#givecamp

The holiday season is almost upon us! Many of us mark this time of year by eating special foods (pumpkin pie and potato latkes), joining together with our families to celebrate holidays (Thanksgiving, Hannukah, and many more), and giving back to those less fortunate in our communities.

For the past four years, a global community has joined together to celebrate this season of giving with #GivingTuesday.

         #GivingTuesday is a global celebration that takes place on the             Tuesday after Thanksgiving to connect diverse groups of individuals,            communities, and organizations around the world for one common          purpose: to celebrate and encourage giving.

Perlman is thrilled to participate in this year’s #GivingTuesday celebration on December 1st! This #GivingTuesday, we have a goal of raising $2,800, which would help send a rookie to camp this summer.

How is Perlman participating in #GivingTuesday?

Perlman is committed to ensuring that no camper is ever turned away from a summer at camp due to financial need. All year long, Perlman raises money for scholarship through our Annual Campaign. This year, we are participating in #GivingTuesday to help raise awareness of our need for scholarship dollars. As we countdown to the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, we are reminding our community of the need for scholarship and asking for their participation.

From now until #GivingTuesday on December 1st, there are many ways that you can participate and help us #GiveCamp!

1. Share our #GivingTuesday posts on Facebook and Instagram to help spread the word about our campaign

2. Talk with your family and friends about what is #GivingTuesday, and how Perlman is participating

3. On December 1st, make a donation to support our #GivingTuesday campaign at bit.ly/PerlmanGives 4. Share our bit.ly/PerlmanGives on your own social media accounts, so others can support our goal of sending a rookie to camp!

Have questions about #GivingTuesday or an idea about how to share Perlman’s campaign? Send me an email at [email protected]

I hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and a meaningful #GivingTuesday.

Working with The Boys & Girls Club of Grand Rapids for their Youth of the Year program during GiveCamp GR.  I sadly do not have much time to donate this year, but with only an hour of meeting and getting some basic information, I was able to do a quick update to their Eventbrite page.

I hope they like it!

The 2nd annual “That Conference” software development conference held in the Wisconsin Dells was a few weeks ago and I personally think it was even more successful than last year.  I met a lot of great people and attended some fantastic sessions.

This year I was able to come up to the Dells the weekend before the conference for Midwest GiveCamp.  I was fortunate enough to work with a great team on a web application for Humanitarian Toolbox, a newer charity focusing on disaster recovery via software solutions, building a system for tracking and assigning volunteers during disasters.  In less than 2 days, we built a fairly solid version 1.0 that I’m happy to say I contributed to and hope to continue contributing to.  Code is available on GitHub.  

Once again, there were a great variety of sessions available across 3 days.  Even given that there are high levels of .NET developers that show up, a wider range of topics was available this year.  Some notable ones that I attended:

Dave Thomas keynote: Dave Thomas is one of the authors of my all-time favorite developer book, The Pragmatic Programmer, so I was very excited to see him speak.  His talk was solid, nothing groundbreaking but still interesting.  He spoke about fear, change, risk and stagnation.  A choice quote: “If things aren’t going wrong, you’re not trying hard enough!”

Machine Learning: A well-known example of this is Netflix’s movie recommendation system.  Lots of math and theorems here.  I’m not sure just yet how I could apply to this to my work, but given the rise of “big data” lately I bet that this could become important to innovation efforts in the next few years.

Elegant Precision of Targeted Actionable Language: A mouthful of a title, this session was about how to create easy to read, well written content in the context of app development.  One of my favorite sessions that left me with lots of material to follow up on.

JavaScript talks: Angular.js, Backbone, JS error logging… the list goes on.  Once again JavaScript was a huge focus at That Conference – understandably so, given the rise of mature, stable frameworks that have become very popular. 

DevOps:  I went to two sessions on this, one by Richard Campbell and one by a guy who works for Stack Exchange.  Campbell’s presentation gave a great overview of what DevOps is and the three steps to work on; lots of ideas to take back to work!

Responsive Design: With the rise of mobile devices of all shapes and sizes, it was no surprise that this session was packed!  Definitely something developers across all industries need to get better at.  This is a topic that I believe will be huge in 2014 and beyond.

.NET Rocks! 900th show: Carl and Richard recorded the 900th show of their hit podcast, this one "geek out" style on automated driving.  I was really excited for this as I cannot wait for automated cars to come in the next few years.  It was a fascinating discussion - the neatest takeaway was that laws are already in place for driverless vehicles and that driverless trucks will begin hitting highways in 2014.

Beyond the sessions, I really tried to meet even more people than last year.  Between GiveCamp and random conversations during lunch and in between sessions, this proved to be the most valuable portion of the conference.  Focusing for a few days solely on development and breaking away from the typical work week really helps energize and motivate me.  I always come away with new ideas that propel my work forward!

On a fun note, myself and a few others gathered at 6am each morning for what was dubbed "That5k" - a few mile run around the Kalahari resort.  Monday there was just a handful of us, but by Tuesday the group had doubled!  Nice to meet some fellow developers concerned with good health.

I had the pleasure of being part of the coordination team for Seattle GiveCamp this year. Ruth Walther, event leader, has done a nice job getting many charities to participate. Plus, over 90 volunteers have stepped up this year. You can view all the charities and their desired projects at the Seattle GiveCamp site wiki. 

On day 1, The Woodland Park Zoo started things off with a very informative keynote, covering their recent fund drive to raise $100k (of $11 million) using social media to build their new tiger exhibit. I learned that the zoo has YouTube's most popular zoo channel because of all their cute cat videos. They DO have some of the most adorable cats and I'm not surprised by the numbers. At last check they have had over 20 million views on their videos. Impressive indeed. I tweeted a couple of lessons learned from the keynote, so check them out.

The sheer number of Wordpress projects (no tumblr requests at all) requested by charities also caught my attention. There were soup to nut projects, plugin development, Salesforce integration with WP, and a couple of WP branding requests. Grant Landram presented a great Wordpress workshop today (Day 2) as well. The WP phenomenon made me research the impact of WP on charities and was able to find several good resources. One in particular was this article "8 Tips for Charity Websites"

Overall, the volunteers stayed heads down and engaged in the race to get their charity projects completed before tomorrow afternoon.