Yahoo! Girl Geek Dinner 2010

Yahoo! is hosting a Girl Geek Dinner on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale. All registered attendees will receive a free Yahoo! “Code like a Girl” shirt and sticker at the event.

Join us for a night of technology, great food and conversation at Yahoo! Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010  at Yahoo!’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA! Learn about what’s going on at Yahoo! and network with other girl geeks, including those responsible for designing and building cool Yahoo! products. Yahoo! Americas EVP Hilary Schneider will be the keynote speaker, and presentations on Yahoo Query Language (YQL), YUI, web performance, innovation at scale, infinite browse system, accessibility, Search Pad, and Sherpa will be delivered by Yahoo! girl geeks throughout the evening.

Yahoo Query Language (YQL) talk description: The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter and join data across Web services. With YQL, apps run faster with fewer lines of code and a smaller network footprint. Yahoo! and other websites across the Internet make much of their structured data available to developers, primarily through Web services. To access and query these services, developers traditionally endure the pain of locating the right URLs and documentation to access and query each Web service. With YQL, developers can access and shape data across the Internet through one simple language, eliminating the need to learn how to call different APIs.

YUI talk description: The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls written with JavaScript and CSS for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. YUI is available under a BSD license and is free for all uses. YUI is proven, scalable, fast and robust. Built by frontend engineers at Yahoo! and contributors from around the world, it’s an industrial-strength JavaScript library for professionals who love JavaScript.

Web Performance talk description: Performance – Do you have it in you? Today, 57% of online consumers will abandon a site after waiting 3 seconds for a page to load [Source: webperformancetoday.com]. For Yahoo!, every 0.4 seconds improvement in page-load speed means a 9% increase in traffic [Source: Yahoo!]. For Amazon, every 0.1 seconds faster in page-load speed leads to a 1% increase in revenue [Source: Amazon]. In other words, when it comes to Web performance, every fraction of a second counts. Join us to learn more about Web Performance Optimization (WPO) and discover: (1.) The top 5 reasons why web giants care about site performance (2.) Three easy steps to speed up your site instantly (3.) How to decode how your site performs in less than ten seconds

Innovation at Scale talk description: Yahoo! serves nearly 600 million unique users globally, reaching almost half the online global population. Achieving that level of ubiquity in people’s online lives introduces a whole new set of challenges. Scale requires optimal performance across geographic boundaries, creates mountains of data, attracts spammers and abusers, overloads commodity technology and generally just makes everything harder and more complex. To successfully operate and continuously innovate at this global scale requires robust and extensible tools. Cheryl will review two case studies where Yahoo! was able to solve problems of scale efficiently by using tools developed by Yahoo! engineers. The first case study will describe how Yahoo! used Hadoop to crunch massive amounts of data. With this technology, operations engineers where able to deliver a new spam-fighting system within weeks. The second case study will describe the use of YTS to provide optimal performance at huge scale across the globe, allowing Yahoo! to reach new markets.

Infinite Browse System talk description: The Infinite Browse System is an application solution that bridges the browsing and search experience. It finds contents relevant and interesting to the input content and the user. Its objectives are to enhance user experiences for easy access of related contents, to grow Y! Network traffic and to increase Y! Search volume. It is currently in a bucket test on Y! News and will be launched soon. Whether you are a user, developer, designer, product manager or executive interested in learning how to find relevant and interesting entities and contents, Infinite Browse is for you.

Accessibility talk description: Design Angels to the rescue…. The latest case for “The Angels” involves users that might be in the dark. Accessibility for users is more than just about code. It’s about making the most of the tools we have. The Angels will guide you through the principles of design, examine test cases and introduce tools that designers can use to accommodate a range of visually impaired audiences. Will they succeed?

Search Pad talk description: Addressing users’ information needs has been one of the main goals of Web search engines since their early days. In some cases, users can’t see their needs immediately met by search results, simply because these needs are too complex and involve multiple aspects not covered by a single Web or search results page. We refer to these types of activities as “research missions.” Search Pad is a feature of Yahoo! Search that was launched in July 2009, and precisely addresses this issue. It helps users keep track of related searches and visited pages that relate to the same “research mission.” What sets Yahoo! Search Pad apart from previous search solutions is that it relies largely on attention data to automatically collect research for the user. For example, if the user is using Yahoo! to search for a used car, Search Pad will automatically appear if it notices a user clicking many related links or spending lots of time on pages related to cars. Links are automatically added to a Search Pad in such a manner that when a pad is prompted to a user, it is pre-populated with content. These features are the result of an intelligent and dynamic technology developed within Yahoo!.

Sherpa talk description: Sherpa is Yahoo!’s next-generation structured-record distributed storage service that addresses the growing scalability needs of Yahoo!’s growing list of properties. Important features of Sherpa include high scalability, elastic growth, a global footprint and low-latency access from anywhere. One key difference between Sherpa and other distributed database systems is Sherpa’s support for different consistency models, allowing the application developer to manage the trade-off between consistency, availability and performance.