I paid a visit to the Yahoo! offices in London last week, having been invited to a “Yahoo! Developer Summit”. I was intrigued to find out what was going to happen at this “summit”, especially with 3 days allocated for it. I had assumed it was going to basically be a mini-conference with a mix of Yahoo! employees and outsiders attending. As it turned out it was basically an internal Yahoo! event with talks covering various topics, generally “web dev” related, to which a small number of external people had been invited.

Unfortunately, being pretty busy in work I was only able to attend on the Wednesday and some of Friday, but I still got to see a good range of talks. In fact the range of topics was pretty broad and not particularly Yahoo!-centric at all. I attended talks on “web security and XSS”, “High Performance Web Sites”, “Using Bazaar for Version Control”, “Working in Distributed Teams” and “Writing Engaging Tutorials”. There was also a great keynote from Simon Willison on using comet server push technologies, something I’m definitely going to use in the future.

I also have to mention the pub quiz that ended the summit. As Jeremy has mentioned we outsiders banded together to fight off the Yahoo! hordes. Apart from my absolute insistence that Firefox 1.0 was released on 19th December 2003 (I was thinking of the date of the New York Times advert, but got it wrong by 3 days and 1 year and the release actually occurred a month before anyway!) we still did pretty well coming in third, as Norm had said from the start “if you win, that means you’re the biggest geeks” so I’m glad to say our coolness held us back from that first place spot. I still got to choose a selection of Yahoo! merchandise to take home from which I took a delightful YDN t-shirt and an “Insta-Yodel!” (which I donated to SteveC at the OSM xmas party and he had lots of fun with).

So all-in-all I have to say I enjoyed the event, it was a shame I couldn’t make it to the whole thing, but 3 days was just too long to be out of the office (especially when Internets were in short supply at Yahoo!) I’d happily go along if invited again, hopefully Yahoo! will open it out to more people in the future too. Talking to some of the Yahoos there did seem to be a feeling that they should be doing more in the general community. I know that we at Multimap also want to get more involved in the web dev and mapping communities more in the future too so perhaps we can find a way to arrange a combined event in the future.