Ten years after — Yahoo Open Hack Day
Chad Dickerson initiated this almost a month ago. I was away in Berlin at the time, hosting a workshop for open source contributors from more than a dozen different countries. He emailed a bunch of us Yahoo veterans scattered to the four winds, set up a Google doc, and invited a slew of busy people to reflect and share. He wrote, “In keeping with the spirit of Hack Day, I’m not sure if this will work and nothing may come of it. But it also could be really awesome. I wanted to start by asking each of you to write something about what that Hack Day meant to you…”
Lately I’ve been having a conversation with myself about the practice of daily writing, which I’ve been doing for around 21 months now, thank you 750words.com. It has brought subtle beauty and beneficial effects into my life, and has increased my capabilities, but has not changed my habits of publishing. I do not post my own stuff very often, and lately I’ve even backed way off twitter. My personal space for self-expression has been offline. Till now. So, here’s my first published medium post, though I have a backlog of drafts and a history of several years medium fascination.
For most of my so-called adult life, I’ve kept company with a few ragged paperbacks of Sufi stories by Idries Shah. Like the fairy tales and favorite TV episodes of childhood, they’ve become touchstones and familiars. When I think back ten years to the first Yahoo Open Hack Day I think of the preface to “The Story of Mushkil Gusha” from A Caravan of Dreams. In this old tale from Central Asia, Mushkil Gusha is the remover of all difficulties, and the story of Mushkil Gusha is about the interconnectedness of subtle, non-obvious, and improbable effects that shape our lives. Here’s a passage from the intro:
“When a number of people come together, and if these people are harmonized in a certain way, excluding some who make for disharmony — we have what we call an event. This is by no means what is generally understood in contemporary cultures as an event… The real event, of which the lesser event is a useful similitude (not more and no less) is that which belongs to the higher realm. … familiarity with the ‘high event’, however produced, enables the individual’s mind to operate in the high realm.”
That golden autumn weekend of late September 2006, when tents appeared on the usually soggy sod of the landfill lawns of Yahoo’s sterile corporate campus at the bottom of the Bay — sandwiched between Lockheed’s locked down campus with its scary white kaaba, and the Sunnyvale water treatment plant with its purple pipes — was a wonderful example of the transformative Mushkil Gusha effect. Puppeteers, rock’n’rollers, rebel coders, digital nomads, tech execs, and spoiled children of Silicon Valley gathered for a couple of days and nights, and made a mark on local culture.
And changed the way we in tech think about events and their role in adding magic to our lives. And touched the lives of those who harmonized, those who took part in a collaboration that was greater than the sum of its parts. No wonder that a decade later I still think of these folks as friends and fellows, despite all the Yahoo disappointments that followed, and all distances of time and space. And no wonder too that I can trace the roots of what I do for work today, to a generous and joyous celebration of open on an autumn weekend alongside a wetland at the bottom of San Francisco Bay.
