My pics

My original plan was to blog throughout the event, but due to lack of sleep, the days blended together and when I sat down Saturday night to write my post, I was in a daze and had no idea where to start.

Now that the event is behind us and I’ve had some sleep, I’m struggling to put into words the amazing experience I had over the weekend.  I woke up today feeling energized and inspired.

This event was truly the event of the year.  I met so many awesome developers that gave up an entire weekend to help some really great charities.  They came together as small teams (who, for the most part had never worked together), figured out what had to be done and they did it.  They did it with NO complaining.  They did it with very little sleep.  They did it better than most teams I’ve seen in almost 15 years of software development experience.

A few weeks ago I was asked by Jennifer to help out with the “requirements” gathering / vetting of projects stage.  I jumped at the chance and enjoyed the chance to talk to four of the charities about their wants and needs.  Of those four, two were selected (the Ann Arbor Hands On Museum and the Washtenaw Chapter of the American Red Cross).  Shortly before the event, I was assigned to the Hands On Museum project.  My assignment was based on my strong feelings about that particular organization so Jennifer made sure that’s the team I was on.  My wife and kids have spent a lot of time at the Hands On Museum and unfortunately, places like that are pretty tough to come by so I really wanted to see this project be successful.

The project needed a team that was strong in PHP/mySQL.  I, on the other hand, have absolutely no skills with either of those technologies, so after the opening ceremony when the teams were talking to the non-profit representatives, I paid close attention to the three other developers who were assigned to the team.  I very quickly realized that they had exactly what was needed for the project to be successful and I wouldn’t bring much to the table.  After a quick team meeting to make sure everyone else was cool with me stepping away, I let them get to work and found Jennifer and Josh.

For the week or so prior to the event, I had decided that I really wanted to be free from a single-team assignment and play the role of “roamer”.  I wanted to be free to roam around, talk to the other teams and offer my assistance where it was needed.  Luckily, Jennifer and Josh both gave me the green light to do just that.  Not too long after that meeting, Josh snagged me to do some video interviews with the charity representatives.  I was a bit nervous at first, but it was awesome talking to the charities and getting my first look at all the teams.

While I was walking around interviewing the charities, I ran into one team that looked…well…they looked like deer in the headlights.  That’s no criticism of them at all, because once I found out which project they were on, I understood immediately why they looked the way they did.  *sigh*  This is the short version: they were assigned to the Red Cross project.  As luck would have it, I helped gather the requirements for this project so I already knew what the issues were.  Unfortunately, they didn’t know any of the backstory on the project so they were left wondering what they had gotten themselves into.

They were actually packing up to leave for the night because they realized they couldn’t do anything without the Red Cross reps being there and they weren’t scheduled to be back until the next day.  After talking to them for a few minutes, I told them to get some rest and that we would have a meeting first thing in the morning to get things straightened out. 

At 9am, the Red Cross team had a meeting where it was decided that the team would push on with the code while I called the Red Cross to discuss options.  Before I called, one of the reps showed up (Jason – AWESOME guy) and we talked about the issues.  He hooked me up with a couple people to talk to.  Long story short, we ended up stopping the project early due to issues beyond our control, but the Red Cross reps that I talked to (Sherri and Julie) were amazing.  Julie (communications director) was super cool and even stopped by Saturday afternoon to talk and get a tour of the event (she also came to the closing ceremony and gave great praise to Give Camp)!  The team was a bit disappointed when the project ended, but I did what I could to let them know how important their participation was and we did find teams for most of them.

What I found myself doing during the weekend was hitting each and every team multiple times to see how they were doing.  I offered my assistance to everyone.  Most were good-to-go, but some took me up on my offer.  Granted, it wasn’t to write code, but I did offer guidance where I could (mostly on DotNetNuke) and provided my input on some issues that cropped up.  I was also the guy that went around to each room and took hundreds of pictures and a lot of video.  Hopefully the teams didn’t find me too annoying.

During the day, I found out about the Knoxville team and how they had nothing to do.   I knew other people were busy and since Nate Blevins and I had been following each other on twitter for quite some time, I volunteered to call him and try to get them hooked up with a project.  I have never talked to Nate on the phone, but I’ll tell you…it was like talking to an old friend.  He is an amazing guy.  We talked briefly, and since it was late, agreed to talk again Saturday morning.  As luck would have it, we found plenty of work for them to do and I can’t say enough good things about them (Josh did a great job praising them in his post).  I can’t wait to meet Nate and the rest of the devs when I head to Knoxville next month for Codestock.  We also had a great team working from Columbus!

During a good portion of the event, if you saw Josh, you saw me close by.  Over the past few months he has not only been a mentor, he has become a good friend as well.  I enjoyed working with him and being his “go to” guy during the event.  At one point during a 1am status meeting with Josh and Jennifer, Josh looked at me and said, “you and Jennifer are the foreman tonight”.  Of course, as he was leaving to get some sleep, he also said, “I want you to get some good video around 4:30am”.   Good times.

I didn’t sleep at all Friday night or all day Saturday.  In fact, it wasn’t until midnight on Saturday that my friend Chris and I headed to a nearby hotel to grab some Z’s.  I probably could have stayed up, but damn…as soon as my head hit that pillow, I was OUT.  It felt really good to get some sleep, but Chris and I were up and out the door headed back to the event by 8am.

Sunday was spent doing more of the same stuff: walking around talking to the teams, seeing if they needed anything, etc.  I took some more pics and some video.  To be perfectly honest, I was getting pretty down on myself because I realized I hadn’t written a line of code…that all I had done was take some pictures and talk.  I’m still struggling with it, but after talking to a lot of people including Josh, Jennifer and some of the other organizers (as well as Sarah and Chris), I’m slowly coming to the realization that I *did* help.

The closing ceremony was actually pretty emotional, but that’s probably due to the lack of sleep.   The results of the weekend were shown to the other devs as well as all the charities!  It’s all on tape, so hopefully it gets posted soon.

Overall, I had a great time and I think the organizers of the event did an absolutely amazing job at putting this thing together.  Huge thanks to John, Jennifer, Patrick, Greg and Todd.  Wow. 

I also want to thank all the great sponsors we had — especially Verio!  Anyone that was there knows that the Verio rep (Matt) was super cool.  I think he definitely went above and beyond.

I made some new friends over the weekend and got to hang with some old friends. 

I was gonna do a “shout out” section but I realized I’d forget someone, so just know this: my respect has increased for every single developer that showed up this past weekend.  They kicked ass and I hope to see them at future events.