Yahoo Hack-U
Last week, Yahoo! held a Hack day at my school, so my friend and I decided to participate/compete (there were some cool prizes). We made a little maps application that is accessible from both the web and via text messaging, but more on that later. First, what exactly is a Hack Day? So Yahoo! has been holding these events for a year (or a couple, I’m not really sure) and essentially they consist of one twenty-four hour session where you form teams and build something cool and useful. Yahoo! always provides food, entertainment and some help. In general they are really fun events for hackers. Most of the time the hacks are exactly that, very few of them turn into successful businesses.
University Hack Day’s are exactly the same thing. Yahoo! came to our school, had a couple talks about their API’s and about PHP, and then they let us form teams and hack away. We only had about 5 hours though, so in terms of technical complication, we couldn’t do anything spectacular.
My friend and I are pretty entrepreneurial-minded, and we always share ideas with each other. The application that we created is one of the ideas that we discussed some time in the spring, but we just never got around to working on it. In that sense the Hack Day was awesome, because it gave us time to crunch out a prototype, and it gave us more incentive to keep working on it. Apart from that, both of us think the idea is pretty useful, and I know for a fact that people have been wanting an app like this to be built.
The application that we built was a meeting place locater that finds locations closest to the middle of the parties involved. Currently it only supports two parties (inputted as addresses), but we plan to expand it to several. The user experience is as follows: the user inputs his/her address and his/her friends address and selects a type of place that they’d like to meet, and a map pops up with markers indicating locations in between the two addresses that match the search query. From the text-messaging interface, the user sends us a text message with the two addresses and location type and we send them back the address and phone number of the best result. It’s a pretty simple idea, but it’s something that we feel people would want to use in a variety of situations.
Technologically it was pretty simple. We used Yahoo!’s geocoding API to get latitude and longitude data and find the midpoint. Then we send a query to Yahoo! with the midpoint and the location type, and we get back data about the results that best match this query. Finally we plot all of this on a map. Naturally there are plenty of improvements that we can make here, but we didn’t have that much time, so we decided to keep it simple.
The text-messaging interface was really hack-y. Essentially, the text message is sent to a Gmail account, which gets routed to my Apple Mail.app on my locale machine. On my computer, I have an Applescript script to check my Mail.app inbox for new mail, and parse out the necessary data from it. I also have another Applescript script that takes in the data and sends an e-mail from Mail.app. (Both of these are fairly simple to code in Applescript, which is pretty awesome). Both of these scripts are wrapped in a PHP script that’s infinitely looping. The PHP script takes the info from the incoming e-mail and fetches data from Yahoo! (similar to the web interface). Then it calls the outgoing script. Clearly this implementation is pretty bad and obviously doesn’t scale, but it worked in our demo’s and that was really all that mattered.
The web interfaces is up and running and can be viewed at Ingapo. It’s called Ingapo which in Tamil (both my and my friends native language) means “go there.” Since the text messaging interface runs locally on my machine, I don’t keep it running. Also I’m pretty sure things will break if I receive and e-mail that’s not intended to be parsed by the scripts.
On the whole though, Hack day was fun and really worthwhile. I hope to attend some of the other ones (there’s one every year at Yahoo!’s headquarters) and in fact, the two of us may end up heading to Sunnyvale in the spring to participate there. It was also interesting to see some of the other ideas which were very cool as well.
What do you think of our idea? Do you think it would be useful?
Tags: Hack-day, ingapo, programming, projects