ajarora^1.0

As I sit here on a plane from LAX to London (12 hours!) and read Chad’s post on the history of Hack Day (I had synced up reader using Google Gears), I am once again reminded of how it is that I got here. But many of you (I say that pretending people read this blog) may not know the story.

I’ve revived the post about hack day from my old blog…and after that day I obviously felt that Yahoo! would be the best place to work in the world. So I emailed the guy who set it up and told him the same thing. Next thing I know I had an offer for an internship with the Yahoo! Developer Network.

There was no doubt that this internship would be better than my last one in Indianapolis. My manager last year had gone to Purdue as well and lived in a church at Christian co-op for his first few years, and commuted 2 hours a day to school after that. Don’t get me wrong, that’s commendable and all…but he certainly lacked social and communication skills (no offense if you read this some day), and our team had little respect for him because of it.

Chad and Dan are the complete opposite. Ever since my first day they (and the rest of the team) have treated me like family, and it’s unbelievable how much that kind of environment facilitates work as well.

There’s kind-of joke where everybody I meet out here calls me “the intern”. But the reason it’s funny is because nobody treats me like one. I’m open to express ideas and project proposals like any other guy at the company…something that would typically be impossible because of how shy I am anyway.

So when I told Chad that I’d found a cheap ticket to London for this weekend and asked if it was OK if I took a few days off to go to Hack Day, he said he’d be glad to cover it and that I could work from the UK office. Yahoo rocks. I’m even gonna stay in a youth hostel in the city so I can save this awesome company some cash (I’m trying to have some corporate responsibility!).

Before I started I daydreamed about working with and talking to the geniuses that had given talks at Hack Day, and coming up with ideas and features for products. But I had convinced myself that it was a completely naïve notion and that there was no way that real work could be as great as Hack Day was. But those things are exactly what I’ve been doing, and there’s no place I’d rather be than at work.

So now I’m on my way to London for a Hack Day. And it all started with the first Open Hack Day last year. Hack Day changed my life, and I’m not the only one.

Chad said it best last year when he spoke about putting Hack Day together with Bradley:

It was Bradley who gave me that patented Bradley look that said, “dude, this is TOTALLY POSSIBLE!” and quietly lit the fire under me to make it happen. I’m hoping that everyone out there has a boss like this one day. Some of my fondest memories of this whole process were high-fiving Bradley in various meetings as we started to get the sense of what we were planning. We just couldn’t wait to share what we were doing with the world. Thanks, Bradley, for making work so fun.

Sorry for all the lame mushiness lately…but multiply what Chad said about Bradley x10 for every dude on the team.

Update: I’ve created a Yahoo! Trip Plan for London Hack Day

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