My time spent at Yahoo! so far has been much of a quiet affair. This is not to say I have nothing to talk about - there are many stories to tell but, unfortunately, my lips are sealed on the project I have been working on. All I can say is it will be the first international product to be entirely conceived and developed in Europe (rather than being something developed and converted from Sunnyvale or Korea), as well as the first product that doesn’t inherit the synonymous Yahoo! branding. Do not worry - more will be announced when the gates are opened.

The reason for this post is to highlight last week’s antics during the second “internal” Yahoo! F2E Developer Summit. Originally conceived in 2005, the purpose of this event was to bring together all front end engineers (often referred to as “Webdevs”) from around the globe to listen and interact with the typical conference format. Considering how many Web Celebs actually work inside the Yahoo! walls, it’s not hard to find several days worth of brains to give their thoughts on their domains. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to actually get to know other Webdevs, something that is difficult with the growing numbers in London alone.

Topics ranged from Norm!’s Laws (otherwise known as coding standards) to Nicole’s 14 website optimisation rules (which mainly focused on the use of implementing CSS sprites, if only due to time restrictions) to Christian’s tutorial writing suggestions (to name but a few).

It wasn’t an entirely internal affair mind - several outsiders were invited such as the Clear Left boys, Gareth Rushgrove, Natalie Downe and her other half Simon Willison.

Simon was invited to give the event’s keynote talk, originally penned as thoughts into portable social networks, but instead he set the bar high discussing his research into a newly coined term, Comet. In its simplest form, Comet is the next natural step after AJAX whereby communication is swapped around to actually push content rather than regularly pulling (or polling) content from the server. Considering this technology has been available since the hey days of Netscape Navigator 2, it’s quite astonishing to think its only just making appearances in services like Google Mail and Google Spreadsheets but its still early days. I’m sure with plenty of publicity around another catchy buzzword named after a cleaning product, it won’t be long before we see more of this technique. For more information about Comet, Simon’s presentation is available on Slideshare.

The whole event was wrapped up Friday evening with a Pub Quiz, hosted by the lovely Norm! and sponsored by some Czechoslovakian beer. Teaming up with Steve, Ben, Nick and Stuart, we set expectations high as the ambitiously named Epic Fail. With five tough (and strict) rounds of hardcore nerdy questions such as naming five rendering engines, naming lesser-known browsers just from the icons and nailing key Web (and Yahoo!) oriented dates, we did considerably well. Ben managed to get the launch date of Firefox 1.0 to within 4 days, bagging us a pocketful of purple schwag but it went right to the end with a nail-biting tie-breaker where Steve estimated only 4,000 short of Bugzilla’s 380,000 bugs filed (as of Friday morning). Epic Fail walked away with some USB powered goodness while team Google came in last - interesting…

So with much excitement, fun and education, that was that. A great time had by all which I’m sure will be repeated at some point in the not-so-distant future. Kudos has to go to Norm for his efforts.

Tags: yahoof2elondon07, summit, conference, yahoo