Yelp Hackathon: A Time for Coding and Sing-A-Longs

Just a few days ago, Yelp hosted its 3rd Biannual Hackathon: 48 hours set aside for our developer, systems and product teams to work on anything Useful, Funny or Cool.

Our Software Engineer, Amber Y., gives the down low on some of the bad ass (we can say bad ass, right?) projects our 20 teams worked on at Yelp HQ on Yelp's Engineering Blog here.

You may remember at the last Yelp Hackathon we had special guest star, Guido van Rossum, creator of Python; built some Kegmates and enjoyed some civilized merriment with mimosas. This time around, highlights included: special guest, Russ Simmons, co-founder of Yelp; self-balancing iPhones (brought to you by Team Kegmate) and the unveiling of the amazing Unofficial Yelp Theme Song -- contributed by some non-engineers! We’re also planning to incorporate several of the Hackathon projects to Yelp.com and our mobile applications soon so keep an eye out!

Finally, we also confirmed that Four Loko, while seemingly a good idea at the time, doesn’t necessarily translate to productivity (cough: Bryce). But hey, we’re all for trying new things. Speaking of: we’re hiring!

And now everyone together... Yelp came knockin on my door!