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Register to attend Yahoo Hack USA

 

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Hacking with NodeJS by Dav Glass (Yahoo)

 

Dav will be walking hackers through how to rapidly build, test and deploy

a hack with NodeJS, Github, TravisCI and probably Heroku, Nodejitsu, etc.

 

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Dav Glass is currently the NodeJS/Open Source architect for Yahoo. He has

many years of experience working with NodeJS and other Open Source tools

at Yahoo’s scale. He strives to be as transparent as possible and open

source as many things as he can.

 


 

 

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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:

 

Specific to the project:

 

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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.

 


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Dungeons and Data by Jennifer Davis (Yahoo)

 

You're standing in a dimly lit room inside the temple. The room has a definite chill, and there is a cold draft blowing from the north east. What does your party do? Embrace the inner story teller and become comfortable with thinking on your feet, and working with others.

 

Jennifer will explain some of the adventures involved with service engineering at Yahoo to build quality services. 

 

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Jennifer is a lead senior service engineer at Yahoo working on the hadoop set of services.

 


 

Write Once, Distribute Everywhere: Yahoo's Commerce Central for SMBs by Amit Kumar 

 

Finding it hard to acquire SMBs for your awesome product or service? Tired of integrating with each ecommerce platform one by one? 

 

It this talk, we introduce Yahoo Commerce Central - a platform built specifically to tackle the challenge of acquiring and monetizing small businesses. We will show you a live demo and give you all the tools you'll need to build a great new product or service for small businesses, or extend support for your existing product to 30+ platforms!

 

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Amit recently joined Yahoo following the acquisition of Lexity, the app platform for e-commerce and one-stop-shop for small businesses (now called Yahoo Commerce Central). Before founding Lexity, Amit was VP of Product for Dapper (also acquired by Yahoo) where he focused on semantic advertising. Prior to Dapper, he was Director of Product at Yahoo Search, where he invented SearchMonkey, filed 15+ patents and managed publisher-focused products. Amit has deep expertise in e-commerce, search, semantic web, and online advertising, as well as experience both founding startups and building new products for Fortune 500 companies. Amit is also President of the IIT Delhi Alumni Association in North America.

 


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From Blammo! by Ben Acker (@WalmartLabs)


An overview of open source node tools available from Walmartlabs.

 

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Ben Acker writes mobile services by day and hacks hardware at night in the mountains near Portland, OR.


 

Debugging and Performance Analysis of NodeJS Applications Using DTrace/mdb by Max Bruning (Joyent)

 

This talk will demonstrate the use of DTrace to analyze performance issues for a given NodeJS application.   DTrace is a tool that allows you to examine the entire software stack, from the OS, though the v8 engine, to your application.   The talk will make use of Manta (Joyent's Object Store) to allow you to use Joyent's SmartOS tools to debug and analyze  your node application, regardless of the target operating system for your application.  The talk will start with a brief description of SmartOS, Manta,  and DTrace, and then go through analysis of an example node application.  The talk will also briefly describe flamegraphs (a visual aid to help "see" where an application is spending its time), and the use of mdb to do post-mortem debugging of a node app, primarily useful in finding memory leaks.

 

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Max Bruning began using and programming Unix-based systems while obtaining a Master's degree at Columbia University in the late 1970's.

 

He has been teaching Unix Internals, Device Drivers, and various other courses since 1981.  Max has also spent many years doing kernel development, device driver work, and debugging work, mostly on SVR4-based systems.  

 

He has done consulting and/or training work for Bell Labs, AT&T, Motorola, Sun Microsystems, HP, Siemens-Nixdorf, and various other companies. Max has had articles published on device drivers, ZFS,  Solaris/Linux/Freebsd kernels, and application programming on Solaris and Linux.  In September, 2010, he started porting Linux KVM to SmartOS for Joyent.

 

He is currently the Training Director at Joyent, and working on a NodeJS performance and debugging course.  He also teaches DTrace and ZFS Internals courses for Joyent.

 

See http://www.joyent.com/blog/filter:bruning for a list of recent blog posts.  He can be reached on twitter at @mrbruning.

 


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UX Design:  How to Better Shape Tools that Shape Us by Vasudhara Kantroo (Yahoo)

 

As hackers and makers we continuously strive to change the world around us. We invest in an idea's potential as a product to simplify our lives. Consequently, while consuming the simpler life enabled by these incredible digital products, we inevitably alter our expectations of what is meaningful. 

 

In this talk, I discuss through illustrative examples and a historical perspective, how the key design objectives of usefulness, usability and desirability have powered what we find engaging in products (specifically on the Internet). And more importantly how, over time, these products have come back to shape our perception of what is useful, usable and desirable. Finally, I'll juxtapose some of these ideas to raise questions that we as hackers, makers and product creators must constantly ask ourselves.

 

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Vasudhara Kantroo is a User Experience Designer with the Platforms group at Yahoo. She is an enthusiastic participant in the culture of hacking and making, while also likes asking questions to understand not just the contexts but also the implications of what makers make. Some of her experience includes optimizing workflows in developer tools, designing robotics for small scale agricultural farms, creating accessibility solutions to cater to the needs of special needs kids.

She has a Masters degree in HCI from Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Bachelors in Technology with a focus on Information & Communication Technology from DA-IICT, India. She is a past participant and national level winner of the international student competition, Microsoft Imagine Cup in Software Design (2007).

 

 

 


 

Using Titanium and its Alloy MVC framework to build native cross-platform mobile apps from a single code-base by Ricardo Alcocer (Appcelerator)

 

 

In this presentation you’ll learn how to use Titanium’s MVC framework and its powerful platform-specific directives to build native mobile apps that conform to each platform’s usability patterns.

 

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Ricardo Alcocer has been working with Titanium since 2010 and formerly conducted training sessions in the Caribbean and Latin America.  He currently works as Lead Developer Evangelist, responsible for conducting developer community outreach globally. 

 


 

 

Using YQL by Guilherme Chapiewski (Yahoo)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Yahoo! Query Language - YQL - is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across web APIs. With YQL, your apps can run faster with fewer lines of code and a smaller network footprint. YQL is specially useful when you want to hack or even build production-grade apps using a number of different publicly-available APIs with very fast bootstrap time and very little effort. This talk will guide you through the basics of YQL and will get you ready and in the best position to win any hack competition ;)

 

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Guilherme Chapiewski (a.k.a. "GC") is Sr. Engineering Manager at Yahoo, where he became passionate and advocate for YQL after joining in 2010. He has been working with professional software development since 1999 and over the years became specialist in high-scalable and high-performing applications development using Java, Python, JavaScript among a variety of languages and technologies. More recently he became part of the Mobile and Emerging Products group at Yahoo, where he leads the team building mobile Search experiences for iOS and Android.

 


 

 

All things Pure by Tilo Mitra (Pure CSS - Yahoo)

 

Pure is a set of small, responsive CSS modules that you can use in any web project. In this talk, Tilo will talk about everything related to Pure. Find out how to work with Pure components and extend them to create beautiful and intuitive websites and apps. Learn more about how Pure plays well with other frameworks, and add some visual polish to your next project.

 

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Tilo Mitra is a front-end engineer on the YUI team who dabbles in all-things JavaScript and CSS. He's canadian but he hates the cold, eh.

 


Hadoop at Yahoo – Now and Beyond by Sumeet Singh (Yahoo)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No one else does as much with Hadoop every single day than Yahoo. We are the largest Hadoop user and a key contributor across all areas of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. The talk will highlight some of the notable use cases of Hadoop at Yahoo and state-of-the-art technology stack we have today that puts us at the frontier of Hadoop scale.

 

The talk will then cover where we are headed in the areas of core Hadoop, low latency processing, BI and adhoc queries, and developer tools, and how we see the technology stack evolving in order to advance the personally ordered Internet.

 

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Sumeet Singh is Head of Products for Cloud Services and Hadoop at Yahoo responsible for product management, customer engagements, evangelism and community development, and program management for the Cloud Engineering group. In this role, he also leads the Hadoop products team responsible for both Apache open source contributions and Yahoo projects. Sumeet has over 14 years of product management, product development, and strategy consulting experience in the technology industry. Sumeet earned his MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management and MS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY.

 

 


OpsCode Chef by Charles Johnson and Bakh Inamov (Opscode)

 

Opscode Chef is an open source configuration management tool that embraces the idea of Infrastructure as Code. We'll show you how Opscode Chef can easily describe both simple and complex application environments, and provide re-usable libraries that can be used across different projects. We'll cover the basics of Chef, talk about the way Chef code sees the world, and show a small number of the primitives available to help you model your infrastructure in simple, consistent, repeatable ways.

 

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Charles Johnson - A career sysadmin, Charles has designed, built, and run web infrastructure for Adobe, Mattel, Intel, Dell, AMD, SAP, and dozens of other companies. Also, he once helped build the worst cloud hosting service you've (hopefully) never used, but we don't talk about that.

 

An avid Chef user since 2010, Charles joined the Opscode team in 2012. He helps Opscode customers solve problems with systems architecture, build completely automated continuous delivery pipelines, and create & refactor systems automation code. He's also written and delivered training curriculum around Chef to hundreds of students.

 

Bakh Inamov teaches people how to use Chef. He has a habit of breaking stuff, just to fix it later. A systems engineer by trade, Bakh has helped numerous startups get their IT systems, business processes and products up and running. A Chef practitioner since 2012, a member of the Opscode team the summer of 2013.

 

 

 


 

Data Meets Design by Maria Zhang (Yahoo)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How did the beautiful mobile apps come come to life at Yahoo Mobile? - by leveraging great UI to deliver relevant information to users from a massive data pool. Maria will share design insights to build beautiful mobile apps. She will share a peak through the curtain at the beautiful UI to see the massive amount of data that drove the ultimate user experience.

 

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Maria is a Sr. Director of Engineering at Yahoo! Mobile. She and her team are building the Yahoo iPhone and Android apps. She was the founder and CEO at Alike, a startup where mobile meets big data. Alike was acquired by Yahoo in February 2013. Maria led product development teams at Microsoft and Zillow previously. She studied Computer Science at Tsinghua University and E. Michigan University.

 


 

You want to hack on the Flickr API. Here's why... by Chris Martin (Yahoo)

 

The Flickr API is one of the most extensive and powerful product APIs ever created, granting access to a repository of over 9 billion photos and an amazingly huge collection of related metadata. This talk will give details about the API, how we use it internally to power flickr.com and our mobile apps, and examples of some of the most creative uses we've seen that show how it can be used to do so much more than upload and display photos.

 

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Chris is the engineering lead for API and integrations at Flickr.

 


 

Introducing the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) by Scott Purdy and Matt Taylor (Numenta)

 

This new open source library is based concepts first described in Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence and subsequently developed by Numenta Inc. NuPIC consists of a set of machine learning algorithms that accurately model layers of neurons in the neocortex. NuPIC’s algorithms continuously learn temporal patterns, make predictions, and detect anomalous behavior within streaming data. These are the same algorithms and code used in Numenta’s commercial product, Grok.

 

NuPIC represents a new approach to machine learning and machine intelligence. Given the large interest we have had from people wanting to study these algorithms and apply them in novel ways we created the NuPIC open source library and the accompanying Numenta.org website.

In this hands-on session, we’ll introduce NuPIC’s Online Prediction Framework (OPF) and demonstrate how one creates models using an OPF client. We’ll set up some live streaming data to pass into the client and watch as NuPIC makes online inferences, learning the changing patterns in the streaming data set. NuPIC and the OPF have been applied to many scenarios and form the foundation for Numenta’s commercial product, Grok. To master NuPIC you will have to become comfortable with concepts such as sparse distributed representations and on-line learning. You can read about these concepts and the algorithms in this white paper:https://www.numenta.com/htm-overview/education/HTM_CorticalLearningAlgorithms.pdf.

 

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Scott Purdy works on the algorithms and infrastructure at Numenta and leads the engineering for the open source project. He previously worked on conversion tracked ads at Google and studied computer science at Cornell University. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Scott now lives in San Francisco.

 

Matt Taylor is currently the Open Source Community Flag-Bearer for Numenta.org, as well as the Manager of Web Services for Numenta’s commercial product, Grok. He’s been a committer on several OS projects like Grails (at SpringSource) and Mojito (at Yahoo!). He lives with his wife and two children in Cupertino, CA.

 


 

 

The Tumblr API by John Bunting (Tumblr)

 

In this talk, John will go through many of the different ways you can interact with tumblr from an API and demo some cool examples of how you can integrate and use Tumblr.

 

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John is the API Lead of Tumblr, working on all things API and third party integrations.

 


Firefox OS Intro by Nick Desaulniers

 

Firefox-OS dev phones have been selling out. For those interested in upcoming phone platforms and the easier initial game and app discovery opportunities they potentially represent, we're happy to announce an Introduction to Firefox OS with Nick Desaulniers. 

 

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Nick Desaulniers is a young software engineer fighting for the open web at Mozilla.  When Nick is not helping third party developers target Firefox OS, he's hacking on the Firefox OS Simulator, contributing to Rust, or compiling C/C++ to JavaScript with Emscripten.  Nick is fond of learning numerous programming languages, just in time compilation, and high performance JavaScript.  Contributing open source software and a free Internet for all are some of the things that Nick is most passionate about.

 

 


 

Yahoo BOSS: A quick hacking guide to Search and Geo API's by Rahul Hampole (Yahoo)

 

Yahoo BOSS provides access to various search and geo technologies. This talk provides an introduction to BOSS, how to start building hacks with it and how it can be mashed with other services provided by Yahoo to build cool hacks quickly. 

 

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Rahul has been with Yahoo! Search since 2010 and is currently a Sr. Product Manager, Search Syndication. Rahul currently manages the BOSS API Product offering and in that role defines the product roadmap, execution plans, support model, terms of use, etc. The larger Search Syndication team is tasked with working with Y! Search partners large and small to build compelling user facing search experiences and to bring Y! Search to millions of users every day on both desktop and mobile. The team is based out of Sunnyvale, CA.  Rahul has been developing applications on BOSS for 3+ years  and in a former life was a Java architect. In his spare time, you will find Rahul enjoying the best outdoor activity that Northern California has to offer, including Hiking and Sailing.

 


Hardware Hacking by Venkat Venkataraju and Jeremiah Wuenschel (Yahoo)

 

This hardware workshop will be a fun and creative way to stretch your hacking skills.  At this beginner workshop for Arduino, learn to make interactive wearable electronics with LEDs and sensors using lilypad kit.

 

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Venkat Venkataraju has been at Yahoo for 6 years.  He's been an avid hardware hacker since adolescence, taking apart old electronics to make franken-circuits as a teen.  Arduino has been a passion for the past 3 years, and he's very interested in the 'internet of things' that is rapidly becoming the norm.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jeremiah Wuenschel has been at yahoo for 5 years.  He started working on on embedded systems initially.  He also enjoys hacking with Arduino and PIC processors and has been playing around with electronics for more than 7 years.

 

 

 


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Hacking with Nodecopters (limited to 6 groups) 

This workshop, facilitated by Emily Rose (@nexxylove), will be an interactive session aimed at getting people acquainted with how to hack Nodecopters.   

 

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Nexxy has been making magic happen with node.js, arduino & omap devices. formerly with @ninjablocks, now hacking mobile devices with @saucelabs. passionate about hardware, community & inclusivity. feudal lord of node.js IRC. purveyor of fine copters and robots. future cyborg.

 

 

Register to attend Yahoo Hack USA