Renaud Bourassa » Yahoo!

Yahoo! Hack U 2009

Rhino — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 06:09:52 +0000

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.

Globami on Hackday.blorg

Rhino — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:59:24 +0000

The Yahoo! Hack U team updated their blog, the hackday.blorg, with the winners of the University of Waterloo competition. Congratulations to all the winners, especially to Addy Cameron-Huff for his wonderful HackDemocracy website. It really is an amazing web application and it is more than appropriate considering that we are in the middle of an election process!

Here’s the passage on Globami:

Third place went to Globami, by first-year studenut Renaud Bourassa:

http://globami.rhinosphere.com

Globami is a friend visualizer that lets you easily see where anybody’s friends are on a couple of different networks, either through a nice Web UI or in a SearchMonkey info bar. Not bad for three weeks of instruction!

And some pictures of the event:

By the way, I’m working on a new look for Globami, something more minimalist, so stay tuned.

Third Overall at Yahoo! HACK U

Rhino — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 05:11:39 +0000

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.