Salesforce Developer Garage is a FREE developer event that allows the developer community to come together to hack, learn from experts and exchange ideas. As part of Developer Garage, we recently held the Salesforce Nonprofit hackathon in San Francisco, which brought together Salesforce Foundation, Salesforce Nonprofits and Salesforce employees together to build cloud applications that could be used by selected nonprofit organizations. The vision behind the hackathon was to help each non-profit solve a specific problem that the organization faced. Organizations were selected with the help of Steve Andersen, SVP of Technology & Innovation at Salesforce Foundation, and included Alliance for Climate Education, Net Impact and Health Leads.
Each nonprofit submitted requirements to which the following use cases were created:
- Alliance for Climate Education: Help ACE share data between two climate education organizations as their supporters transition from one to the other.
- Net Impact: Make it easier for Net Impact to manage its products and services.
- Health Leads: Assist Health Leads in activating and deactivating the hundreds of volunteer users who power their services.
Nine developer teams competed and the top three teams were chosen based on best technical, best creative, and best hack requirements.
The hackathon open with the nonprofits’ representatives, Anna Wheatley, Kara Muraki and Zach Goldstein, briefing the developers about each hack. The nine hack teams flexed their “pro-bono coding muscles” to solve real-world problems faced by our nonprofits, as well to be one of the top three winners.
Throughout the day, the teams received guidance, not only from the nonprofits, but also from UX experts, Shannon Hale ?and Mrudula Kodali and Force.com experts, Derek D’Souza, Jinal Kathiara, Chen Deng, John Brock, Pat Patterson ?and Raja Rao DV.
Anna, Kara and Zach all expressed their amazement and the benefits of working side by side with developers to create ready-made apps for them in one day.
To keep everyone energized, I kept the tradition of providing great food, drinks and FREE “I Code Cloud” t-shirts for everyone. After ten hours of hacking, the teams presented their Salesforce Platform apps to the judges: Steve, Anna, Kara, Shannon and Pat.
As mentioned, the judging criteria were best technical, best creative and best hack requirements. While the judges were deciding on the top 3 teams, suspense was building up among everyone. They were excited about which
teams would have the satisfaction of seeing their code adopted for a good cause, and also win some awesome prizes – up to 4 Mac Minis for the winning team, Beats headsets for the runners up, and Jamboxes for third place. We are talking about more than $3,000 in prizes!
“As an aspiring Salesforce Administrator and someone brand new to Salesforce technology, the nonprofit hackathon provided a wonderful opportunity for hands on collaboration with experienced Salesforce developers to solve real-world customer problems.”
-Dennis Markunas
And the winners are…
Third-place winners Derek Lansing and Kyle Barrett
THIRD place winning team Derek Lansing and Kyle Barrett. Second place went to Thys Michels, Ravikumar Neti, Robb Tyson and Guna Sevugapperumal. First place went to Missy Longshore , Ray Lion, Jeremy Bergtholdt and Jagadish Paidimarr.
Thys Michels, Ravikumar Neti, Robb Tyson and Guna Sevugapperumal
CONSOLATION PRIZES were cool Salesforce Platform hoodies awarded to…
David Schach @dschach, Mike Leach @dlog, Tom Johnson, Gilles de Bordeaux, Chris Peterson @ca_perterson, Bennett Fonacier @bfonacier, Vasu Rampally @vaasu9, Chandra Shekar Reddy, David Liu, Lal Singh Ramavath, Jenna Vuong, Colin Pearse, Luong Tam, Peter Kao, Dennis Markunas, Cecelia Pernada, Don Mitchell, Adam Purkiss @apurkiss and Sachin Naik @sachinnaik. More photos from the hackathon can be found here.
First-place winners Missy Longshore , Ray Lion, Jeremy Bergtholdt and Jagadish Paidimarr
Final Word
Based on this first experience, I believe we are off to a great start with the Salesforce Developer Garage Hackathons and I’m looking forward to the next one. To that end, we are looking for participants to lead the way and commit to doing a pro-bono project for a nonprofit. You can get involved through the Taproot Foundation, NPower Community Corps or Catchafire. To receive updates on all DeveloperForce community activities, you can join by clicking here and follow us @forcedotcom.