Atomic Spin

AO devs Dustin Tinney and Drew Colthrop participated in Grand Rapids GiveCamp this weekend, a volunteer event in which developers lend their skills to area nonprofits. This year 125 volunteers from all over the Midwest came to the Downtown YMCA to work with 23 nonprofits. A combination of local and national businesses sponsored the event, including AO’s neighbors – Brick Road Pizza and Sandmanns.

Dustin worked with C-snip, a low-cost veterinary outfit specializing in spaying and neutering pets. C-snip currently receives thousands of calls a day from area pet owners seeking their services; each call can take up to fifteen minutes because of a detailed questionnaire. Dustin’s team created a web application that would streamline this questionnaire process and free up valuable resources for C-snip. You can see the page they created here.

Drew worked for Friends of Grand Rapids Parks, a grass-roots movement to preserve and enhance area parks and other public spaces. He added park-specific pages to their website that will feature photos from their Flickr pools and convenient Google maps of the parks.

In order to develop deliverable software, the volunteer teams needed to take on projects of the appropriate scope. For Drew and Dustin, their experience of working in short iterations and delivering the most essential features first came in handy. Dustin and Drew commented that the project management was very similar to what we do at AO: “We’re used to working on small stories, working closely with the clients, and receiving constant feedback.”