introspectiveH

At this year's RailsConf, Dave Thomas wrote about the Rails community as they set a precedent for other tech conferences by skipping the typical swag and instead donating any funds to charity.  Fellow SDNer, Nigel James, then picked up on the meme by calling out to the SAP developer community and then shortly afterwards, it caught some momentum with the Redmonk guys as they talked about taking some real action.  How cool it is to see more people spreading the love.  

This past week I attended the 360 Flex conference in Seattle.  During the conference, the Seattle Flex Users group, led by Ali Daniali, coordinated a 60 hour coding marathon called the Flex Code Jam.  They gathered a volunteer group of hardcore, dedicated Flex hackers to develop a virtual food drive web application for Northwest Harvest Organization. 

They started on Sunday night and continued through the end of the conference on Wednesday.  I am no Flex guru, but I did stop by for a few hours to see if I could help.  Luckily, I had some experience with the PayPal API and was able to at least contribute a small amount.  It was quite an experience.  They rented out a suite on the top floor of the hotel and had a constant flow of Redbull (kudos to Redbull for providing this for free), soda, pizza, and beer. They actually had a keg, but I just stuck with the Redbull since I am no good at CUI (coding under the influence).  The mix of alcohol, greasy food, energy drinks, no sleep, and mama jokes proved for an interesting combination for sure. 

The guys pulled it together by the Wednesday morning keynote to show a working demo of the first version.  They also announced their plans to release the entire code base as open source so that other charity organizations can use it as well.  At the end, Ali made the call to other groups in hopes that they would be inspired to do similar events in the future.  This was a tremendous effort and very fulfilling to see.  It was an awesome experience and I want to give some serious congrats to all involved.  This is a prime example of developers changing the world. 

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