Cleveland Givecamp 2013

What a great weekend! We had a great time at Cleveland GiveCamp on the LeanDog Boat as we do what we do best. All 18 teams completed their projects, and every non-profit walked away with a smile on their face. I can't think of any better way to spend our talents than what we helped pull off this weekend.

On day one, we were assigned to teams and informed on who we were going to be helping. I had the opportunity of helping Heights Arts design a fresh new site using WordPress and multiple plug-ins to make it easy for them to maintain. Meanwhile, Steven was on a larger team building a mobile app for North Coast Community Homes. After we met with our groups, the project managers organized us and gave us all the tasks that needed to be completed. Night one was finalized with a nice fireworks show, followed by a pretty fierce storm. The Byte Shredders tent held up to it, though, and we made it through the night.



Day two began while it was still raining from the storm, and I immediately rushed to the coffee station before I met with my group. It seemed like we were pretty far ahead, so it made for a pretty relaxing afternoon to try and put the final pieces in place. My team worked well together to make sure everything got done. We had one minor hitch with some of the WordPress plug-ins that was solved fairly quickly when we decided to pitch a PHP plugin that allowed us to code inside of the text-editor. Turns out plug-ins really don't like other plug-ins.

Steven's team also shot ahead and were able to make time to make additional improvements to NCCH's site. After that, we turned on 'shred' mode, staying up until 5:00 AM on night 2 offering our help to other teams that were biting their nails to get their project finished. Needless to say, caffeine was an invaluable resource.

On Sunday, we woke up around 8:30 to go meet with our teams. We were very tired but since we were so far ahead, all my team needed to do was pretty things up and put together some documentation. I created the backup plan for Heights Arts site and handed the backup to the GiveCamp organizers. Steven's team cleaned up bugs and finalized a few features before packing up NCCH's site. They put their source up on Bitbucket so they had source control going forward. We then headed over to the Burke Lakefront Airport to view the results of everyone's hard work over the weekend.

Everyone did a great job, and it all seemed to go without a hitch. Our teams were full of fun and interesting people, and we were fed very well all weekend. It all made for an awesome weekend we will never forget. Thank you Cleveland GiveCamp organizers, along with all of the sponsors for giving us such an opportunity to put our talents to great use.

GiveCamp Sponsors:

• Arras Keathley Agency 
• Burke Lakefront Airport 
• Explorys
• Hyland Software 
• IEEE Cleveland Section 
• JumpStart
• KeyBank
• LeanDog
• Rosetta
• Coffee and Code
• Onshore Momentum
• Bizdom
• BlueBridge Networks, LLC
• DXY
• Pantek