Filipino 'hacks' his way into Silicon Valley

By Lawrence Casiraya INQUIRER.net TWENTY-three year old Andrei Navarro has done what probably every software deve loper his age yearns for -- a chance to visit Silicon Valley. Navarro who hails from Baguio City and a graduate of Ateneo de Manila flew to S unnyvale, California a few weeks ago courtesy of Yahoo! He was sent along with two others from Malaysia and India to represent the region in Yahoo!âs Open Hac k Day. Yahoo used its annual developer conference to show its latest application progr amming interfaces or APIs -- that's geek-speak for tools developers can use to allow their own software to run on top of Yahoo!'s products, say email and its popular Yahoo! Messenger. Andrei's programming skills was put to good use designing an application overni ght using these APIs. That meant a lot of pizza, a bit of booze and in his case, at least three Red B ulls. And as a reward, he got to party afterwards with developers from all over the world Silicon Valley-style. But more importantly, the trip made him realize a thing or two about what devel opers like him really need. He tells more in this interview.