“6 PM Food, Beer & Games”

Posted September 12th, 2008 at 7:30 pm by Sean Montgomery, Yahoo! Sports

 6 Comments / Filed in: Conferences/Events

When the post title above is a line item on your official schedule, you know that you’ve got something good going on. With the flood of classes and workshops winding down, hackers began filtering into the common area of Building C, drawn by the aroma of pizza and the dulcet tones of Rock Band projected onto the massive screen in front of the audience. Classic 80’s arcade games also littered the show floor, allowing a few of the older, yet young at heart, participants to relive their cherished memories of Street Fighter and Pac-Man glory. As you look around, you can see the crowds part as equipment-laden cameramen forge their way through the sea of people, or you might catch Filo chatting up a random hacker over a beer. The University Hack Day winners are, of course, still studiously working on their projects in a set of booths in the corner. I mean, they’re still in school. That’s how they roll.

By 6:38pm, we have our first pizza shortage. There had been somewhere on the order of thirty boxes delivered in the initial shipment, proving the evolutionary link between hackers and piranhas. However, beer continues to flow copiously.

T-shirt logos speak to the diversity of the attendants at this Open Hack Day. Canada is well represented by those sporting the “HACKDAY IS BACK, EH” outfits. University of Miami shirts and University of Illinois hats are making the rounds. Other companies are out in force – at a glance, OpenDNS, CNET, Adobe, or my ex-co-blogger JR Conlin making his return in his new Netflix gear. The Splunk employee is dominating at Rock Band. And of course, you have the Yahoo! employees wandering around in their “Crew” shirts (or just whatever Yahoo!-branded clothing they could pull out of their closets), helping to troubleshoot API questions or to direct confused hackers around the building, or more likely to just mooch all of the free pizza and beer, geez.

Hackers continue to mill about as we get closer to the concert start time. No concrete word on the secret performer just yet, but I’ve heard that it’ll be “mashup music”, which is fitting for the occasion. EDIT: The band is Girl Talk! I know nothing about them, but I’m looking forward to the show. In the meantime, we’ve replenished the pizza and the Rock Band rockers continue to thrill the adoring crowd, which is just about all you need.

Who the heck is writing this post anyway? Sean Montgomery authors the Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day blog and is guest-posting over the weekend. He would love to play with you in Rock Band.

Tagged: hack, open hack day

Post a Comment Bookmark This Digg This

6 Comments Add your own

EJ Campbell | September 12th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

It’s almost like I’m there with this nice description. Are there any photo’s of tonight’s festivities?

Sean Montgomery | September 12th, 2008 at 11:03 pm

A big chunk of photos from the Girl Talk concert were just uploaded to our photostream (check out the Flickr module to the right!), but you can also just generally find Open Hack Day photos by searching on Flickr for the tags “openhack08” or “hackday“. Thanks!

Ryan Lee | September 15th, 2008 at 10:26 am

Yeah, nice recap. It gave me a sense of what I missed out.

Lcd televizyon | October 26th, 2008 at 2:05 pm

wish i was there to guys
sounds great

Jacques Snyman | Website Design | June 7th, 2009 at 5:40 am

Nice little glimpse into the social aspects oif being a Yahoo! employee. I daresay that the free pizza and beer is deserved, and will definitely lead to improved performance from the employees. The comparison of hackers to piranhas is very apt too! Pizza does have legs of its own though!

haber | July 3rd, 2009 at 5:02 am

sound great an super