Yahoo! 9/11 10-year Anniversary Digital Moment of Silence

Role: Engineering and Universal Header Project Lead

Front End Architecture

On September 11, 2011, we used our platform to deliver a front-end experience for a 1 minute "digital moment of silence" on all Yahoo! U.S. web sites from 8:46 a.m. ET to 8:47 a.m. ET. I did the initial scoping and analysis of feasibility as well as project planning. In addition, I led the progressive testing efforts and provided code guidance to the engineers preparing the CSS and JS for the event. I prepared the markup for this event and did the data modeling work in our platform. The code had to be compatible with all Y! code bases, so was written in native JavaScript. Our platform allowed us to "pre-distribute" the code in an inactive state for testing against all the web sites prior to the active time.

This was an unprecedented achievement at Yahoo!, and a very exciting accomplishment for the team - in addition to providing a meaningful experience to our users. During the 1 minute, over 130,000 users experienced the moment of silence delivered by our platform with our front-end code.

The front-end code has support for:

• Accessibility
• Runs on tablets and web sites alike
• Compatible with all Yahoo! U.S. code bases, written in native JS