So last weekend was the event and it was a combination of the best and worst feelings a human can experience.
To recap, the Microsoft Charity Challenge is is the Dallas version of GiveCamp. The idea is to provide a weekend’s worth of consulting time to charities so that they can further their message and work into the world. A charity applies for the event, a selection committee reviews their application and the work that will be done, if the charity is selected (of which there are about 20) then their project is the subject of about 4 or 5 volunteer developers’ brain power over a weekend’s worth of time.
I had the awesome privilege of working with Second Wind Dallas. The subject of what we worked on was their help in setting up families with volunteers’ donations though local schools. They had data, in mixed formats (paper, Excel, etc) and needed a centralized repository for the information as well as a good user interface for them and their volunteers to work with.
I was on a team with four other developers; Rick, Mike, Don, and Trevor. It was really nice as they each brought their expertize and there wasn’t a ton of overlap so the project benefited from a wide range of knowledge. In the picture above is Chris Koenig, a Microsoft evangelist and one of the event organizers, Don (he’s the young one), Rick (he’s the dreamy one), Mike (he’s the smart one), Me (the best one), Trevor (the devil may care one) and Richard Campbell. Richard is something of a micro-celebrity. He co-hosts the podcast .NET Rocks. Think of him as the Conan O’Brian of the Microsoft world, minus the drama. Together we could be the best boy band ever but instead we use our powers for good.
I think that between all of us, we got about one good nights sleep…for one person. We averaged about 4 hours for the whole weekend. You can imagine with that kind of fatigue the range of emotions. We went from “this is never going to work and we’ve failed” to “oh my gosh…we ARE geniuses”. In reality we landed somewhere in the middle.
The good news is we finished 4th! I had to leave part way through the charity presentations yesterday so I didn’t find out until this morning the awesome news. To go through all of that hard work and to not only be rewarded with a finished product for our charity but to also finish 4th??? It was a good thing done and I’m thrilled and almost (ALMOST) ready to do it again. Luckily it’s an annual event. I think of it like childbirth, God makes you forget the pain so that you’ll do it again.
Anyway, it was a massive success and I’m a much better developer having associated myself with my teammates and their skill sets and knowledge.
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Glad you had a great time! Hope to see you out there again next year
/ck