Ann Arbor Give Camp and the developers in room BE-240
This weekend I had the opportunity to participate in the first Ann Arbor Give Camp. I wasn't sure what to expect at first since this was the first event of its kind in the area, but I had a blast! At the end of the week, all of the charities that participated walked away with some great projects and the developers walked away with an amazing experience.
Dan Hibbitts originally convinced me to attend give camp with the lure of working on adding digital signing to a mobile app for Forgotten Harvest. I've been interested in learning more about mobile development, so I decided to give it a try. I worked with Dan at Media Station for a few years and was looking forward to working on the same project with him again. Martin Shoemaker was the other developer on the project. Besides his reputation on UML, Martin also has a lot of mobile experience. Our team was set to crank out this project in a weekend.
On the first day we met with the representative from Forgotten Harvest Donald Washington. 
As he explained, the person who wrote the proposal for Give Camp didn't understand completely what Forgotten Harvest's needs were. They already had a mobile app that would capture digital signatures from food donors or recipients of the donated food. What they needed was to get the digital signatures integrated into their database and signed receipts to be automatically emailed or faxed to the recipient. Their current process required many manual steps. Some Give Camp teams were able to start from scratch on their database projects, but Forgotten Harvest had a large pre-existing database in Access 2000 with many custom forms, so we had to integrate with their database. It was a lucky thing that Dan is also an expert on anything having to do with databases, I had some ADO.Net experience to facilitate talking to the Access database, and Martin and I had plenty of desktop windows experience to knock out the necessary automation.
There were over a hundred developers that signed up to volunteer their time developing for local charities. Each charity had a team of anywhere between 3 to 7 developers working on their project. Each room at Washtenaw Community College had two development teams in them. The other team occupying our room (BE-240) was the team developing for NOCIRC of Michigan. Jeff McWherter headed up a team that was working on a web site that allowed any charity (not just NOCIRC) to keep track of and schedule volunteers for upcoming events. He drafted (conned) many developers to help him out. It seemed that every day there was someone new working on the project. I follow many of the people in the room on twitter, so it was great to work with them for a weekend and get to know them better.
Both teams had an incredible amount of work to do in a short amount of time. The chemistry in the room was shall we say very jovial. Jokes (good and bad) were flying all weekend long. It was probably the opposing forces of the intense caffeine we were drinking and our lack of sleep that made the atmosphere in the room so much fun.
In the picture you can see Jeff wearing a florescent head band -- Jeff stayed up for over 40 hours before he took a cat nap. In the back you can also see another developer Marc (can't recall his last name) who downed a stack of 8 monster energy drinks and one red bull. Yikes!
Sometime on Saturday Dan decided to play episodes from "The IT Crowd". A very funny English sitcom on the overhead projector while everyone worked. This was very natural to me since most evenings I enjoy having a movie on in the background while I get some work done on the computer.
The Give Camp was also a good opportunity for developers to learn new skills. The environment of the room provided a great opportunity for people to pair program on projects. On the NOCIRC team there were a couple developers that learned C# and ASP.NET for the first time. On the first day Martin and I paired up and both of us learned little things here and there from each other. On Saturday I wrote a windows service for the first time and learned a few good techniques on how to debug it. Neither Martin or I wanted to pair with Dan since he was stuck working on the Access 2000 database. Sorry Dan.
I would like to thank all of the organizers of the Ann Arbor Give Camp for putting together a great event for the charities and also the developers of room BE-240 for making the experience a lot of fun. If you get a chance, make sure you attend a Give Camp. It is definitely worth it. I can't wait for next year.