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Yelp Hackathon 15: Sharks, Sock Puppets and Spectacular Projects



We recently held the 15th edition of Yelp Hackathon, a two-day event comprised of pure, unadulterated hacking, innovation, creativity, fun, and lots and lots of snacks. Close to 60 inventive projects came out of the event from engineers working in our offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Hamburg, and London. They ranged from cool data mining and visualizations, to useful product features, funny utilities, and some serious hardcore hacking. Yelp engineers worked through the night finding ways to speed up Yelp’s mobile app, creating a tool to explore cities by neighborhoods and keywords, crafting sock puppets for a Yelp commercial (not every project has to involve code!), and lots more. For all the technical details, click over to the Yelp Engineering blog.

Check out some pics from Hackathon below, and if this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, head over to yelp.com/careers to see all of our current product and engineering job openings. Hackathon 16 isn’t too far off!

Yelp Hackathon 15 shirt

Limited edition Yelp Hackathon 15.0 shirts

Sharks (1)

Yelp engineers hacking away, seemingly undeterred by the flock of floating RC sharks swarming their conference room.

 

Quadcopter

Are they building a quadcopter to fight those sharks?

 

Jeremy hackathon 15 selfie

The Creative team at Yelp came up with a fun Yelp branding campaign complete with sock puppets and a “selfie station” for Hackathon 15. Yelp CEO Jeremy stopped by for a photo op.

 

Neighborhood map sf hackathon

A data visualization project for exploring neighborhoods shows “touristy” neighborhoods in San Francisco that also have fancy restaurants.

 

Science_fair hackathon

Our hackers showing off their projects in a science-fair style exhibition.

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