I make it a general rule to never give any money to charities, mainly for one reason or another that I won’t go into here, however, that’s never stopped me giving effort to good causes when I can.
One of the things I was lucky enough to do while working as an Electrician for NZAS was to go to Chalky Island and volunteer some of my time as a tradesperson working on the huts where the DOC volunteers stay while working with the Kakapo.
Something else that has appeared on my radar lately, while at an APN meetup at Tait a few weeks back, is the opportunity to participate in a weekend of coding for free for a charity.
The event itself currently goes under the name “Hackathon”, which raises a few reservations on my part, the largest of them being that I don’t hack code. Other people may think that “hacking” code is cool way to describe it, but I find it rather demeaning. I prefer that term “crafting” or just plain old “writing” code, which I think imparts a sense of intentionality. I’ll leave the term “hacking code” for those that really do just hack code and generally think that life as a professional Software Engineer finishes at 5pm every workday.
The other confusing thing is that there has already been a “Hackathon” here in Christchurch in 2013, which I went along to as I was up here at the time interviewing for various roles, which was vastly different.
So, you can read some more about it here on their website – http://www.charity-it.org/
One of the first questions I asked the spokesperson, Piyush, was whether any of the charities who are asking for some free developer time are going to make their solution open source. I think as a developer going to contribute my time and experience for nix, its only fair that the code be open source and available. The other large advantage I feel that a volunteer organization would gain by having their software open source is they would find a willing community of people only too happy to contribute new features or bug fixes in their own time.
Having 3 young active boys, I wasn’t too keen originally on giving a whole weekend away, but luckily I have a beautiful and supportive wife that convinced me otherwise.
It will be an interesting experience and hopefully be a chance to meet more other like-minded developers among the Christchurch developer community.
And yes I fully intend to try and apply TDD as much as possible … 😉
Will post a follow-up after the event, so stay tuned.
nathanjohnstone 
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