Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

Vote for YUI in the Open Source Awards Finals

Thanks to everyone who nominated YUI for the Packt Publishing Open Source Awards. Vote now for YUI as your favorite JavaScript library!

Find conversations: bloglines | technorati

Share and extend: Bookmark with del.icio.us | digg it! | reddit!

Nominate YUI for the 2011 Open Source Awards!

If you love YUI (and we hope you do!), please take a moment to nominate us for the 2011 Open Source Awards, sponsored by Packt Publishing. Be sure to point to our shiny new website at http://yuilibrary.com!

The nomination form is open now through September 9.

Find conversations: bloglines | technorati

Share and extend: Bookmark with del.icio.us | digg it! | reddit!

Rey Bango of Ajaxian Interviews YUI Developers Adam Moore, Satyen Desai, and Luke Smith

Rey Bango of Ajaxian (and Microsoft) visited Yahoo! last week, and he has posted his interview of YUI core team members Adam Moore, Satyen Desai, and Luke Smith. Check it out on his blog or in the embed below.

Find conversations: bloglines | technorati

Share and extend: Bookmark with del.icio.us | digg it! | reddit!

Upcoming Industry Conferences

We love great tech conferences, and we know that a lot of you having amazing things to share. So I’ve put together this list of conferences and barcamps coming up that are looking for speakers or participation.

We are going to be at some of these and we hope we’ll see many of you there speaking or not.

Professional Conferences

Web 2.0 Expo NYC 2010

Submission Deadline: April 12th, 2010
Web 2.0 Expo NYC Submission Page
Conference Date: 18th – 21nd October 2010
Location: New York, NYC, USA

EuroPython 2010

Submission Deadline: April 30th, 2010
EuroPython Submission Page
Conference Date: 19th – 22nd June 2010
Location: Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham, UK

Barcamps

• April 3 – MobileCamp Boston
• April 10 – BarCamp Rochester
• April 10 – BarCamp Charlotte
• April 17-18 – BarCamp Boston
• May 1 – BarCamp Missoula
• Sep 25 – BarCamp JonesBoro

We’ll keep updating you on event speaking deadlines as they come up. Let me know what I missed in the comments section and we’ll make sure your event is included here.

Find conversations: bloglines | technorati

Share and extend: Bookmark with del.icio.us | digg it! | reddit!

Ada Lovelace Day 2010: Julie London, Diana Liu, Helena Rajan, Shweta Hayatnagarkar, and Betty Tso of Yahoo! Finance

The women of the Yahoo! Finance frontend engineering team are some of the most talented engineers I have ever had the privilege to work with. Their passion for best practices, accessibility and the end user make building the world’s biggest and best finance site an absolute pleasure. On the eve of shipping a massive update to the Yahoo! Finance site that will take our codebase global and push it into data centers around the globe, I find myself feeling incredibly lucky to work with these women on a day-to-day basis. I asked the women on the Yahoo! Finance frontend team to think about what brought them to frontend engineering and what it’s like to work on one of the world’s most frequently visited web sites.

Julie London

I built my first website in 1998 when animated GIFs were considered cutting edge. I was working as an anthropologist at the time and never imagined that the 5 crummy little web pages I built for San Francisco State University would be the beginning of a path that would eventually lead to Yahoo!.

I love frontend engineering because I love to be challenged and I love to solve puzzles. My job is never boring. The landscape is constantly shifting and to excel you have to keep learning.

Working at Yahoo! keeps my ego in check. I work with brilliant people on a site that’s used by millions of people.

Diana Liu

I first got involved with web programming when I worked as a Co-op student during my undergraduate studies. I was working at Hewlett-Packard on their internal web sites and web tools. I was exposed to a wide variety of tasks, but I soon found myself attracted to frontend engineering. I love being able to write a few lines of code, hit the refresh button on the browser, and immediately see results. The instant satisfaction is overwhelming. I love working on the tier closest to users. It is important to me that I provide great experiences to users, and as a frontend engineer I can often influence the usability and design of web pages.

Yahoo provides extensive training in frontend technologies, and it also has a high standard for the code that we write. Yahoo pushes us to write accessible code. To me, it is very rewarding to know that people with disabilities are able to access the features of Yahoo! Finance because I write code that supports assistive technologies.

I am proud to tell people that I work on the biggest finance site on the net. It is a huge responsibility knowing that I write code for millions of users worldwide. At the same time, it is an incredible feeling to know that I am helping people getting things done easier because of the code I write.

Helena Rajan

All of us know the proverb, “Face is the index of mind”. I would compare frontend engineering to the face and backend engineering to the mind. That says it all. The site is firstly judged by the look and feel, then comes the other characteristics…and that is what I’m into and this is what keeps my daily life interesting.

It’s an awesome experience to be working in finance. Not everyone gets the opportunity to work on a product which is seen by millions of people in the world daily, and I’m grateful to have that opportunity. This project has given me the privilege of working with some great technologists and it helps me learn something new daily.

Shweta Hayatnagarkar

Frontend engineering is an amazing domain — you get to develop the coolest software that end-users actually see and appreciate. You are constantly developing features that impact the user experience. In addition, you get to learn and work on cutting-edge, state-of-the-art technologies which are continuously evolving. Yahoo! provides a solid platform for frontend engineering.

It’s a double-edge sword — on one hand you get a satisfaction that whatever you develop will be used by millions of users across the globe, on the other hand you have to be constantly on your toes to make sure that the site is running perfectly. Thus it’s challenging and satisfying at the same time.

Yahoo is a fantastic place to be a frontend engineer. The frontend infrastructure and continuously evolving frontend research, not to mention our millions of users, makes developing at Yahoo! a most interesting, challenging and satisfying work experience.

Betty Tso

I also started building websites during the time when animated gifs were a hit. After studying Computer Science, I focused on high performance web site development. I joined Yahoo! as a frontend engineer, and it has been very rewarding to see how different frontend technologies have evolved the online user experience and made the web an everyday part of people’s lives.

My focus on the Yahoo! Finance frontend team includes analysis and development of ways to improve site performance and user experience. I also help other Yahoo! properties to identify performance bottlenecks and suggest solutions for improvement. I enjoy sharing the purple spirit with people outside of the company, and I was one of the representatives in Massachusetts Institute of Technology university recruiting program.

It’s going to be my 4th year at Yahoo! in a month and, looking back, it has been such a fulfilling journey. I get to work on a website that impacts millions of people’s daily life, and I get to work with some great talent in a friendly, busy, crazy and fun team environment.

Find conversations: bloglines | technorati

Share and extend: Bookmark with del.icio.us | digg it! | reddit!

Ada Lovelace Day 2010: Sadaf Shahsahebi of the Yahoo! Developer Network

Growing up in the heart of Silicon Valley, one could argue that Sadaf Shahsahebi was always destined to work with technology. Her father brought home her first computer when she was 7 and by middle school she was already programming in Pascal at school while taking summer courses to learn C++. Even so, a part of Sadaf was equally drawn towards medicine and the potential to help treat and cure children. It wasn’t until right before college when she definitively decided to focus on technology. The medical profession’s loss turned out to be Yahoo!’s gain.

A chance summer internship at Yahoo! following her sophomore year in college began a relationship that lasted through to graduation, when she decided to work for Yahoo! full time. Though her internships weren’t focused on frontend engineering, she gravitated towards the discipline when she learned about the Juku program. Sadaf spent several months learning the ins and outs of frontend engineering before graduating with the first-ever Juku class.

Sadaf then joined the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) team as one of their first frontend engineers. She was part of the team that created YAP from scratch and grew it to the feature-rich platform that developers enjoy today. Quite an accomplishment for anyone, let alone for someone’s first job out of college.

Because of her depth of knowledge regarding YAP, Sadaf was also tasked to work on the technical integration of YAP into My Yahoo! She worked closely with the My Yahoo! team to create a seamless experience with the existing product, making a huge impact on the millions of My Yahoo! users worldwide.

Sadaf’s current role as part of the Yahoo! Developer Network team has her developing and maintaining the developer tools that allow third-party developers to create and manage their YAP applications. Suffice to say, if you’ve ever created a YAP application, then you’re thankful for Sadaf’s work.

What Sadaf brings to her work is evident when she speaks: a passion for the Web, a love of challenges, and a thirst for knowledge. She can regularly be found trying to expand her own understanding of all things software, as she’s an avid reader and just recently began a master’s program in computer science.

The challenge of the Web, a constantly changing, ever-evolving realm of APIs is perfectly tuned to Sadaf’s considerable talents. Although she is quick to admit that IE6 drives her nuts, Sadaf’s passion for front-end engineering and her dedication to continue learning ensures a bright future for her and any of her future projects.

Find conversations: bloglines | technorati

Share and extend: Bookmark with del.icio.us | digg it! | reddit!

Happy First Birthday, JSMag

Our friends over at JSMag are celebrating their first birthday. If you haven’t read JSMag it’s a monthly PDF magazine that covers news on hot JavaScript topics and provides practical tutorials.

JSMag are giving away a free issue from their first year. Simply log into your JSMag account and use the code ‘oneyear’ to get a free issue.

When selecting your free issue, you may want to seek out the articles in JSMag written by Yahoos frontend engineers or about YUI over the last 12 months:

• March 2009
  
  • Matt Henry on unit testing with YUI
• April 2009
  
  • Yours truly on Profiling your JavaScript
• June 2009
  
  • Yours truly on Build Scripts
• July 2009
  
  • Stoyan Stefanov on Function Patterns
• August 2009
  
  • Jon LeBlanc on YQL and browser MVC
• August 2009
  
  • Stoyan Stefanov on function patterns
• September 2009
  
  • Chistian Tiberg on using administration system with YUI
  • Stoyan Stefanov on more function patterns
• October 2009
  
  • Chistian Tiberg on inline editing with YUI
  • Stoyan Stefanov on more constructor patterns
• November 2009
  
  • Yours truly on Enhancing YQL with server-side JavaScript
  • Stoyan Stefanov on more inheritance patterns
• December 2009
  
  • Christian Tiberg on using the YUI2 datatable and chart components
  • Stoyan Stefanov on more reuse patterns
• January 2010
  
  • Christian Tiberg on using YUI to build desktop gadgets for Windows
  • Stoyan Stefanov on the sandbox pattern
• February 2010
  
  • Stoyan Stefanov on the private members pattern
• March 2010
  
  • Yours truly with an overview of server-side JavaScript
  • Stoyan Stefanov on currying

Happy Birthday, JSMag!

Find conversations: bloglines | technorati

Share and extend: Bookmark with del.icio.us | digg it! | reddit!