Baltimore Hackathon Thread.org After Action Report

Last weekend's Baltimore Hackathon project to help Thread was a lot of fun! Several people from Baltimore's PHP and mobile web communities reached out to help me, as did a good friend from New England who put us in touch with some Salesforce experts. Two people came to the hackathon to participate. Everyone else couldn't make the weekend but expressed interest in helping later.

We focused on documenting the app and making it ready for easy improvements. Here's what we accomplished:

• Setup a private bitbucket git repository where we could share code changes
• Created a setup README file explaining how to use MAMP to quickly create a development environment that mimics what runs on Thread's application server (this is what took up most of the time as we had to learn the intricacies of CodeIgniter)
• Made minor changes to CodeIgniter settings so the app could be run locally in a development mode
• Added a Neighborhood field to the application UI and underlying MySQL table so that volunteers can document the locations where they work.

The next steps include:

• Connecting Thread's data analyst with the Salesforce experts (should happen later this week)
• Adding a simple leaderboard that shows the number of interactions per volunteer.
• Deploying our changes to Thread's staging server and rehearsing the database migration
• Deploying to the production application server
• Drafting suggestions for long-term upgrades and maintenance to avoid software rot