Filipino ‘hacks’ his way into Silicon Valley
- Events, Software, Yahoo! -
By Lawrence Casiraya
INQUIRER.net
TWENTY-three year old Andrei Navarro has done what probably every software developer 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 Sunnyvale, 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!’s Open Hack Day.
Yahoo used its annual developer conference to show its latest application programming 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 overnight using these APIs.
That meant a lot of pizza, a bit of booze and in his case, at least three Red Bulls. 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 developers like him really need. He tells more in this interview.
