Disrupt #11: Hacker lessons from the Valley

• Panellist is David Weekly, now with Facebook and working on Internet.org
• Active in Silicon Valley as mentor, and founder of Hacker Dojo

DESCRIBING himself as “a nerd who loves people, likes giving people hugs on sight, a trouble-maker with run-ins with Stanford Network Security – among others,” David E. Weekly is heading to Kuala Lumpur this week and will be a panellist on the 11th DNA-TeAM Disrupt.
 
The topic is ‘Hacker lessons from the Valley,’ and Weekly is well-positioned to share his thoughts on how geeks are planning to take over the world. Is resistance futile?
 
According to his LinkedIn profile, he has been “writing code since I was five (professionally since I was 15)," and thinks he probably wrote the first layman’s description of MP3. His bio shows him to be equally adept at both the geeky stuff and having the nous for team and business-building.
 
With Digital News Asia’s (DNA) Week in Review last Friday all about hackathons, Weekly is uniquely positioned to share his views on the importance of such events as well.
 
He was a founding member of the Hacker Dojo back in February, 2009 in Mountain View, California. It is the world's largest non-profit ‘hackerspace,’ home to about 300 members, and is filled with people learning, teaching, connecting, building open source projects, and founding companies.
 
Many successful tech companies have already been founded at the Dojo, according to Weekly, including Pinterest, FitSquid, MicroMobs, Yobble (iPhone Air Guitar), MatterPort, Motion Math, WordLens, NetworkedBlogs, Reddit Pics, EcoBold, YourVersion and Skydera.
 
Weekly (pic) is now the chairman of Hacker Dojo.
 
He is currently with Facebook via what he describes as a March 2013 “acqui-hire” of his second company, Gaston Labs.
 
His job description is infrastructure project manager, Internet.org – yes, the project that is currently Mark Zuckerberg’s passion. Weekly describes his job as “to help design and build the systems that will connect the species to the Internet.”
 
The species? Is resistance truly futile?

Weekly likes to bring people together for dialogue and parties … often both. He enjoys giving talks or advice, “particularly when I’m sure that the result will be that I can save someone a year of making the same mistakes I have,” he says on LinkedIn.

His LinkedIn profile is littered with generous praise of his helpful nature from various people, including startup founders.

With his specialties including idea generation, clusters, Linux, Perl, PHP, MySQL, CSS, networking, security, audio coding, strategy, team formation, party planning, communications, protocol debugging, hiring, team management, founding startups, founding non-profits, and helicopters; Disrupt attendees won’t be short of questions to ask him, nor Weekly short of anecdotes and experiences to share.
 
Disrupt will be held at The Canvas Malaysia (thecanvas.my‎), a venue generously sponsored by entrepreneur and angel investor Khailee Ng. The address is G6C, Jalan PJU 8/3A, Damansara Perdana, 47820 Petaling Jaya, Selangor. The session will be held from 5.30-7.15pm on Thursday, Sept 19.

 
Related Stories:
 
TeAM and DNA out to ‘Disrupt’ the ecosystem
 
Disrupt: ‘It’s hard to raise money in Malaysia’ 
 
Disrupt: Easier to sell to overseas clients than local ones
 
 
For more technology news and the latest updates, follow @dnewsasia on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.