Year in Review: there's a web app for that.

Dhananjay Ragade

Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn

February 22, 2011

Did you get the 2010 Year in Review email from LinkedIn? Now you can see all of your LinkedIn connections that made a career move in 2011, 2010, or 2009.

Check out the Year in Review LinkedIn Labs page here

Many of our users loved the Year in Review email's personalized content and design (by Moses Ting), and thought it was a great opportunity to reconnect with people in their networks. So we decided to make this a LinkedIn Labs product that you can play with on the web, and share with your friends and colleagues. Check it out here.

From Hack to Production

We have a cool tradition at LinkedIn, started by Adam Nash, called HackDays – one day a month when everyone is encouraged to play with new technologies and come up with something creative. The Year in Review email was a Hadoop related hackday project that Elaine Chien, Vidya Chandra, and I created in December.

Over the Christmas holidays, I made some modifications, connected it up to a live email server, and sent it to some coworkers on New Year's Eve. That got further attention, and after an internal test for feedback, Joff Redfern decided to do it for real. Moses and Jenn Tsai jumped on to help fix up the look. Yassine Hinnach and I sent it out to groups of our users. Getting a hackday project to production in the midst of an already busy product roadmap took a lot of flexibility from many parts of the organization and showed me what a great environment LinkedIn has become for letting creative ideas surface rapidly.

Everyone liked the Year in Review email so much we wanted to make a web version of it. So I built a Ruby on Rails web app, using our own LinkedIn developer REST APIs to get all the data. Moses jazzed up the design, and added some JavaScript fun (see if you can find it). Adriana Flores-Ragade helped translate the site into Spanish.

Thanks to all our users who enjoyed the original email we sent you. We hope you have more fun on the brand new site we built for you.

Check out the app at http://yir.linkedinlabs.com/