Hacking 101

Christian Heilmann | http://wait-till-i.com | http://scriptingenabled.org

Delhi, India, University Hack Day, January 2009

नम#$

Namaste

I’m Chris, hacker and geek.

I am today here to introduce you to what hacking means

to us.

To me it means:

“Altering a system to do what you want it to do using what

is at your disposal.”

It also means having a lot of fun trying to make things do what they weren’t made for.

It is unrestrained innovation.

So welcome, innovators!

We want you to show us what can be built using the systems

we (and others) offer...

...that makes a difference in your lives and make the

things you care about easier to achieve.

Find something that always annoyed you with systems

you use...

...and build a workaround.

You’ll be amazed about the impact this can have.

To reach hackvana you need three things:

Access, Data and an Interface.

Access is granted to you via feeds, web services and SDKs.

Feeds are data in a predictable format, for

example RSS.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/restaurants

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/restaurants/rss

Web services are quite similar, only they allow you to filter down the data you

want.

http://answers.yahooapis.com/

AnswersService/V1/questionSearch?

query=delhi+puppies&region=in&lang=en&

appid=yahoodemo

... lots more...

http://developer.yahoo.com/answers/V1/questionSearch.html

They also allow you to get the data in other formats to

easily re-use it.

The idea of hacking is to use this data, mix it up with other

ideas and other data to provide a better service for

the end user.

This is dead easy these days!

There’s Yahoo Pipes for mixing, filtering and

matching.

http://pipes.yahoo.com

Or if you like SQL-style data conversion there’s YQL:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/

Both of these systems allow you to reach data from Yahoo

and other services and pre-filter it for use in your own

hacks.

Data however is not enough.

Building *working* web interfaces is a specialist skill.

I’ve been developing for the web for 12 years and it still is a

mystery to me why some things just don’t work.

The technologies are easy enough:

HTML for structure

CSS for presentation

JavaScript for behaviour

Where it gets truly annoying is the unknowns.

You have no idea about the user’s setup, ability or rights

to change their technical environment.

And then there are the browsers and all their

wonderful bugs and quirks.

This is why it is a good start to use libraries or frameworks.

Here are our helpers:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ http://mobile.yahoo.com/developers

YUI

BluePrint

Using these, you can quickly build interfaces that work on

the web and mobiles.

What about reach?

The newest way of access that systems and companies allow you these days is opening up

their address books.

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/http://developer.yahoo.com/social/socialdir/

http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php

Instead of building it and waiting till people come, build

where the people are.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/

And build with what they use already.

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/

How about some hack examples?

I use SlideShare – a lot.

http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/slideshows

One cool thing is that SlideShare automatically creates transcripts of your slides:

So I’ve used this to create a version that is easily

accessible for blind people or those who don’t have Flash.

http://icant.co.uk/easy-slideshare/?slides=http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/playing-with-the-web-

presentation

Using YQL, it was also easy to write a JavaScript wrapper that allows you to show the transcripts with your slides.

http://www.wait-till-i.com/2009/01/11/adding-transcripts-to-presentations-embedded-from-slideshare-using-yql/

I use Twitter – a lot.

I got all this emails from Twitter telling me about

people following me.

What I didn’t get was it telling me when people left me.

Or what I was telling the world before they left me.

So I dug into the API a bit and built TweetEffect.com

http://tweeteffect.com/?user=codepo8

I put it up, and started testing edge cases.

One of them was Guy Kawasaki, whom I knew has a lot of followers and updates.

One of them was Guy Kawasaki, whom I knew has a lot of followers and updates.

And that started a landslide of visitors, comments and ideas

for it.

Guy KawasakiGuy Kawasaki

Ryan CarsonRyan Carson

Tim O'ReillyTim O'Reilly

And without knowing it, I became a startup to watch!

What about reach?That was me, time for you to

show what you can do!

Innovation is not a matter of skill or being in the right job

position.

It is a matter of wanting to change what we have and be

ready to play.

We do this to help you see your potential.

And we do this to see if we do a good job in explaining our

offers to the developer world.

The web is yours, go out and play!

Access happens on several channels.

T H A N K S !

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nez/378349478/