next*

This Thursday evening we're hosting an all-night hackathon for memcached developers at Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale campus. You can come and code all night long (that's what makes it a hackathon), or stop by in the evening to meet developers from the community and developers at Yahoo! who use memcached on sites like MyBlogLog to improve speed and scalability.

We're hoping to ship some new features and release the binary protocol. We'll be hacking from 8:00 PM Thursday till 7:00 AM Friday morning. Food and drink will be served.

Memcached is a distributed memory caching system that lets you store information of any type across multiple servers (clusters). It improves performance by letting you cache specific, frequently used information directly in memory. Instead of constantly reading from your database, the data you need is more readily accessible. The memcached layer sits in the middle between the front-end of your site and the database servers.

Memcached was developed by Danga Interactive for Live Journal, but is now widely used. It's available via a permissive free software license.

You can find more detailed info about this event on Upcoming (let us know if you're planning to come so we can order plenty of food). There's also a wiki, and even a listing on Facebook. Hope to see you there.

Photo from kentbrew.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Wow, this place is nice! Everything's so new and shiny, it won't take us long to scuff it up.

Why am I wandering the halls of this fancy new place called Next? Well, I wanted to tell you about this great program I run here, but first, let me tell you a little about my myself.

My name is Arlo Rose , and I came to Yahoo! just over two years ago when my company Pixoria was acquired for its flagship product Konfabulator. And really, by flagship, I mean that it was our only product. But it was an awesome one. So awesome that the concept behind it is now an integral part of both major operating systems (Mac and Windows) and is used all over web pages to convey simple, highly contextual, information to people. Konfabulator ran files called Widgets. Sound familiar? I know, they’re everywhere now! Makes me proud.

I’ve done a bunch of stuff since coming to Yahoo!, but my current project is running this thing called Hack. Hack is a program that's all about letting people who like to tinker with code have a voice outside their day-to-day duties.

The basic concept is this: take 24 hours to try and realize whatever you want to build; show it in a science fair setting and let your peers vote on which they think is the best; take the top 25 of those, show them to some execs and well respected peers and let them choose the top three.

Here’s where the Next piece of the equation fits in--we now have a place where we can share winning hacks. It’s an important piece of what Next is going to be about. When a project that’s able to be publicly consumed has had a little bit of polish applied, we’ll publish it on Next while we work out its place in the big picture. This is great because the developers get their work out to the world, and you guys, you know, get to play with this cool stuff we develop out of passion. You can’t beat that.

(Photo from Chad Dickerson )

Popularity: 12% [?]

HackDay TV is a video treat from Y! UK Hack Day. We present a new way to watch long-form video on the web -- in snack-bite sizes. You can see a list of all the hacks (including which hacks won the judges' awards), you can launch URL demos for many of the hacks, and, best of all, you can jump to any hack instantly to watch it

Who built it

• Peter Shafton
• David A. Shamma

What people are saying

Hack TV: Watch the demos here, hackday.blorg, by Matt McAlister
"The Yahoo! Research Berkeley team built a handy hack demo viewer..."

Popularity: 14% [?]