We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge Weekend 2010
Just wrapped up my 3rd We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge and it was the best year ever. The event is a 3-day coding binge to benefit charities in the Dallas area. Each of 20 selected charities is assigned a team of 3 developers, a DBA and a designer. Together they build, usually, a web site or a web application that the charity needs. Since there are only 3 days, sleep is ignored and caffeine rules. Also lots of coding food like pizza and sandwiches and, of course, the Saturday afternoon Pokey O’s ice cream sandwich – Oy! 
Our charity was the Lil Goldman Early Learning Center in Fort Worth. I am a bit shocked to say that our team was awarded 2nd place this year! Thanks, everyone! Admittedly, our site came out pretty nice. We used Telerik’s Sitefinity CMS (Telerik donates licenses for the charities) which gave us a huge head start. Basically, we ported the old site – a venerable old 90′s style site – to a new format. Sitefinity also enables non-technical people to make updates to the site to keep it fresh and useful.
Thanks to a really talented group of guys – Shawn Weisfeld, who doubled as PM and developer and DBA, Cedric Yao, and Jag Sandhu! I had a blast and would be honored work with any of you again anytime.
Here is Shawn’s post with some good video:
Lots of good work done this weekend, especially, I think, the amazing feat the guys from Improving Enterprises pulled off by creating an entire web app in 2.5 days. Great job, guys!
And thanks to everyone for giving of your time and talents to so many worthy causes.
