Posts Tagged ‘Why This is Cool’
Giving Thanks
Friday, September 25th, 2009
How do you thank you to a community? Well, blog it of course! Now that we have gotten over the initial excitement of being approved by Apple, we want to give recognition to all those who helped us get here. This is a daunting task due to the many folks who have been involved so please bear with us as we give it a try.
We can honestly say that without The Community Foundation’s support, we would not have gotten very far. Your support has allowed us to focus on the project while you took care of our nonprofit administration. We brought you an idea for a nonprofit startup that we developed during a sushi eating contest and you provided the nonprofit umbrella for us to make it happen which was an amazing feat. Thank you so much – we love you!
We gotta give a huge shout out to the Van Heyst Group who have provided our workspace. Our productivity is directly linked to these fine facilities and for that we are forever grateful. Thank you so much for everything. Looking for office space to rent? They have some available and it is awesome.
Both Rally Software and Amazon have provided key infrastructure components for us to develop and deliver these applications. You have made our process so much easier which is key for a large group of volunteers who are writing and testing code (you know exactly what I mean).
The Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup has been a home base for us and we can’t tell you how much the love has powered us forward. We have pitched our ideas, read your tweets (be nice!), and appreciated all of the feedback and support. Remember, we are just getting started and have much more to do so we hope you will continue to provide this tremendous lifeline to this project.
To our web and logo designers, Christopher Ritter and Chris Freitag, we don’t know how to thank you. You have developed the face of SnapImpact and we are honored to work with you. YOU ROCK!
Our volunteers. So many people. There were so many who helped us to get started and who have supported us over the time taken to get to this point, check out Andrew Hyde’s and Stepan Mazurov’s fabulous photos. Thanks for helping us get this off the ground. We could not have persevered without ya!
Most recently, we have had a kick ass software development crew – Ryan Schneider, Hassan Abdel-Rahman, Neil Simon, Tony Kay, Dave Angulo, Orn Kristjansson, Mark Chance, Eric Telingator, and Sue Uyetake. They have worked hard slinging code with only mediocre pizza and good beer to sustain them while keeping full time jobs and family happy. You are heroes.
The current rock star business development team includes Nicole Glaros, Josh Clauss, Katrina Florence, Rick Saltzman, Rich Grote, Brett Greene, Dan Hellman, Mark Haeg, Luke Tilsley, Kevin Cloughley, and Phong Le. You slaved away to develop the feature set, build out a PR and marketing plan, and continue to push our project forward (over a few bottles of excellent tequila). Thanks for doing this while keeping bosses and families happy along the way.
Finally, our data partners HandsOn Network and All For Good, are truly the engine of SnapImpact. They provide the data that fuels the volunteering process and we are proud to call them partners.
We are the luckiest startup nonprofit in the world. Thanks to everyone!
iPhone Development for fun and non-profit
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
As a transplant living in Lafayette, telecommuting to Oregeon, I’m hardly dialed in to the Boulder tech scene. Last year, I was lucky enough to stumble upon the Boulder New Tech Meetup, and attended a couple meetings. Then, real life and tight deadlines joined up to keep me heads down in my basement office for most of 2008. Once 2009 rolled around, I came up for air and was lucky enough to attend the February BDNT meetup.
It was standing room only, and I was squeezed way in the back when announcement time came around. Some guy named Dave stood up and said that he was looking for iPhone developers for a volunteering application. A couple books and a crash course on Cocoa hardly makes me an iPhone dev, but I’d been wanting to learn for some time, so I tracked him down after the meetup. And the rest is history. Recent history. Still in the making, actually, since we’re still plugging away.
Which brings me to my point: iPhone development is capital F-U-N fun. I’ve done most of the major languages, but Obj-C is the first one I’ve picked up in a matter of hours vs. days or weeks. Think about it: on Febuary 1st, I had a vague idea that the iPhone used something called Cocoa, and that Objective C “was sort of like C++, but not”. Yesterday I got my first data-bound UI up and running. And this isn’t full time by any means, just an hour here and there where possible, and a couple stints on the weekend.
But the real reason I piqued up at the iVolunteer opprotunity was that, as a telecommuter, I’ve gotten kind of bored with discussing application design and implementation with myself. So, why not share the fun? You really don’t need to know the first thing about iPhone development, just a general computer programming background is more than enough to get started. You don’t even need an iPhone, just a Mac, some curiosity, and patience while the SDK downloads.
We’ve got our data model foundation pretty well worked out, so now it’s the fun stuff: a slick UI, tight look and feel, and all the cool little bells and whistles that make an app really shine. Even if you don’t want to touch a line of code, a keen eye for design is also very welcome. So if you want a chance to learn a new technology while contributing to a really good cause, drop us a line. Or look for us at next week’s BDNT Meetup in Boulder.
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