On Thursday, August 8, the Yext engineering team welcomed 100 software developers, hackers, and innovators as we hosted the NYC Hacker Union for a Hacker Forum at our Madison Square Park HQ.
NYC Hacker Union organizer, Brandon Diamond, and Sean MacIsaac, CTO at Yext, welcomed the crowd and kicked off the event.
The topic for the night was screen scraping, a technique to extract data from human-readable output on a website. The evening included three presentations:
- Kevin Caffrey, Software Engineer at Yext, gave an overview of how Yext works and explained how they scrape sites to verify data accuracy on their 175,000+ active clients.
- Cole Diamond, Program Manager at Microsoft, shared an anecdotal story from his hacker days at Columbia and explained that it's important to conduct screen scraping in an ethical way.
- Jonathan Dahan, Media Technology Developer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, demonstrated his api, scrAPI.org, and how he uses it to scrape data from the Metmuseum Collection.
Attendees asked great questions, made new friends, and enjoyed an array of food and drinks, provided by the Yext engineering team. Special thanks to Yext, NYC Hacker Union and Brandon Diamond for organizing a fun and informative event.
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