This year I participated in the F1 Web Challenge. The event brings together teams of programmers, designers, and project managers with non-profit organizations. The goal is to build a professional website for the non-profit in less than 24 hours, and teams compete against each other for the overall best website.

Sierra Bravo (event sponsor) covered the event in depth on their Nerdery blog.

The non-profit we were assigned was “Resource Center of the Americas.”

Technical details

  • Built new site with Radiant CMS
  • Built a basic Paypal integration for e-commerce using Website Payments Standard
  • Managed Radiant plugins as git submodules
  • GitHub sponsored our team and wrote a blog post about it! We used GitHub throughout the competition
  • Deployment was managed with capistrano (thanks @tomtoday)
  • 1 year of Slicehost VPS hosting (and t-shirts!) was paid for by a Tightrope Media Systems sponsorship
  • Built a team twitter and flickr aggregator site with Sinatra

Conclusion

This was an excellent experience personally speaking, and I think most of my teammates felt the same way. It was satisfying to be able to contribute something meaningful to a good organization. I also really enjoyed meeting the other participants and spending time with my team members.