LAMP Campers Find Success at Weather Channel Hackathon

Norcross, GA ­­- Everyone loves an underdog story - stories in which people discover their potential and rise above the odds like Rocky Balboa, the every man who went the distance, or two guys named Steve who grew a computer empire from humble beginnings in a California garage. This storyline recently unfolded for a group of aspiring developers from LAMP Camp. This band of unlikely victors proved to others and themselves that honoring their mentors while making their own way through creative thinking can lead to success.

LAMP Camp is a fully sponsored developer education program in the Atlanta area designed to turn coders into developers through real-world experience building enterprise applications using PHP and MySQL. PHP is a server-side scripting language that now powers more than 70% of the web.

Armed with the skills they honed in the first few weeks of this summer’s LAMP Camp session, Austin Peete, Ocean Evers-Peete, Raymond Hebard, Wren Howell, Eric Dyer, Erick Lin, Jasper Lee, and Saied Motevali took on teams of coders from around Atlanta in the Storm the Road Hackathon hosted by The Weather Channel in conjunction with Google Maps’ 10th Anniversary celebration.

Despite their limited experience, four of the LAMP Campers teamed up as the “Inglorious Gaijin” and finished second place overall while another Camper team finished third overall, besting 10 more established teams.

“You wonder if your ideas are valid. The hackathon helps you realize that they are,” said LAMP Camper and Inglorious Gaijin member Raymond Hebard. “You feel like you belong and that you can do this.”

The triumphant Campers developed a concept that fulfilled the hackathon challenge of connecting people with essential supplies in regions affected by natural disasters. They credited the mentoring at LAMP Camp for their success. “You start with a big idea and have to break it down into executable parts,” said Hebard. “This is something that is stressed at LAMP Camp.”

Brothers Ocean Evers-Peete and Austin Peete also related the hackathon to their experience at LAMP Camp. “Our exposure to the Scrum framework helped a lot. A big part of what we’ve learned and already do at LAMP Camp transferred to the hackathon,” said Ocean.

“We relied on Scrum and Agile principles to lay out the planning of the project’s tasks,” added Austin. “Our experience at LAMP Camp gave us a few extra tools to analyze the situation we were in for the hackathon.”

LAMP Camp Director Kane McConnell looked on with pride as the two teams of champion campers returned to headquarters, having already heard the good news through Twitter. “I’m proud of them all. LAMP Camp is rigorous, and not everyone has what it takes to make it through,” said Kane. “These Campers demonstrated that they can take what they’ve learned here and apply it to other challenges. That’s what distinguishes a true developer.”

LAMP Camp runs year-round and is currently accepting applications from those who are driven to become outstanding web developers. http://lampcamp.guru/