Whatever I think…

After working in one of the internal teams at Yahoo! for one and half years, I am moving on to a different team (Universal Profiles). While I am excited about the new opportunity, I will miss my current team members. That was a great experience working in a very small team at big organization like Yahoo!

Universal Profiles is a part of Y!OS (Yahoo! Open Strategy). Y!OS will allow third-party developers to access Yahoo! assets and build applications around them. Developers can distribute these applications on different Y! websites or on their own website. Profiles team will transition Yahoo! 360 and Mash to more advanced Yahoo! “Profile” experience. Another cool thing for me is — as a part of this move I am getting my HP laptop replaced with MacBook Pro…yeyy

To learn more about Yahoo! Open Strategy watch following video from Web 2.0 Expo where Neal Sample, chief architect at Y! explains Y!OS.

For last two weeks I have been working on converting Scriptaculous based UI elements to YUI based elements for one of the websites. This is a fun process and I learned a lot about YUI. While doing this I was also working on improving the site performance in terms of response time by making changes to the site frontend.

For improving the web performance of the site, I was following the research done by Y!’s Exceptional Performance Team. I am still working on this process. This is the first time I actually worked on CSS Sprites. I knew this technique but never got a chance to use it. I reduced the number of background images from 19 to 8, which means, 11 less http requests when page loads. Reducing number of http requests helps a lot in improving site performance. Y! has also created an amazing tool called YSlow, which can be used as Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug to measure site’s performance.

If you want to learn more about this, here is the interesting video on High Performance Websites:

This was my first time using YUI Rich Text Editor in one of my projects. RTE is very flexible and highly customizable component of YUI Library. As a test I was trying to get simple form submit to work with RTE. There was only one textarea and one submit button in the form and on click on submit I was trying to print HTML content entered in textarea using print_r. This was giving me an error saying “J.form.submit is not a function”. After spending lot of time figuring out the problem, I wrote my question to our internal frontend developers list. One of the developers here at Y! pointed out that my form submit button name and id attribute was set to ’submit’ and that was conflicting with form.submit. I changed the submit button name and it started working fine. I wanted to post this in my blog just in case if somebody is facing the same problem will find it useful.

Walt Mossberg saying:

This was a second Hackday at Yahoo! for me. I work on one of the internal portals here at Y!. My hack was a tool which measures user’s activity on this portal. Basically it was an interesting visual interpretation of existing data. Part of this visual interpretation was developed by using Y! maps api, and ChartDirector. This hack shows number of visitors to the site from different Y! offices on the map for any given date. I used internal search api to get visitor’s profile information including picture.

Last week I was in New York for our team offsite meeting. I was there for four days. That was such a great experience to see an amazing city for the first time. New York is so much different than other big cities in USA. It’s a very fast life. It’s good to visit and see all the attractions, but I would never move there. Manasi also joined me on Friday and we spent the weekend there. We were happy to see big Yahoo! sign at Times Square. We took Grey Line city tour for two days, that was fun too.

Sumo wrestling match between Yahoo! co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang.

There was a Hack Day at Yahoo! today. Yahoo! Hack Day is a day long event where programmers present innovative applications and mashups built using Yahoo! web services and products. Developers start working on their application twenty four hours before the presentation which was Monday noon this time. If you are participating you can work on the project regardless of your day to day work. Today there were one hundred and thirty hacks presented.

This was a first Hack Day presentation for me. I developed a hack called Apartments on Yahoo! Map. I built this using Y! Maps, Y! Pipes, Y! Answers and craigslist apartment listings. The way it works is—after user selects a city; script pulls apartment listings RSS feed from craigslist. This RSS feed is ran through Y! Pipes to extract the location information. Once I have the location information, I am plotting every apartment location on Y! Map using Maps API. This hack also uses answers API to query real-estate and apartments related questions asked by Yahoo users. See it in action here.

I have been reading a lot about YUI and I attended several training sessions on it too. I have been looking for a chance to develop something using YUI but never got it. Recently I used this open source library for developing “Star Rating Module”. In the past I have played with Dojo and developed some stuff with scriptaculous but I like YUI the most.

Another cool thing about this library is you can use library files served from Yahoo! servers. You can simply reference YUI Javascript and CSS files in your application from Yahoo servers. Since the files are hosted on Yahoo! you get advantages such as fast response times, optimized caching, and use of gzip compression. YUI is a great resource for small companies who develop web-based applications with rich user interface but don’t want to spend time and resources in developing JS components from scratch because of shorter timelines.

Recently yahoo released new tool called pipes.yahoo.com. This is a JavaScript based tool which lets you create RSS mashups through web-based visual interface. You can combine different RSS feeds and use the output of that combination in your web application. You can also apply customized filters to the data mashup. The site has some cool examples which will help user building their own pipes!

Here is the video created by Yahoo! Engineers demonstrating how to build pipes.