developer community event: Yahoo! Hack Day

I stopped by Yahoo! Hack Day last Friday (pre-Beck concert), and I wanted to congratulate Chad, Jeremy, Dan and the others involved from Y!DN on a fantastic developer event. Three things impressed me particularly:

1) You can consider your developer event a success with good tech press, blog, flickr & youtube coverage. But getting your local TV news anchor to exclaim how much she wants a Hack Day t-shirt is in the camp of impressive crossover coverage.

2) I particularly enjoyed reading this post by Ben (formerly of BBC/now of Citizen Agency) who we met briefly at Hack Day on the specific elements of what he thought worked better at this developer event than others he has attended. Phil took things a couple of steps further by contrasting the cultures and sensibilities of a more commercially-minded API developer crowd (even the term VAR is so 1996) with a hacker crowd. Bottom line: I think it's a good thing to recognize that not all application development is done by twenty and thirty-something, Silicon Valley-dwelling hipsters.

3) And speaking of recognizing and celebrating more parts of the developer spectrum, you gotta give props to a developer event where the best overall hack was a flickr hack from three women armed with the tagline "blog from your purse". That rules!