Yahoo! Hack U 2009

Last Friday, Yahoo! was back at the University of Waterloo for Hack U 2009. After a week of talks by web gurus, such as Rasmus Lerdorf and Douglas Crockford, came the 24 hours hack event. This year, we decided to do something useful and in this tough economic time, we ended up creating a mashup to follow job trends across the United States. We scraped all the data we could from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, making it possible to search for statistics and open positions relevant to a certain type of job. We then display the result on a map using different metrics such as the average salary or the number of workers.

The result is called JobU and can be found here: http://renaudbourassa.com/projects/jobu/.

We won 4th place (when really, we should have won at least 3rd). The first place went to Docuvine, a really interesting web application that mimics Google Wave. Here are some picture of the event.

For more pictures of the event, see Rasmus Lerdorf or Jamie Lockwood flickr photostream.

Tags: Hack U, JobU, Web Apps, Yahoo!