Chad Dickerson’s keynote speech this morning talked about how he hacked Yahoo!. Hacked Yahoo! the company itself and not code, mind you. In his speech, “Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!, Chad talked about the Hack Day that Yahoo! hosted last year.

Normally this wouldn’t seem quite so remarkable, but in light of the recent “peanut butter” memo it is reinvigorating to see Yahoo! working to be more edgy and more open. The memo outlined that Yahoo! was lacking a cohesive strategy and that duplicated projects were rampant. Chad showed us how even a company like Yahoo! can break out of its rut and get developers excited about hacking.

Hack Day was held last year on the Yahoo! campus where people camped, rocked and hacked all in the space of a weekend. Inspired by the proliferation of tech camps (Foo Camp, Bar Camp, etc), Yahoo! took it one step further and hired popular rocker Beck to come and play a concert for all the people assembled on Yahoo!’s campus in Sunnyvale.

The key to Hack Day was some team building by having the Beck concert on Friday night and then Saturday hacking on whatever people fancied. The keyword here is whatever — Yahoo! set no agenda or rules what people could hack on. Some people hacked with Yahoo! API’s and others used non-Yahoo! APIs — one person even used a Google API. Everything was cool.

What was probably the most important aspect of Hack Day was that key developers from the Yahoo Developer Network and important projects like Flickr were present and hacking alongside everyone else. I’ve long believed in the power of getting people together in the same room to discuss things. O’Reilly did a fantastic job of this for the first P2P conference when it brought a bunch of P2P hackers to San Francisco for the conference. Many of these people had never met in person and watching the open exchange of idea when people met face to face was exhilarating (and exhausting!).

Hack Day worked on this important principle. Bring people together (on the Yahoo! campus), build some excitement (let Beck rock their world) and then hack all night long with important hackers from far and wide. Some of my best learning and inspiration came from sitting in the labs at Cal Poly hacking along side with older students. Learning by proximity of cool and intelligent people will teach you much more than cracking open a text book any day.

More specifically, the rules for hack day were:

  1. Build something in 24 hours (NO POWERPOINTS!)
  2. Present it to everyone at the end of the day in 90 seconds
  3. No prior review of projects — anything goes.

Simple rules with no real limitations — I like it. So, what did Yahoo get as a result? First and foremost it got many excited developers who enjoyed rubbing shoulders with other hackers. Second, some cool projects came out of Hack Day:

  • Blogging in Motion: A purse with a pedometer, cell phone and Flickr integration. Every 100 steps the purse took a picture and posted the picture to Flickr.
  • ybox: Konfabulator for your TV — An old TV was converted into a widget display system. The hardware lived inside an Altoids tin and had an Ethernet plug and TV outputs. To program it you’d use its web interface. Cool!

So, what is the recipe for making cool things happen? Bust out a blank canvas, cool people, no restrictions and a lot of Red Bull. Throw in a dash of rock, camping and attention to detail and watch cool things unfold!