Originally posted on the WIT blog.  By Karen Bruner.

Yahoo! has been hosting company-wide Hackdays two or three times a year now for several years, and while Yahoos in the Southern California offices were welcome to work on hacks, they didn't have the support of an organized local event. That changed for Summer Hackday 2011. The SoCal chapter of Yahoo!'s Women in Tech group, with funding from the Yahoo! Developer Network, put together a great environment for local hackers to collaborate and concentrate on their hacks.

Prospective hackers listen to pitches over pizza

A week before Hackday, potential hackers came together to pitch ideas and find interested hackers. Hacking wasn't limited to engineers who fit the traditional definition of computer hacking. The Southern California offices have a large proportion of people in the advertising and business side, but they still have many of the necessary hacking skills: ideas, aesthetic input, and enthusiasm.

By the time Hackday rolled around, 19 hackers worked on several local projects that had come together. Hacks ran the gamut from ideas that could someday appear on the front pages of Yahoo!'s sites to internal tools that would make the behind-the-scenes run better. While most hackers were local to the Burbank office, Yahoos from the Santa Monica office also came to join the hacks. WIT volunteers kept them energized with drinks, munchies, and pizza.

SoCal Summer 2011 Hackers

For another first, the teams in Burbank got to present their hacks in the Friday afternoon demos via teleconferencing with Hackday HQ in Sunnyvale. Several dozen people, hackers and supporters alike, crowded in a boardroom over pizza and beer to watch the local demos. The enthusiasm and excitement from everybody was tremendous. Second-time Burbank hacker Srikanth Bangalore said this was a big improvement over his first Hackday, when he worked from his desk and had to record his demo so it could be replayed in the Sunnyvale demo session. Doing the demo live and having an energetic audience made for a very different experience.

A first: Burbank Hackday demos teleconfereced live with Sunnyvale 

Mariena Quintanilla's hack was related to her day-to-day work, a monitoring tool she had been needing for awhile but hadn't had time to work on. Hackday gave her the perfect chance. She found another would-be hacker to help out, and her tool will have an immediate impact.

With one successful Southern California Hackday under WIT's belt, the plan is to make this a regular event, allowing local Yahoos to tap their hacking talent more easily, which can only benefit Yahoo! as a whole.

Product Manager, Cloud Platforms Group  

I manage some exciting products at the Cloud Platforms Group (CPG), based at Bangalore.

My work revolves around the knowledge and personalistion space – I need to make sure that the products I manage create impact as a platform and power differentiated end-user experiences.

The cloud platform group is charted to create a global, scalable platform built on science that enables rapid innovation and delivery of personalized, monetizable experiences across devices. Some of the technologies that I work on are around detecting trends algorithmically and showing relevant trends based on user interest, geography, demography etc. I also work on personalization technologies that are helping in showing the right content to the right user at the right time. I find it exciting that so much of my work finally impacts user engagement and delight!

Yahoo! is one of the rare organizations that support women in different phases of their lives. I was hired and came on-board while I was expecting my baby. And I was very pleasantly surprised that my professional capabilities were weighed over my personal situation and I received complete support during the whole course of my pregnancy. I could actually continue to work without having to take a break in my career, and it feels just awesome to have been with an organization which truly believes in diversity and supports folks through different stages of their lives.

Today, my son who is a year and half plays around in the day care facility in the office, and all I need to do is catch a glimpse of him is pop down a couple of floors.

I have always believed that Life is about the choices one makes, and I am glad I chose Yahoo!.

“Girl Geek Dinner” in Bangalore

by Vartika Agarwal

What was the best part about this Girl Geek Dinner? One girl geek wrote in the feedback form, “There were no men.” Laughs aside, Yahoo!’s first Girl Geek Dinner in India generated a huge buzz for all the right reasons. From new entrants to industry veterans, girl geeks of every hue and standing came to this event, making it an unparalleled opportunity to network.

Over 275 women technologists from organizations like Cisco, NetApp, Google, Microsoft and IBM braved the rush-hour traffic to connect over dinner at The Leela Palace in Bangalore on June 9. Though the number of women in the tech industry in India has continued to climb since the dramatic growth of the IT industry in the mid ’90s, and is now around 25 per cent, networking events for women are not that common. For some attendees, Girl Geek Dinner was nothing short of inspirational. “It led me to realize that women can do more,” said one girl geek, referring to the real-life stories of women technologists achieving against all odds, shared that evening.

A networking version of Bingo served as an icebreaker and spurred interaction. But besides forging connections for the long term, there was one more reason to play. The grand prize for the competition was an iPad! (There was a collective gasp when a girl geek from Cisco walked away with it.)

Just before dinner, a discussion on a hot topic offered food for thought. Three accomplished women panelists, (including one Director from Yahoo!, a tech entrepreneur in India and a former VP of Engineering from Novell), debated the question, Are women considered geeky enough to climb the corporate ladder? The audience, a microcosm of the workforce, was the guest panelist in this discussion, revealing the diverse challenges they navigate everyday, during the Q&A that followed. Some came from conservative homes (“What do you do if your family does not support your decision to work?”) others were contemplating starting a family, or were rejoining the workforce (“Do you bribe your children with presents when you travel or work late?”)

While the consensus was that women technologists did not lack the capability, drive or passion to succeed, there were other factors, many of them personal, which slowed career growth. In India, while women are well represented in entry-level roles in the tech industry, they drop out of the workforce as they progress up the ladder. Global trade body NASSCOM puts the percentage of women in leadership roles in the Indian tech industry at around 6 per cent.

Aparna Ballakur, VP – HR for Yahoo! in India, made a telling statement in her welcome note, “I’m the executive sponsor for WIT in India not because I am the HR head, but because I’m the only woman in the leadership team at Yahoo! in India. I would have preferred a woman technologist to be here in my place today,” she said. Aparna shared how WIT Bangalore plays an important role in inspiring and supporting technical women across the talent pipeline, both within and outside Yahoo! in India. At Yahoo! Bangalore, the charter includes building an inclusive workforce, mentoring women and supporting them as they rejoin the mainstream after a break. Outside Yahoo!, it’s been about giving back to women in the tech community. As part of its outreach program in India, WIT helps women on campuses successfully enter the IT workforce. It also connects and empowers women in tech through networking events.

The networking at this Girl Geek Dinner continued over dinner - a fabulous Indian and continental spread. The event ended like it began, high on energy. One guest had just three words to describe it, “Insightful, informative, helpful.” That said it all.

Indian Kanoon search engine helps people understand their rights.

Sushant Sinha, part of the Cloud Platform Group in Bangalore, was recently named one of India’s top innovators. He was featured in Technology Review's prestigious TR35 2011 – a list of outstanding innovators in India under the age of 35.

Sushant earned his place in this exclusive list for developing Indian Kanoon, a free search engine of Indian law (Kanoon means ‘law’ in Hindi, the official language of India). The portal provides the most relevant Indian laws and court judgments in response to a query.Since its launch in January 2008, Indian Kanoonhas been embraced by the Indian public, and is empowering citizens to seek justice.

Traffic is growing exponentially - 10 times in the past year and a half. Indian Kanoon currently receives half a million unique users a month, with roughly 2.5 million page views.

And here’s why. Prior to Indian Kanoon, there was no website which provided information about Indian law, at least nothing that was easy to use. Asignificant portion of the population remained completely ignorant of their rights and privileges.

“Most existing law websites charged a hefty fee and were designed by lawyers for lawyers,” explains Sushant.”The technology was stone aged, compared to the advances in the information retrieval brought about by current search engines.”

He filled these gaps when he developed Indian Kanoon. “I started the project as a way to enrich court judgments by linking them with laws and other references. The linking turned out to be so useful that I went on to build Indian Kanoon,” he adds.

Besides the standard information retrieval techniques for relevance, Indian Kanoon brings in a couple of other innovations to make law search effective. First, it breaks down law documents into the smallest possible clause. It then determines the important law sections at the granularity of the smallest possible law section. Secondly, it tightly integrates law/statutes with court judgments, which allows automatic determination of the most relevant clauses and court judgments.

It isn’t just the man on the street who’s benefiting from Indian Kanoon. Lawyers and law students form a big chunk of the user base.

Sushant, who has a PhD in Internet Security (“nothing related to search,”) is currently working on the document enrichment framework Sombrero at Yahoo!. He balances his day job with Indian Kanoon by working on it in the night and on weekends.

On what it takes to be an innovator, Sushant believes, “It takes identifying important problems and working hard to solve them. Sometimes the identified problems are just minor issues when others view it and so what really matters is whether you are convinced about the importance of the problem.”

Are you motivated by the design challenges inherent in building highly scalable, complex and reliable software systems? Do you relish the opportunity to work on one of the largest distributed systems in the world, running on thousands of machines and handling petabytes of data?

The Hadoop Engineering team in Yahoo! Cloud Computing, Bangalore is looking for smart engineers to help develop hugely Scalable, highly Performant, and Reliable platforms, and Scheduling for such environments. These platforms are used to handle the data manipulation, mining and storage needs of applications that work with several multi-terabyte data sets. Developing this infrastructure requires solving many technical challenges in the areas of parallel and distributed computing, multi-terabyte storage systems, and high-performance computing. It calls for skills in distributed algorithms and file systems, software design principles, systems programming and expertise in Java and C/C++. You will be expected to build scalable and modular system; measure and optimize system performance, and ensure that systems run reliably in a 24/7 production environment.

Requsition Number: 34827

Location: Bangalore, IN - Bangalore Intermediate Ring Road

Our primary distributed computing platform is Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org/), an Apache Software Foundation open source project, which is fast becoming a widely prevalent Grid platform of choice. We are the primary contributors to Hadoop. The Bangalore Hadoop team is also responsible for developing and enhancing Hive (http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hive).

Absolutely Required:

- You should have a formal degree in engineering course in Computer Science
- You should have a total of 5+ years of experience with specialization in Distributed and parallel computing - addressing requirements like high performance, fault tolerance, maintainability serviceability. You should be able to establish through your experience that you have successfully designed and created the applications that devoured all the available computing resources to deliver maximum performance and scalability.
- 5+ years of experience in Java and or C++ on UNIX/Linux platform. Proficiency in core Java and multi-threaded programming is a must. Hands-on experience in using design patterns and best practices for developing scalable and high performance applications.
- Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills.
- Strong analytical and problem solving skills.
- Collaborate with teams in US to define the architecture and design of the next generation of Hadoop

Desirable:
- M.S in Computer Science.
- Understanding of Cloud Computing, Resource managers like Torque/Maui, Hadoop
- Understanding database internals like Query parsing, execution plan, query optimization, data storage