Our Startup Story

Tom and I had the pleasure of supporting the Flex Charity Code Jam at two different 360|Flex events (Seattle ’07 and San Jose ’08). Both times it was an awesome success due to hard work of the organizer, Ali Daniali. Here’s how it works.

Ali picks a charity before our conference begins.  He comes to the show with a spec of what needs to be built.  He announces the project during the Monday keynote. People start volunteering their time Monday morning after the Keynote. From that point until the Wednesday keynote, developers work pretty much 24 hours a day in a mad coffee, red bull, soda, and pizza supported frenzy with Ali being the overseer of all. In the end, a local charity get’s an RIA that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford.

Both times in the past it’s been a local food bank. In San Jose the food bank got a food locator, to help people locate food pick up areas in their area, it was very awesome. (Side note, if you’re wondering how ‘poor people’ have access to the internet, it’s easy. The poverty line is pretty high, plenty of people have jobs, but still don’t make enough to put food on their tables.)

Tom and I support the effort by providing a room at the conference and a suite at the hotel, so that the coding only has to stop while folks move from one location to the other. We usually provide the white board, markers, coffee, and pizza, etc. That’s it.  We take no credit for the brilliant outcome, only pride in helping make the outcome a possibility and reality by providing a place for it to happen.

The only thing we can’t cover is travel for Ali or payment for his time/effort.  In Seattle, he was local so travel wasn’t an issue.  In San Jose Adobe covered his travel, which worked out really well. Mad props to Adobe for stepping up like that.

It was awesome in San Jose, because on top of supporting the codejam itself, Tom and I were able to donate $7,000 to the food bank. Not only did they get a killer RIA that made a huge impact in the community, they also got enough money to buy 14,000 meals. It felt kinda nice to hand those folks a Publishers Clearing House style check for $7000.

Let’s fast forward to our upcoming event in May, 360|Flex Indianapolis. The Organizer of the Charity Code jam’s been out of work for a while (yeah sucks, hard).  This means he doesn’t have the resources to come to Indy or even organize it like he *wants* to. Definitely a suck factor of 10.

We can say with 100% certainty, that if our company could hire someone who could not only organize a charity project and get it built in 50 some odd hours, with all volunteer effort, we’d do it. If it was just a matter of a few thousand dollars for his time setting the event up and a plane ticket to get him to the event, we’d be all over that like spammers on an open mail server.  Thing is we can’t afford it yet.  We’re still trying to make sure we can get paid to do the conference thing 100% of the time with no side projects.

Wouldn’t it be cool if software vendors, like Adobe and Microsoft, hired people like Ali to do these code jams full time.  We know Ali had aspirations of doing 4 or 5 code jams a year.  Think of how many lives his efforts would affect (those receiving/using the project and those volunteering to code it).  Think of how much good juju and karma (not to mention press, if they played it up a bit more) the company would get.

Ah, the frustrations of not being a large enough company to make the world a better place yet, and seeing others with the means not doing it.  Someday, we’ll have the resources to step up and make sure great opportunities like this get realized.  However, this is one case where we wish someone would beat us to the punch.