Yahoo! Open Hack Day Project
March 20, 2010
I’m directly from brhackday, SP! The event is amazing so far, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of stuff to blog on the next days (YQL is amazing, Yahoo! is getting more social, everything is very exciting around here).
But I want to talk about the project we chose to implement here for the competition (Thanks Leonardo and Gustavo, you’re being great so far! Hope we can make a great project out of this):
We’ll cross routes (from and to anywhere anywhere) with traffic and weather information (from the official traffic agencies) in São Paulo, to help users choose what route to take when using google maps.
So, what do you think? Will it be useful for you guys? Have already seen anything like this?? Any extra feature you would like to have in this system?
Any feedback will be greatly appreciated!
EDIT: There is a traffic layer on google maps, and it works pretty well. Don’t know why we haven’t seen it before, but it showed up here just before we begin the work. Actually, I think they used the exactly same structure we intended to use. Anyway, we dropped this project to work on a more useful one.
Yahoo! Open Hack Day Brazil 2010
March 10, 2010
I just received my registration confirmation to Yahoo! Open Hack Day Brazil 2010! I have a lot to study now, so you should expect to hear a lot about Yahoo! services (YQL, YAP, YUI3, Meme, etc) around here in the next weeks!
If you haven’t registered yourself yet, there’s still time! Go to http://openhackbrazil2010.eventwax.com/open-hack-2010-brazil and sign up!
Anyone else going? Any Yahoo! APIs you have experience and would like to share? Do so in the comments!
Just watched another great google tech talk. Its subject is the set of rules the guys at Yahoo came up with to make web sites faster. These rules are presented on the book “High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers“, available here.
What have made my eyes jump off the orbits was one single number:
Wow! So, only 5% of the time to load http://www.yahoo.com is used generating and downloading the html document? In the study, Steve Souders also says he learned this happen in all websites – not only on big companies’ sites. The only ‘exception’ is google, on a primed cache, and even then the html download time was only about 36%.
This means something. You should not worry to optimize this 5% if you’re worried about overall user experience (at least until you’re sure you’ve got a great and fast frontend). This means we should worry more with the javascript we write and the way we deliver web pages and sttic content.
About the rules: They’re so simple you should give them a shot. It’s something you could try on a couple of hours, just to see if they’re really effective on your case. Post in the comments section if the rules haven’t worked for you.
About the tools: There’s YSlow from Yahoo, Firebug (of course), and plenty of others.
- YSlow test your site against the set of rules mentioned above.
- Firebug has its JavaScript profiler, which is great.
- If you’re wondering which js lib to use on your next project, take a look at this link.
So the talk was great, and I’m gonna test the rules on a website I’ll be responsible to optimize over the next month. I’ll draw a graph of response time X implemented rule, and post it here when I’m done.
Rodrigo Gama 