Shopit was originally supposed to go up to San Francisco solely for the PorC conference (see post below), but then, we were invited to attend Yahoo’s Openhack08 conference!  Sweet!

We hopped on a train and headed to Yahoo’s main campus in Sunnyvale, CA.  We got there, registered, and attended the crash courses.  Some of the topics covered in the courses were: Yahoo’s mobile platform Blueprint which let’s you easily build apps for the iPhone and other basic phones. OpenSocial, OAuth, and Y!AP.

After attending the Yahoo Application Platform (Y!AP) course, I got the urge to start up a Shopit hack for a possible entry into the openhack08 contest. I left my mouse at home but luckily Kent Brewster from Yahoo was kind of enough to lend me one so that I can move much faster.

I ended up successfully porting the Shopit application to the Yahoo Platform in about 4 hours.  Yahoo has put together a really nice platform and made it really easy to port.

After deciding that we were not going to stay an extra day (which required us to sleep in tents or on the floor of classrooms), we did not enter our “hack” into the competition.  Congratulations to cafe.com for winning openhack08.

Toward the end of the day, I sat in on a course taught by the one and only Rasmus Lerdorf (the creator of PHP).  I felt like I should write him a check!

We were then allowed to socialize a bit with some Pizza & Beer.  Geek to Pizza is like Cop to Donut.

We headed home and caught a flight out of San Jose to LA.  Surprisingly I ran into my cousin on the flight home and had a good time catching up.

All in all, it was a nice experience to mingle with some of the industry’s finest… and bitter sweet because although I was tired and wanted to head home, I would’ve liked to see where we would have stood in the contest…  oh and I missed an awesome performance from Girl Talk!

You can see all pictures via flickr from the event here.

–Troy

Our brilliant app developer Troy, and our COO Rhett, attended the recent Web App Dev Meetup hosted by the kind folks at Mahalo Wednesday night.

The first event speaker was Eric Marcoullier, CEO of Gnip. Eric spoke about the Gnip technology, which is focused on reducing the pain of constant pinging to servers every 15 minutes for updates from data providers such as Flickr, Twitter, Mahalo, etc. Hoping to amplify focus on creating great applications instead of aggregating data.

The second, a great presentation from Chris Schalk and Kevin Marks, Google Developer Advocates talking about Open Social; seamlessly getting user’s information out to the rest of the universe through a common API for social applications across multiple websites.

The event was a success…free education, free networking, and free food. What more could you ask for in a meetup? Looking forward to the next!