Taking the pulse of tech

Posted October 3rd, 2008 at 1:05 pm by Tom Hughes-Croucher, Yahoo! Developer Network

Number of Comments No Comments / Filed in: Behind the Scenes, Conferences/Events

I go to a lot of tech conferences — it’s part of my job. But the last one was pretty different. It was very, very purple. Earlier this week, I walked among Yahoo! geeks from all over the world, exploring the cutting edge in technology. At our inaugural Tech Pulse, organized by our CTO Ari Balogh, I saw sessions on everything from how Yahoo! is opening up our whole platform to developers, to how we can generate the most interesting content on our front page for you as an individual, to how we find the most relevant advertising for searches about “yoga.”

As a technical developer, it’s a wonderful feeling to go where you are utterly out of your depth, and yet realize that you’re surrounded by people who not only understand the material, but also have intelligent questions to ask. For two days, we all chose from among more than 50 lectures and no less than 80 less formal poster sessions. There were experts in geographic intelligence, accessibility, mobile widgets, data center efficiency, the future of drag-and-drop. Everything we talked about will affect you in ways you see… and some you don’t. For more technical detail, head over to our developer blog next week.

notes The theory behind Tech Pulse is simple: By having the inventors of all these key technologies explain them to the other techies, we’re making it possible to implement more of them for your benefit. Yahoo! is at heart a technology company and the more technology we have at our disposal, the more we can use it to create fun, useful, interactive experiences. The best way to spread all these amazing discoveries through our own tech community is to bring everyone together to listen and discuss. I’m sure that when all the engineers went back to the mothership, they shared their new knowledge with co-workers and the cycle of innovation started over again.

If nothing else, Tech Pulse emphasized the amount of raw talent at Yahoo!. While I can’t give away any secret sauce, trust that there’s an astounding depth of knowledge here to take concepts from theory to reality. We’re doing incredible things to create better experiences for you.

Tom Hughes-Croucher
Technical Evangelist
Yahoo! Developer Network

Tagged: conference, yahoo! developer network