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This weekend I participated in the 2011 Columbus Give Camp. Give Camps are weekend long events where developers and designers donate their time to help out worth charities. A good majority of the time projects are to create or update charity websites but it is by no means limited to that.

This year there were 5 charites that were lucky enough to be selected:

• Ohio WildLife Center
• Northwest Plains District Family Church Camp
• Gallery 202: Partners in Art
• Interface Center of Peace
• Pets Without Parents

I was on a team with my co-workers at Quick Solutions, Inc. We were privlidged to get to work for the charity Pets Without Parents. The team updated the current plain static pages to a SiteFinity backed CMS solution. We have some training with the charity so currently the new site isn’t live for the public yet but it will be soon.

It was a wonderful weekend and I had a great time. If you’re in the area please think about helping out next year!

The Cleveland GiveCamp 2010 has been announced and is currently looking for charities and volunteers!

About GiveCamp

GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they’ve donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation is that the project should be scoped to be able to be completed in a weekend.

The Cleveland event will be held July 16th - 18th, 2010 at LeanDog located at 1151 North Marginal Road Cleveland, OH 44114.

So please check out the Cleveland GiveCamp 2010 and sign up to help if you can!

This weekend I had the honor and privileged to attend the Grand Rapids GiveCamp in lovely Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Roughly 100 developers, designers and other technical professionals graciously gave their time and energy to help 25 worthy charities. Work was done on projects ranging from updating outdated websites to building databases to track donors.

I must make a confession here… To be honest I was very hesitant to go.  I think like many developers I have a great fear of coding in public. In the safe confines of the cube jungles you are comfortable and safe. In a public setting being sat down at a table with a room full of coders was down terrifying to me. I was terrified that I would be found out as a phony, an incompetent programmer and *gasp* a newb in comparison to everyone else.

But I felt a calling on myself to take the chance and do some good. Much of what I can directly account for to my recent reading of Joyce Meyer’s  book “A Love Revolution”. This book has really inspired me to open up and give to those in need.

Anyhoo… enough of my emotional outpouring lets get back to to #GRGiveCamp

I was assigned to do updates to some surveys and data collection tools that the Volunteer Center of Greater Kalamazoo had. I may be biased but I think we had the most awesome kick-ass team with my fellow teammates @mattsonlyattack and @kalpers.

We worked with the ASP.Net MVC Framework and Drupal to get our project done. It was very fun as I have wanted to learn MVC but have yet had the chance to sit down and dig in. I got to be tossed into the deep end and work my way through it. In 2 days of programming I managed to grok a lot and I feel very comfortable that I could safely do MVC work now.

It was an amazing time and one I will not soon forget.  Thank you Chris Woodruff (@cwoodruff) and all the crew that organized this. I feel so energized and happy knowing I did some good and made a difference in this world!