Photo by Dustin Diaz.

Mistakes I Made Building the Pin It Button by Kent Brewster (Pinterest)

Pinterest's widgets (including the Pin It button) are the source of millions of new pins on Pinterest every day.  They are super-lightweight, contain no iframes, and are called by a single JavaScript include.  

The techniques Kent will show are highly relevant to mash-ups and prototypes, especially in combination with Yahoo Pipes and YQL; Indeed, Kent evolved many of them because of internal Yahoo Hack Days.

General areas of discussion:

• Including third-party scripts with a single line of JavaScript.
• Passing configuration variables without adding extra SCRIPT tags.
• Creating structure, styling with CSS, and adding interactions, all without resorting to iframes or external libraries.
• Avoiding interference with existing and future page elements.

Specific to the project:

• The full source of Pinterest's widgets and how anyone can access it.
• How and why Kent pushed back on design.
• API endpoints and how he's hitting them without running into cross-domain security trouble.
• Dealing with browser compatibility issues.
• How and why he avoided using libraries.
• What he did about analytics and user tracking.
• Who he broke on launch day, and what he had to do to fix them.
• What he would do differently next time.

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Kent Brewster was an early Yahoo! front-end engineer, technology evangelist, and Hack Day enthusiast. He wrote the original iPhone and Android applications for Netflix, Live View for Lexity (now Yahoo! Commerce Solutions), and breaks the Internet every time he ships the Pin It button for Pinterest.  If you look him up on Wikipedia you'll find a science fiction writer with the same name; this is also him.