Hacking is not a job done just by suspicious characters sitting in small rooms in undisclosed locations, trying to break into military installations or robbing banks as shown in Hollywood films or even poorly-shot Bollywood ones. The stereotyped image of hackers was put to rest by around 200 software developers in a two-day event called ‘Hackday’ organised by Yahoo in Bangalore and London. “Don’t call it an event. It’s a camp,” said a hacker.

The developers or ‘hackers’ came all prepared with sleeping bags, for this 24-hour marathon of punching furiously on the keyboard to hack, hack, eat, rest and hack. The Taj Residency, where it was organised, looked like a command centre in a futuristic war period. All participants were provided physical and mental sustenance throughout the event, with plenty of fuel (food in this case) served. Hackday was a straight dive into 24 hours of hacking on a collection of tools such as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and data.

APIs, in short, are used by developers to make programmes usable to a particular platform.

At the end of the first Hackday in India, that had around 200 hackers participating, the different species of hackers submitted 31 ‘hacks’. Each hacker had his/ her 90 seconds of fame while presenting the hack on three massive screens to the assembled audience as well as the seven judges.

According to the Yahoo Developers’ Forum, all the hacks were of high quality including the ones created by the Indian hackers that didn’t fall into a stereotypical format. Some of the titles awarded were ‘Best non-technical hack’, ‘Best desktop hack’, ‘I wish I had a Mac Hack’, ‘Most viral hack’, ‘Most likely to arrive at next hack day on time hack’ and ‘Brainiest hack’.

“We want to thank all the hackers for putting so much effort into it and coming up with such a wide range of hacks and ideas,” said Chris Heilmann, one of the organisers.

Hackday, in a way, was not only about hacking. People could be seen chatting with fellow hackers about movies that were playing in the town or the latest DVD game that is ruling the market and things like the Champions League. Hackday may gave come and gone, but good hackers will remain.