Hack Week 2010
Ready, set, hack! This year’s Hack Week ran from March 8th through March 12th, and provided Tech students with a unique opportunity to show off their skills. Hack Week, sponsored by Yahoo!, is one of the most exciting yearly events in the College of Computing. This year, Yahoo! Web experts led discussions on the latest news in computing, gave hacking tips, conducted coding workshops, and gave lectures about geolocation services, Hadoop, YQL, and YUI. In order to help with coding, multiple APIs and tools from the Yahoo! Developer Network were provided. The week concluded with the University Hack Day competition, where students exhibited their coding skills in a fun, yet challenging environment.
Students were given 24 hours to design some sort of hack, such as a web application or a widget of some sort. Participants were required to present their hack within a limited time frame of about a minute and half by showing how the hack solves a respective problem. It was strongly advised that the competitors first state the problem and then the resolution, leaving the “how it works” part for last. Web Applications were typically presented and displayed on Yahoo!’s computers, but presenters could present widgets and other software on their own laptops. Coding began on Friday at 1pm and ran until Saturday, when the products, completed or not, were presented.
First place prize went to Shauvik Choudhary, Sahil Miglani, and Utkarsh Shrivastava for their hack,
“Video in Ymail”, a Firefox extension that allows you to record and send videos through your Yahoo! mail. Second place winner was Roger Pincombe’s “Importance Filter for Gmail”, which analyses the contents of your inbox and sets apart those you are most likely to reply to or star. Mike Hirth and Daniel Hopper got third place for their “Lyricist” hack.
