Breakdown of the 2008 360Flex San Jose Conference
One of the best times I’ve ever had.
Tom and John organized another excellant 360Flex conference. It is very cool how they are promoting networking within the Flex community. If you want to know what is going on with Flex, you have to attend!
Ok, I just gotta jump right in and tell you why it was one of they best times I’ve ever had.
During the Key note, Ali Daniali spoke about an opportunity during the conference to work on application for the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. They needed an application that would help people find Food Banks close to them.
Something about this really tugged on my heart and I thought, what a cool idea… Here’s a chance to work on a really cool project and help create something worthwhile.
I missed the first meeting that day but showed up that night at the hotel room where the Flex Code Jam was taking place. I asked what I could do to help and was assigned the Yahoo Map component. Nobody seemed to mind when I explained I’d never worked with it before. The help was appreciated so I dove in and started researching the Yahoo Map Flex API. I worked until a little after midnight and got a small prototype to work.
The next morning I went back to Ebay, met up with the Code Jam Team and started integrating the Yahoo Map component into the main project. Believe it or not, I actually started running into problems with the Yahoo Map component… 
I raised the issue to my team members and kept troubleshooting. Everyone else was pretty much swamped so I was on my own for a while. What I didn’t know was that SCRUM was about to change things for the better.
I’d heard of a SCRUM meeting but about all I knew was that you are supposed to stand up. We had a SCRUM meeting when I was about 3 hours into the day. In a SCRUM meeting the SCRUM master asks you to stand up and answer three questions; What have you been working on? What are you working on now? What problems are you having? It was amazing how those 3 questions brought accountability and moved the project along. Ok PMs wipe off that silly grin!
Because of the SCRUM meeting, I was able to quickly find out that two team members had just wrapped up their tasks and were free to help out. After trying several things the problem was finally resolved, not by me, you know who you are. I moved on to other tasks after the Yahoo thing was resolved.
Things really took off after Midnight, everyone was either focused on a task or was asking for something to work on. The team really gelled and worked together. At about 3 am we had a working application that was ready to present to the client. But there were a few hours left before we had to present the application at they keynote Wednesday morning so we kept polishing and testing the app.
I will never forget the experiance of working with some of the best Flex developers and the best people in the world! It is something that just doesn’t happen every day. If you get the chance to work on a charity application like this just do it! I really can’t explain what an amazing experiance it was.
I got a little choked up that morning during the key note when Tom, John and Ali talked about the project and Tom and John announced that they were donating 7K to Second Harvest. It felt really good to be a part of something like this.
I just want to say thank you to Tom, John and especially Ali for bringing this project together. You guys are truly awesome!
I also want to thank the Flex Code Jam team. It was great working with you and hope we can do it again sometime.
You can find a link to the app that we created below. The app currently works for zip codes around San Jose. You can use 95126 as a test zip.
The code is open source and is available at: