It was a huge success. There were so many hacks. Way more than last time. The quality and thinking behind the hacks was also improved. This tells me the initiative is working. People see the value of this and are taking advantage of the opportunity to express themselves in this manner. I believe that it's one of the best things Yahoo! has done. At least internally.
The room was packed. I don't think I can discuss specific hacks, but there were very clever innovations presented. I believe there were many more search hacks this time. Upcoming, Y! Widgets, Flickr, Autos, Shopping, 360, Local, Travel, WebJay, Maps, Messenger, Mail, and more were all represented and hacked in one form or another. I'm sure you'll be seeing many of them appear live on the site in the near future. Actually it would be cool to somehow identify the new feature or service as something that was developed through Hack Day when it goes live. At the very least the orgs respective blog should blab about it.
I don't know when the next one will be, but I'm preparing. I said earlier that I'm going to learn to program and I meant it. I taught myself pretty much everything I know this far, so why should I stop now? I'm starting with Ruby on Rails, because I hear it's elegant and simple, plus I believe I can understand object oriented structured. I'm also going to brush up on web standards, CSS, and XHTML. It's been awhile and much has changed since I every seriously had my hands on the stuff behind the page. First I believe that this is the only way to get some of my ideas out there, and second, I fit in with nutty programmers and designers more than I do with PMs. I've done the design thing, so now I'm going to try the other side. We'll see how that works. L8r
