Next Thursday, May 15th, Yahoo! Search will host a developer launch party for SearchMonkey, our awesome new open developer platform. The festivities will take place from 5:30 to 8:30pm at Yahoo! Headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

If you’re a developer and you’d like to learn more about SearchMonkey, meet the folks behind it (including yours truly), see live demos, eat free food, and drink free beer, register for the event at upcoming.org and send an email containing your full name and the name of your company (if any) to searchmonkeyevent@yahoo-inc.com.

Space is limited and the friendly security guards at the front gate won’t let you in if you’re not on the list, so be sure to RSVP soon.

If you’re an awesome web developer or QA engineer and want to work on awesome things with me and lots of other awesome people at Yahoo! Search, send me your résumé.

Even before the whole Microsoft thing, Yahoo! was a prime target for recruiters. A recruiter will find someone’s website or LinkedIn profile, discover that they work for Yahoo!, then call one of the main Yahoo! numbers and either drill through the directory to find the person’s extension or simply ask a receptionist to transfer them. The end result is that whenever my desk phone rings, there’s a 90% chance it’s a recruiter.

On the whole, I don’t mind being pinged by recruiters via email or on LinkedIn. If they’ve actually seen my résumé, then they know my cell number, which they’re welcome to call as well. But my work number isn’t published anywhere, so when I get recruiting calls there, it’s extra annoying and doesn’t do much to establish a feeling of trust.

So, to avoid these annoying interruptions, I’ve simply stopped answering calls from numbers I don’t recognize, and I’ve updated my outgoing voicemail greeting thusly:

Hi, this is Ryan. I’m not at my desk right now, but if you leave a message I’ll try to get back to you. If you’re a recruiter, please hang up now.

Even so, I still get voicemails from recruiters. The ones who actually hear the message usually say, “I know your message said to hang up, but…” Some of them stoop to really sketchy levels, like giving only their first name (to imply that I should know them) and saying that “some important papers” have recently come across their desk and that I should call them right away. One woman left several messages like this and I eventually had to call her back just to tell her to stop.

But none of these comes close to a voicemail I got a few weeks ago from a guy who appears to have seen this site and thought (correctly) that talking about pie would get my attention. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of talking about pie while sounding like a creepy-ass pedophile:

Listen to the voicemail

I didn’t call him back.

When a new employee joins Yahoo!, they get to choose whether they want a PC laptop or a MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, if you choose a PC and then later decide you want to switch to a MacBook, there’s a huge waiting list (unsurprisingly, there’s no wait to switch from a MacBook to a PC).

Way back in November, my coworker Brett filed an IT request to switch to a MacBook. About a week later I filed one as well. We each got responses letting us know that we’d been added to the queue, that we could expect our MacBooks in Q1 ‘08, and that we’d get a status update in January.

When January rolled around and no status update appeared, I added a comment to my ticket requesting an update, but never got a response. In early February, I again requested an update. Still no response. Yesterday I decided to pull out the big guns. I resolved to post a poem to the ticket once a week until IT responded.

At 11am on Thursday, I posted the following limerick:

I filed an IT request
A response was promised with zest
When layoffs occurred
And Microsoft merged,
My ticket was lost in the mess.

By 11:13 the ticket had been assigned, and this morning I had a shiny new MacBook Pro.

Needless to say, Brett wasn’t too happy, since he’d filed his ticket before mine and should have been earlier in the queue. Luckily I had already written a haiku (having anticipated that the limerick would be ignored), so I suggested he post it to his ticket:

A MacBook request
filed in winter, long ago;
spring is drawing near

He posted it this morning and IT contacted him this afternoon to let him know his MacBook was being set up.

Result!

After stumbling across Ramaze a few weeks ago, I knew I had finally found the Ruby web framework I’d been waiting for. It’s still young and the documentation is still sparse, but the code is so clear and well-commented (and the folks in #ramaze on freenode were so helpful) that it only took me a week or so of frenzied hacking to completely rebuild wonko.com in Ruby. You’re looking at the result.

The only significant user-visible change is that the search feature is now powered by the Yahoo! Search developer API. Try it out; I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how well it works.

I’ll post more about Ramaze and Thoth (my new blog engine) later. In the meantime, if you’re curious, you can find the code here.

One of the awesome things about getting to work on Yahoo! Search Assist is that I got to toss a few extra little features in there just for myself. I haven’t seen these mentioned in the press or blog coverage, possibly because nobody’s noticed them yet.

Quick access to the search box

On search.yahoo.com, the cursor is automatically placed in the search box when the page is loaded, but on the search result page, we don’t automatically give focus to the search box because that would prevent you from scrolling using the keyboard.

So, what if you want to edit your query without moving your hand all the way from the keyboard to the mouse to click on the search box? Well, now it’s easy: after the page loads, just press tab. Voila, cursor in search box, ready to edit, no mouse necessary.

Quick access to the Search Assist tray

By default, Search Assist isn’t displayed unless you appear to be having difficulty deciding what to search for. It does this by analyzing your typing speed and noticing when you pause longer than usual. Sometimes, though, you want to see suggestions right away without waiting. You can use the mouse to click on the little arrow beneath the search box, but that requires more pesky hand movement. Luckily, there’s another option.

When the cursor is in the search box, you can simply press the down arrow on your keyboard to expand the tray. If you decide you don’t want the tray after all, hit the escape key to close it again. As has been mentioned elsewhere, you can also use the arrow keys to select suggestions and concepts.

Mouse wheel scrolling

If you’re a mouse person and aren’t fond of having to click the tiny arrows to scroll the lists of suggestions and concepts, just move your cursor over the list you want to scroll and use the mouse wheel. When the cursor isn’t over a suggestion list, the mouse wheel causes the entire page to scroll, but when the cursor is over a list, the mouse wheel only scrolls that list.

A little something extra

I can’t take credit for this one, but it’s one of my favorite new features nonetheless: Yahoo! Search goes up to 11. Google only goes to 10. You do the math.

YUI's Julien Lecomte has just announced the release of YUI Compressor, a new JavaScript compression tool that achieves better compression than both JSMin and the Dojo compressor. And I even get a shout-out at the end of the article. Sweet!

I'm not sure when it happened, but it looks like Yahoo! oneSearch has been updated with a beautiful new iPhone-friendly interface. You'll see it if you visit oneSearch on an iPhone (and only on an iPhone).

Unfortunately I have no way to take screenshots and I don't have a camera with me at the moment to take photos of it running on my iPhone, but it's really very nice. The page automatically scrolls down to hide the Safari toolbar on load, and the color scheme, icons, and widgets all match the iPhone UI styles much better than the standard oneSearch design. I like!

Eric Miraglia has just posted an excellent tutorial on the YUI Blog demonstrating how to use Douglas Crockford's awesome Module Pattern for JavaScript.

I learned about this pattern when I randomly stumbled across a page about it on Yahoo!'s internal wiki shortly after joining the company, and I immediately fell in love with it. I was amazed that I couldn't find any mention of it outside Yahoo! aside from a few hints on Doug Crockford's website, so I'd been meaning to write a tutorial, but never got around to it.

Luckily, Eric did the hard work for me, so now all I have to do is link to his article. Hooray!

One thing Eric's article doesn't mention, though, is how to extend a base module in such a way that the inheriting module still has access to members of the base module's private scope. It's a little tricky, and there are caveats, but luckily Douglas Crockford has gifted the world with the solution to that problem too. I'll try to find the time to write about it soon (if the YUI blog doesn't beat me to it).

It's been a while since I mentioned I had accepted a job at Yahoo!, and more than a few people have asked me when I was going to stop being lazy and write about what it's like working for Big Purple. Now that I've been there almost two months, I feel like I'm finally ready to give an accurate report.

So. What's it like? In a word: awesome. And by awesome I mean totally sweet.

Maybe it's just that right off the bat I've gotten to work on projects that are really interesting and that present lots of fun challenges, but so far I've been having a blast. I honestly can't remember the last time I've enjoyed a job this much. I can't wait to be able to show people what I've been doing.

I also love the environment. The people are friendly and smart, the campuses are beautiful, the coffee is free, and the food is delicious. Especially the cornbread. I'm absolutely in love with the cornbread served in the Yahoo! cafeterias, to the point where I've had to fight the urge to eat meals consisting entirely of cornbread and honey.

So far I've also managed to resist the urge to partake of the dessert bar, which is kept well-stocked with various kinds of delicious-looking pies and cakes and whatnot, but I imagine I'll eventually lose that battle. And what a delicious loss it will be.

As with any job, there will no doubt be good days and bad days, and I'll eventually develop complaints. I could probably already think of a few minor ones. But as long as the work is at least half as fun as it is now, and as long as they don't take away my cornbread, I think Yahoo! and I will have a long and happy relationship.