Flickr as well since there was some time left. I also did a small SearchMonkey application to show the Globami map of Twitter’s users in Yahoo! search results.

At the end of the competition, the Yahoo! team ended up with 24 projects to judge. Each team had to present his project in less than five minutes. After 2 hours of presentations and 20 minutes of deliberation between the judges came the announcement of the winners. This is where I learned that Globami finished third overall. Not bad for a first year student.

Thanks to the Yahoo! team, especially to Rasmus and Paul, for this great week.

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