Yahoo! Open Hack India is Here

Hi ,
India's most awesome developer event 'Yahoo Open Hack Day' is back.  Here is few tips if you are planning to attend.

Text Editors
On HackDay you need to come up with the hack in just 24 hours of time, Which is short time, so make yourself ready with right tools.
If you already have your favorite text editors make sure that they are  javascript/HTML/CSS ready. If you Do not have one I will recommend you to use Komodo Edit (on all platforms). Komodo has built-in support for web languages like HTML, Javascript and CSS.  I will strongly recommend you to use Komodo but you have some more options here
Notepad++( for windows).
Textmate on Mac is fair deal.
Vi (try installing snipmate and other useful vi plugins)

Brush up on Javascript HTML and CSS
Though your are free to hack in any language possible, I will recommend you to learn javascript(CSS and & HTML). Yahoo hack day is the best place to get your hands dirty on these languages. Javascript is most popular language in the world already and it spreading on all possible computing device.  So better you make up your mind to learn them. Era of things like GWT and ASP.net (where you bypass these languages to get the things done) is Over.
Watch this video to know how to start writing and executing javascript. Here is awesome video to know deeper in javascript. This is from Doug Crockford, based on his book "Javascript Good parts" available for Kindle. (do you know kindle is available for PC?).


YQL / YUI3 / jQuery
YQL is best things ever invented after AJAX and JSON. YQL has tables for almost  all popular ajax/REST APIs on web. Just spend a lil bit of time to understand YQL and I will promise you will have easy time on hack day.
YQL is awesome for doing page scraping. You can also try my hack.

YUI3 is very professional javascript library to work with, but since this is going to be a hack-day, i will personally recommend you to use jQuery for quick win.


Web Browser (+firebug)
firefox (with firebug/Yslow plugin) is very popular browser among web developers. You can use chrome as well. The whole idea behind having firebug is you will be able to debug your code right in the browser. Chrome developer tool is not bad,  you can watch this video to get familiar about it.

Other things
Get a  Camera, there will several moments to capture.
Do not bring any food , you will get hell lot of that right at the venue.
I have quite a few of hacks posted on my blog they will be a good example of how to quickly create a hack , but they are not winning hacks ;)