Digerati Indonesia

Hackers of Southeast Asia unite!

Nov 25, 2009 13:59

(Disclaimer: Yahoo! is a client and did NOT pay or request for this blog post. However, the writer does believe this event to be pretty significant in Indonesian technology circles.)



There once was a time when we in Indonesia could only look with envy on TV, the newspapers or via Wired Magazine all the fun stuff that geeks and hackers around the world experienced. Conferences, seminars, LAN parties and what-nots were all happening around the world and many of us felt left out. Heck, to get a good Betamax video deck, those of us in Indonesia had to buy it in Singapore or Hong Kong!



Fast foward to today.  



Thanks to open markets and the World Wide Web, we can quickly and easily get all the information (and products) we want. Practically everything is available in Jakarta now, from Chanel to Timberland, from iPods to BlackBerrys. And prices for computers, especially laptops, have fallen big time.  All we need now are those world-renowned conferences.



Enter Open Hack Day Southeast Asia.

Yahoo!'s famous all-night hacking contest came to the Balai Kartini Convention Center, in Jakarta, November 21-22, 2009. With seminars in the morning and afternoon, followed by an all-night hacking session afterward till the next day, hackers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore got together to learn new things and hack new programs. All within a night!



One of the gems of Southeast Asia's first Hack Day was in the form of Koprol.com, an Indonesian-made location-based social network that demonstrated how easy it was to integrate Yahoo! APIs (application programming interface) into the site and drive more traffic to their business. 







Koprol feels like a combination of Twitter and Yelp as it allows users to check in on a particular location (say, a mall) and you can quickly find out which friend is closest to you. There are many possibilities with this service and the crew at Koprol are now moving on to mobile apps for their service (because like the Philippines, Indonesia is very mobile phone-centric).



The vibes throughout the weekend were tingling with new technologies and APIs, as well as meeting old friends or finally coming face-to-face with virtual ones. What's more, the organizers had filled the place with everything that a hacker needed, from food to beanbag chairs, from PlayStation 3s to fast Internet connections to get them going all night.







The result? Around 30 hacks made by individiuals or groups of hackers, some of whom had only just met that day. You can find their hacks here.



From the entries, Kristiono Setyadi's Chat Plus is pretty amazing as it allows users to chat online, but with a built-in translator so that after you select your language and target language, as you type, you can see your original sentence being translated.



Kristiono said he plans to open the code, so hopefully the Open Source community can use this code that would allow people from various countries and cultures to communicate as they learn each other's languages.



Overall, Open Hack Day showcased the power of Southeast Asia's hackers, proving that there are many bright and creative people who can develop some amazing programs (even under a tight deadline with no sleep!). And many are hoping that events like this can continue to be held to further develop the local developer community.  







Just being there makes me want to brush up my programming (I studied Turbo Pascal in the old days--damn, just dated myself) and hack some code together. And if I need help, I met a lot of people who are willing to help. That's what hacking is all about: Sharing knowledge.

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