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My introductory speech for the University Hack Day in Dundee Scotland talking about how hacking came to be and what is a socially acceptable hack.
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Dundee UniversityHack Day, Mark II
Christian HeilmannDundee, Scotland, November 2007
Welcome Hackers.
Hackers?
but in reality…
Karl Koch a.k.a.
Hagbard Celine
The “real” hackers had a dream.
“Wissen muss für jeden Menschen gleich zugänglich
sein!“
“Information is free and needs to be accessible for
everyone.“
The good news is that we are well on the way.
The other good news is that we don’t need to resort to
illegal activity.
More and more companies realize that offering
information for the world to re-mix is a great idea.
This starts with RSS feeds to subscribe to without having to
visit web sites.
…and it ends with full fledged Application Programming
Interfaces (APIs).
APIs allow access to systems and retrieve information in
the desired format.
What we do with this information is up to us.
Hacking with it is one idea.
Hacking in this case:You make a system do what
it doesn’t do out of the box.You built upon structures
that are already in place.
You can achieve that in different ways.
By mixing one system with another (a Mashup).
By accessing or displaying information in a different
fashion.
Interesting Platforms:–Maps
–Messenger
–Air / Flex
–Flickr
–Upcoming
Above all hacking should be about having fun and
achieving something you always wanted to try.
This is what Hack Day is inside Yahoo!
We want our developers to challenge our products and make them better for users.
We also want our developers to challenge themselves to
try something new.
And we want to challenge the business people to see what
is possible when you let developers play.
… and now we offer the same possibility to you.
Feel the developer’s itch.
Use APIs, systems, SDKs and ideas and do something
that helps you and isn’t available yet.
Past hacks that rocked:
Search everything (photos, videos, web) from inside your messenger.
Get images related to the lyrics of a song while you play it.
Tag files on your harddrive to find them later on. Share and collaboratively annotate pictures with others
using desktop widgets. Allow people to doodle on maps and send a replay to
their friends Offer live information on traffic problems using instant
messaging and mobile alerts.
Christian Heilmannhttp://wait-till-i.com
http://icant.co.uk
Get Hacking!
