UPDATED 22:36 EDT / MAY 19 2016

NEWS

Coding for a cause: This year’s ServiceNow Hackathon winners | #Know16

There’s a meme these days that casts coders and programmers as brazen careerists, sending San Francisco’s rents through the roof and driving around in Teslas with “DISRUPT” on the license plates. We can’t vouch for the general truth or falsehood of the stereotype, but we can point to one team of developers who pose a challenge to it.

Team Smiles, the grand prize winners at this year’s CreatorCon Hackathon, have built an application called, Happines-as-a-Service. Sean Caron, principal solutions architect at Linium, LLC, and Mike Brannon, senior program manager at National Gypsum Co., worked with four others to create the application.

The application is basically a wish-enabling platform for terminally ill kids with UNOS (United Network for Organ Sharers). Inspired by the Make a Wish foundation, the app takes kids with a wish — like swimming with dolphins, going to the World Series, or going to Disneyland — and connects them with benefactors who can fund their adventures.

Working from 4 p.m. to midnight, the team used ServiceNow to collaborate on all aspects of the project. The appointed project manager, Brannon, said all involved had to wear many hats to pull it off in time. “I was also loading data,” he told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team.

The campaign trail

The two spoke about the “campaigning” they did for the app to win the votes it needed for first prize. “Sean was our Donald Trump,” Brannon joked.

And the good deeds will continue post production. Caron said they will be donating the application to ONUS free of charge and donating their winnings to the the kids.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by SiliconANGLE

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