LetGive—a platform for good
It has been a while since my last post, but I am thrilled to say that the delay was because of a rather tremendous life change. Between working with Developers for Good and being a part of the Hamptons Hackathon, I appeared on the radar of LetGive. LetGive is a startup that is creating a platform that allows mobile and web developers to seamlessly incorporate charitable giving into their applications. Want an e-commerce site where you sell your stuff, but choose to donate that money to charity? Want an alarm clock that donates $0.25 to charity every time you hit snooze? Want a weather app that lets you donate to RedCross and other first responder organizations when there is a severe weather advisory? Yes? Me too. That’s what LetGive makes possible.
If I sound like I am evangelizing, I might be. Within a week and a half of meeting the CEO of LetGive, I signed on to be their Lead Developer. This means that all the programming that makes those apps possible is my responsibility. To be honest, I was thrown in to the code my first week. I had to wade through thousands of pages of half-finished code in order to understand what was happening. Fixing one page on the site meant changing 5 different files of code. And the best part? The code to make the platform and their sample app (coming to the iTunes store soon!) is in five different programming languages!
Despite my frustration and my ongoing 80 hour work week, I finally have the satisfaction that every single line of code that I write, every single query, every single semi-colon is for good. We are enabling a whole community of developers to provide ways for anyone to give whatever they can afford to potentially 750,000 non-profits. I finally feel like I am earning a living by doing good and enabling others to do the same.
P.S. Shameless plug, you can be one of those developers by joining our hackathon in September: LetGive Hack for Good http://www.letgive.com/hackforgood
