Hack India: Hyderabad is going strong! This hack is shaping up to be one of our most formidable, mirroring our current internal focus: collaboration, innovation and creating great products with speed.

With roughly 2 million developers, India has one of the largest developer presences across the globe. For that reason, and because of the enormous demand for our developer events across the region, we decided to add an additional city to our annual Bangalore event. Hyderabad is second only to Bangalore when it comes to developer concentration, so it was a natural choice when we decided to expand our India hack program.

Yahoo!'s external hack events in India have long been our most heavily attended. We received more than 4,000 applications for the 2012 Bangalore event alone! In anticipation of the usual enormous interest, we introduced a coding challenge for the first time this year as a way to simplify the selection process. Similarly to the coding challenge that we used at Hack China: Beijing, developers completed a series of problems before the event, and we used the results to ensure the top developers were invited to attend. More than 1,000 developers signed up for the Hyderabad coding challenge to compete for the coveted 250 spots. We also invited designers to apply, and are excited to have a contingency of them helping backend coders make their hacks look great.

Despite this week’s monsoon rains, the sun came out to welcome developers from more than 20 states to the first day of Hack India: Hyderabad. A local artist created a beautiful installation and coders had fun posing in front of it with props such as colorful wigs, boas, hats and slogan signs like “Certified Hacker.” .

And, of course, no Yahoo! Hack would be complete without bragging on the delicious food, including Biryani, a stewed rice dish that Hyderabad is famous for, regional specialties like a variety of curries and Kathi Rolls. We even shared a yummy tea time with coconut meringue and an assortment of cookies. And now we’ve dimmed the lights for an impressive laser show.

The tech talks were a combination of technical how-tos and best practices, with two tracks so that each hacker could design their own learning experience.

If not otherwise linked, you can find the presentation decks at YDN's SlideShare.

Speaker Bios

Niranjan Prithviraj | Front-End Engineer

Niranjan works with Yahoo! Small Business. His job is to make sure people find things simple, easy to use and, responsive. He predominantly works with front end technologies. He's had his fair share of run-ins with Y! Hack Days and won a couple of them. In his free time, he builds YUI/jQuery plugins or plays with cool stuff like createjs. You can find more about Niranjan at http://niranjanprithviraj.com

Presentation Deck: http://nbprithv.github.io/openhack2013-decks

Keshavaprasad Seshadri | Front-End and Back-End Tech Lead

Keshav works with Yahoo! Small Business. Currently, he works with the Dashboard team that is building the Yahoo! Small Business dashboard. Keshav works with both frontend and backend technologies. Formerly, he worked with D. E. Shaw & Co. You can find more about him at https://www.facebook.com/kbsbng and his blog: http://blog.kbsbng.com

Avinash Chukka | Front-End Engineer

Avinash is a frontend engineer who works on Yahoo! Small business applications. He is passionately creative, conceptually driven, quality orientated and always focused on the user! Avinash is an active participant at Yahoo! internal hack events and has won quite a few of them as well. Learn more about him here: about.me/avinash.chukka

Pradeep Banavara | Product Manager

Pradeep wanted to be a farmer, but since at first he didn't put much effort into becoming one, that didn't start well. After this, he trained to be an engineer and joined the IT Dept in the Govt. of Karnataka wanting to change the world. Instead the world changed him and he was soon out looking for a meaningful job. When that didn't come by easily, he became an entrepreneur so that he could employ himself. His fascination for internet lead him to Yahoo! Open Hack Days, where he discovered the joys of hacking and creating meaningful stuff. He then realized that the only way to do more of such stuff and be paid for it was to join Yahoo! At Yahoo!, he explores the ways in which technology can help people to be connected, and acts as an evangelist for such solutions to be adopted.

Presentation Link: http://www.slideshare.net/pradeepbv/what-the-hack-yahoo-hack-india-hyderabad-2013

Sumeet Mulani | Front-End Engineer

Sumeet is a front-end engineer (F2E) in the Yahoo! Contacts team, and has a keen interest in web-application security. His usual activity when he is working on an idea or hack is to convert caffeine into code. When he is not dealing with work, he doubles up as an electronic dance music DJ. Visit his home on the interwebs at http://sumeet.info

Presentation Link: http://www.slideshare.net/teemus/yql-yahoohack2013indiahyderabad

Sudar Muthu | Research Engineer

Sudar Muthu is a Research Engineer at Yahoo! Labs. He works on numerous internal and external projects related to information extraction, user engagement, semantic web and data mining for socially and behaviorally interesting data. He is passionate about programming for the web and mobile and loves to build websites from scratch. He generally likes to play around with gadgets and works on both Android and Arduino as a hobby. His favorite pastime is to build robots using Arduino and blogs at http://sudarmuthu.com

Presentation Link: http://sudarmuthu.com/blog/make-your-hack-standout-using-purecss

Amit Kumar | Senior Developer

Bio: Amit is a senior developer who is responsible for social @ Yahoo. He is a regular participant in Internal hack days and has won few. His current passion is SmartTV, Kinect and Machine Learning, spending most of his time reimagining web on TV.

Sourav Chakraborty | Software Developer

Sourav is a Software Developer in Yahoo's Consumer and Global Platform group. He likes to build cool stuff that performs and scales well, and is obsessed with code quality and performance.

Yash Dayal | Research Engineer

Yash is a seasoned web developer with experience of running large websites. He has solved many scalability problems in his career. He has also worked on improving the search engine for a popular Indian website. He is passionate about responsive web design. In his spare time, he likes to tinker with Arduino hardware projects.

Arunima Saboo | Interaction Designer

Arunima Saboo holds a masters in Interaction Design degree from NID, Ahmedabad. She has been working as a lead UX designer in Yahoo! for the past 3 years . Her area of interest is UX Research & Innovation. Passionate about her marathons, she is on a run working across different verticals in Yahoo! spanning from Media, Small Business & E-commerce to Ads & Data - always preaching simplicity in design.

Prasanna Revan | Principal Interaction Designer

Prasanna is a designer, illustrator, motorcyclist, and a dad with a degree in visual arts. With over 12 years experience in interaction design, he is passionate about art and design of user experience. His other distractions include, music, graphic novels and comics, sci-fi movies, farming, indology and vampires.

Shwetank Dixit | Web Evangelist, Opera

Shwetank Dixit works as a Web Evangelist in the Web Standards Team for Opera Software. He is also part of the W3C Mobile Web for Social Development Group and the W3C Web Education Community Group. He promotes open web standards and best practices amongst the developer community. His articles and interviews can be seen on dev.opera.com, .net magazine, The Hindu, Technorati, Times of India, PCQuest and more. You can follow him on Twitter as @shwetank and read more about him on his site:shwetankdixit.com

Sanket Patil | Data Weaver at DataWeave

Sanket Patil works as a DataWeaver for DataWeave. Sanket has a doctorate (Phd in Distributed Systems Design from IIIT). He looks into Product Strategy and Business Development for DataWeave. Sanket specializes in Distributed Algorithms, Datacentric Networks, Graph Theory, Complex Networks, Open World Systems. Sanket has two patents and made several publications. You can follow him on twitter at @sanketp and you can read more about DataWeave at their blog http://blog.dataweave.in