Whew!

My last week at Portland Code School was over a week ago, but last week we volunteered at Railsconf 2013 which was a tremendous opportunity to meet and hear from luminaries from throughout the Ruby and Rails Community. I got to meet and shake hands with Sandi Metz, ask Richard Schneeman questions about object inspection and using the standard library. As a volunteer I helped everyone with a last name starting with P,Q or R get registered (I feel sure that we at Team M-R had the fastest moving line). I helped Aaron Patterson find the Speaker’s Lounge, and sold leftover Railsconf 2013 T-shirts to raise money for Kids Ruby including to people going to another conference going on nearby.

I met a lot of other cool people from all around the world: Mexico, Canada, Australia, Latvia, Slovenia, India and Japan. (Funny sidenote: newcomers from all over the country and the world want to go get coffee from Stumptown). I saw several talks on testing, security, debugging, and being a volunteer fireman. I also went to a lot of parties, which leads me to the most exciting thing that happened to me this week.

One of the student team projects was a Kickstarter helper app which helps people with projects prepare for their Kickstarter campaign with checklists, and timelines. I wasn’t on the Developer team of this project, but I was on the Stakeholders team. At the New Relic party last week I had the good fortune to run into Bethany Sumner of Kickstarter. I immediately told her I had some people for her to meet and arranged for her to meet the PCS students who were at the party: Phil and Patti on the Dev Team, and Cris and Faye on the Stakeholders Team. Bethany invited us to the Kickstarter party the next evening to demo the project!

So we got the Dev team: Cole, Neilson, Patti, and Phil; and myself, representing our Stakeholder team, and we demoed the our Pre-Kickstarter to Bethany and Tieg Zaharia of Kickstarter. They liked it! Afterwards we discussed how this is something that they think about at Kickstarter.

I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, this may not turn out to be that big a deal. But for Portland Code School Students, this is hugely awesome. This app was Cris’s brainchild, and was executed and presented by the PCS Pre-Kickstarter Dev team to people who actually work and think about Kickstarter and Kickstarter users. I feel like we all won something for this experience. After all, we practiced this sort of thing, in our lightning talks, and our project stand-ups and demos, and we did it, for reals.

I can hardly say how grateful I am to Portland Code School and RailsConf for this.