Meet and greet: : Hackers and programmers work on programs at the Open Hack Day 2009, the first of its kind organized in the country by search engine Yahoo. JP/ID Nugroho
Kristiono Setyadi slumped back in his Yahoo ball chair last Sunday. He slowly lowered the laptop, still running, onto his lap. He placed the small mouse on the right armrest of the purple ball chair.
“Just a little more and this project is complete. It’s very simple, but hopefully it can help net
users when using Yahoo Messenger,” he said.
A moment later, he was back concentrating on the computer program.
Saturday and Sunday (Nov. 21-22) were great days for the world of Internet programming in Indonesia and perhaps even Southeast Asia. For the first time ever, search engine Yahoo held its Open Hack Day 2009 in Indonesia. Three hundred hackers and programmers signed on to enliven this event, although only a dozen people from various countries managed to complete the program.
For more than 24 hours, all the hackers packed into the Rose One and Rose Two rooms at the Kartini Hall in Kuningan, Jakarta, to work on programs they had compiled.
“The easiest way to explain all this is – fun!” said Michael Smith Jr., a developer for the Yahoo network.
Smith said the event was an attempt to capture the interest of programmers in Southeast Asia. Yahoo had seen a lot of high-quality programmers from Indonesia, he added. In addition, Indonesia was chosen to host the event because of its standing as the largest countries in Southeast Asia and hence one of Yahoo’s bigger markets.
The possibility remains, Smith went on, for Yahoo to use programs produced by Indonesian
programmers.
Indonesian programmers are also in the running for a place at national and regional levels in the Southeast Asian competition, and also at the international level.
The spirit of being part of something greater also underlined the presence of a large number of hackers at the event.
Achmad Gozali, one of the hackers in the competition, said his presence at the Open Hack Day was “something priceless”. He was thankful for being able to meet with other hackers and improve his knowledge through discussions with famous hackers such as Natali Ardianto and Soni Ariyanto
Kurniawan.
“So far I’d only been able to communicate with them through chats, but at this event we were able to meet,” he said.
Two hackers from outside Indonesia, Dominick Danao from the Philippines and Nazrul Kamaniddin from Malaysia, both had the same view. Their long journeys to the Open Hack Day 2009 were not just based on getting a reward.
“To meet, gather and have a discussion with fellow hackers in Indonesia – that was our goal,” said Danao, commenting on his first ever visit to Jakarta.
However, this did not mean the hackers were taking things easy. Achmad Gozali, for instance,
is by day a software engineer with a leading online media company in Jakarta.
With his teammate, Abdul Aziz, he has been developing an alert system for Internet users via cell phone. In the alert system, mobile Internet users get a choice of five topics: earthquake alert, stock exchange reports, weather forecasts, upcoming events and business news.
“The winner of the Open Hack Day in the United States only succeeded in presenting one alert; we have combined the five alerts together,” Abdul Aziz said.
Another programmer was freelancer Natali Ardianto. Owner of the site www.urbanesia.com, Natali has developed a program that combines cell phone chat with geographic location. With this program, people chatting on phones can easily locate friends in the same coverage area.
“This allows us to know where our close friends are within our locale,” he explained.
It was Kristiono Setyadi, however, who may have designed the most comprehensive program. This
Yogyakarta-based programmer combined a multitude of features in his Chat Plus software package.
These include a translator, a direction locator and an image applet to illustrate sentences written in the comment chat box.
“If, for instance, you’re chatting with someone in Germany and neither of you fully understands what the other person’s saying, with the Chat Plus program [and its translator] everything becomes clear.”
When the chatter from Indonesia talks about the National Monument or Monas, the image of Monas will automatically appear on the screen. Consequently, the other person will understand very well what
they mean.
“The program I created was more interested in understanding the message from the chatter, especially when we’re chatting with strangers,” Kristiono said.
Those participating in the Open Hack Day, including the judges from various countries, all sang the praises of Kristiono’s Chat Plus. Not surprisingly, the program was chosen as the Best Hack of that event.
“Maybe this will encourage our friends outside Jakarta, who are often embarrassed to come to events like this, to get involved,” said Kristiono, owner of the domain Kristiono-Setyadi.net.
