Three times a year the entire engineering team at Yelp gets together and does innovative (sometimes crazy) things like launching a 3D printer into space or flying a quadcopter with human wings…err…arms or figuring out whether Cronuts are more popular than Donuts. We call this tri-annual event…Hackathon! It’s a festival celebrating innovation, creativity, and technical badassery where our smart, talented and witty engineers get 48 hours to work on anything they like. Needless to say, a relentless supply of delicious food also plays a key role in this event.

The 14th version of our Hackathon, which was held this past month, saw around 80 projects across all of our engineering offices, covering a wide variety of topics ranging from mining our rich dataset to developing visualization tools to building robots.

Shahid C., one of our intern extraordinaires this summer, worked on a project that he calls “Yelp Boost,” a nifty visualization tool that tries to address the age-old economics question of supply and demand. Shahid echoes what sounds like a fundamental tenet of Yelponomics 101, “If we can figure out where the demand for a product greatly outweighs supply, we could recommend business owners to set up their shops in those locations in order to meet this demand and boost their sales!” To determine these supply and demand logistics, Shahid dug deep into our search logs and came up with real time visualizations that look like this:

The heat map (the light blue to intense red) represents an increasing demand for pizza, while the red dots with green halos represent pizzerias in San Francisco. You see those big red blobs with dropped pins inside them? There is a high demand for pizza there, but unfortunately, there aren’t many pizzerias nearby. Hmm…wonder what could be done about that.

Did I mention that we also built robots during Hackathon 14? Apart from the physical ones that could roam around and shoot nerf darts at you, a team of engineers, Aditya M., Anthony M., Jon M. and Kurtis F., built a different kind of robot - a robot that tries to understand Yelp the same way traditional web crawlers do. It’s affectionately called BotBot, it’s a web crawler that shows our engineering team how crawlers like Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, and Bingbot discover and index our content. The team created this useful simulation by using Scrapy to crawl the site, pull out links, and used selenium to process pages that had javascript content.

Pretty cool, eh?

Have the creative engineering gears in your brain started turning? Check out our exciting product and engineering job openings at www.yelp.com/careers and apply today! Who knows, you may be showing off your killer idea at Yelp Hackathon 15.

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