Ann Arbor Give Camp - Angel's Place

I was fortunate enough to be not only an organizer for the Ann Arbor Give Camp, but I also put myself on the development team for Angel's Place -- a local charity that helps place developmentally and physically challenged adults into good homes.  Our team of Paul Vollweiler, Carl Furrow, Aditya (Adi) Thakker and myself had a great time with our assigment.

After Friday's night's dinner, we met with our charitiy representative Marcie Levey and started working on a solution for their ever-growing waiting list (that is currently stored in Excel!).  Once we had a good idea of what we wanted to do, Paul set up an SVN repository for us to use for the weekend and then Carl jumped on the UI.  Paul, Adi and I whiteboarded the schema until about 1am Saturday morning.  Then we started coding our domain model using ActiveRecord.  We were just about done at 2am, but we kept going for about another hour writing some code to populate the inital tables.

On Saturday we finalized the domain model and started work on the UI (WinForms).  Carl had organized the form into different tabs which related to the different sections of the paper form the Angel's Place staff is already familiar with.  In addition, he set up an architecture where each tab had a separate user control that was used to display data for a particular applicant.  This allowed all of us to work together on the same UI without having to worry about conflicts in VS.NET's "designer" files.  We just concentrated our UI coding on a particular user control!  That along made us very productive in the home stretch.

All in all it was a great success!  We didn't complete our app 100% before Sunday, but Paul has put a lot more work into it and we'll be handing it over to the charity some time this week.