You may have heard about Hack Days at Yahoo!. These are internal 24-hour events where Yahoo! developers drop everything and work on something cool. For many of us, every day is hack day, but the real benefit of the official Hack Day is that you can take advantage of the resources at the company to help with your own cool hack - in fact, we’re having our next one this week!

But there’s more. On September 29-30, we are holding a public Hack Day. The first day, Friday, is a workshop-style Developer Day where you’ll meet a number of Yahoo! engineers and get hands-on information and training. The YUI guys will be there in full force showing off their latest Javascript magic. Douglas Crockford will teach you more about Javascript in an hour than you thought was possible, I’ll do my PHP thing, and you will hear from the Flickr, Delicious, Mail, Messenger, Maps, and of course, Search folks. Then that night chill out with the mashup Djs - Adrian + the Mysterious D. Saturday night’s entertainment has yet to be announced, but the rumors sound interesting.

On Saturday the hacking commences. Bring your ideas, team up with people and come up with something cool. What better way to create a hack involving Flickr than to work with one of the Flickr engineers? Or if you have trouble getting a certain neat CSS hack to work, grab Matt. PHP not cooperating? I can probably figure it out. There will be a critical mass of resources to solve just about any web hack problem. Hack Day has proven to be fun and effective here at Yahoo!, and I think it is going to be even more interesting as a public event.

If you are interested in participating, please go to HackDay.org.

Rasmus Lerdorf
Infrastructure Architect